‘I’ve never been an activist’

The Independent spoke with half a dozen protesters arrested for supporting Palestine Action after the group’s proscription

- TOM WATLING

In an interrogation room at just after 1am, 68-year-old grandmother-of-seven Marji Mansfield was sitting across from counterterrorism officers after being arrested at a pro-Palestine protest in central London. She had suffered days of poor sleep in anticipation of this eventuality.

Now, an “aggressive” man was asking her repeatedly if she sympathised with a terrorist organisation, leading her through an extensive list of questions about her politics and who she knew in Gaza.

A few hours earlier, on the afternoon of 5 July, half a dozen officers had handcuffed the pensioner and hauled her off the ground and into a police van alongside her 73-year-old husband. The couple, who once described themselves as “small-c conservatives”, had travelled to the capital from near Chichester for the protest, declining to tell their children what they were about to do.

It was only a day later that their son realised what had happened after he saw his mother on the news, suspended and flanked by the large group of officers.

Mansfield had been following the conflict in the Middle East since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014, but only became an active protester after former home secretary Suella Braverman described peaceful protests as “hate marches” in October 2023. “I have never been political or an activist. I was just an ordinary, middle-England person,” she says. “But then I became outraged.”

Mansfield says she was “shocked” by the events of 7 October, when Hamas militants crossed the border into Israel and killed around 1,200 people, taking 251 more hostage. “But the actions that subsequently followed, where entire families are being wiped out, I had to join those urging for a ceasefire now,” she adds.