Introduction

In the groundswell of political organising that followed October 7th 2023 and Israel’s brutal escalation, there was a sharp awakening of internationalist political consciousness in Britain. At a workers’ assembly in London, it became clear that our efforts to support the Palestinian people were strengthening our own ability to organise and confront capitalism in Britain. ‘It’s not just that we are liberating Palestine, Palestine is liberating us’, has become something of a movement slogan. In the past one and a half years since, a huge amount of creative energy has been brought to the development of leftwing organisation, cultural sense, and political activity through the objective to liberate Palestine.

Necessary efforts to shift the ground on Palestine within our sector, since October 2023, have taken place through worker organising. The view I will take in this survey of recent activity is based on a rank-and-file or grassroots mobilisation strategy aimed at involving the greatest possible number of people in the most revolutionary political project possible. Capitalism guarantees the continuation of imperialist wars and military occupation. The conscious and purposive activity of workers, in our millions, is the only force strong enough to overturn the situation.

Rank-and-file strategies have historically involved creating and maintaining networks of committed worker-activists with an aim to increase the total mobilising capacity and strategic understanding of workers in their sector and in the labour movement broadly. The group that I have been most involved with, Artists and Culture Workers LDN, can be placed within this historical lineage. We are a sectorally specific iteration of the strategy advocated by broader, non-sector-specific projects such as the Labor Notes, Troublemakers at Work, Organise Now!, and of course, this journal.

Culture Workers Before October 7th

The response in Britain to Oct 7th has been mass mobilisation of people into a long-standing international solidarity movement. We have been living through a moment of intense politicisation, with millions attending demonstrations and starting to question how they can engage with Palestine alongside their workmates. If the mass protests are anything to judge by, the identity ‘worker’ seems to have caught on - a welcome development that likely owes some cause to the 2023 strike wave¹ and a post-Corbyn drift away from parliamentary politics.²

Prior to this, trade unions representing workers across our sector, such as Bectu, Equity, PCS, and Artists Union England, have long been passing motions at a national level to back international solidarity with Palestine. They have done this in line with the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement³, initiated by Palestinian organisations on a similar model to anti-Apartheid campaigns in South Africa throughout the 1980’s. These long-established trade unions form a core component of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), the most sizable organisation in Britain working towards Palestinian liberation.

Also operating in our sector, though more at the level of advocacy amongst professionals than worker organising, is The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee established in 2004. It works internationally on cultural boycott campaigns. PACBI works closely with Artists for Palestine UK, an advocacy group and independent media outlet set up in 2015 with a strong track record of working mostly with high-profile figures, institutions, and journalists around the culture industry to advocate for Palestine. A campaign specific to the visual arts has been Boycott Divest Zabludowicz (BDZ), launched in 2014 to coordinate an artists boycott of Israel-based philanthropic art organisation - the Zabludowicz Trust.

At the rank-and-file level, the Art Workers Forum, initiated by activists in 2019, held some remnants of a small network of trade union organisers in the sector together.

I’m not well-placed to discuss the Scottish context, partly because communication between groups North and South of the border require improvement, but also because Scotland’s relative independence from Westminster politics and devolved public funding for the arts creates some regional variations that might complicate any comparisons. Nevertheless, it is worth acknowledging that the group Art Workers for Palestine Scotland has demonstrated enormous creativity and persistence in its approaches to shifting the sector towards Palestine since 2021.⁴

Going into the heightened crisis, then, were a number of organisations with pre-existing strategies, priorities, and principles of action. These groups were to encounter a huge influx of fired-up activists as moral and political outrage blazed across the left in response to Israel’s licensed genocide. With spontaneous mobilisations running through informal networks, the Palestine and labour movements were animated by interactions and negotiations between older and newer formations. A lot of learning was taking place quickly and approaches had to be improvised to create the conditions for a mutual reinforcement of capability.

After October 7th

The first couple of months following Oct 7th saw the most fervent and volatile public response.

In the culture sector, a number of newly created groups were launched, aiming to cohere workers around solidarity activism, such as, UK Filmcrew for Palestine, Book Workers for Palestine, Ravers for Palestine, Culture Workers Against Genocide, Artists and Culture Workers LDN. I’ll get into some of the activities of these groups momentarily, but first we should consider the pre-existing formations and approaches that had carried the movement in Britain up to this point.

The large national organisations involved in organising the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s national demos did not offer specific models for culture workers to filter into. But this large structure contained a ‘trade union bloc’ that could be and was used by culture workers as a physical rallying point for workers. While these large A to B marches were not in-and-of-themselves particularly conducive to building worker resistance, it was possible to turn them to this end by creating a regular, visible meeting point with the aim of expanding our worker-activist networks, building trust between activists, and sharing up to date information from across the sector. Not to mention keeping some of our spirits up with trips to the pub afterward.

Early in the heightened crisis, Stop the War UK (STWUK) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) - both leading groups in the national demos - struck up a large meeting for trade unionists. They set up a massive (and woefully moderated) WhatsApp group called ‘Trade Unionists for Palestine’ and called for national ‘workplace days of action’ on the 15th and 29th November. As part of these activities they encouraged workers to participate in actions up to and including ‘walkouts’. However, there was confusion around how these walkouts were going to be supported by the organisations calling for them, and after the first date, the messaging was hurriedly dialled back such that it emphasised less risky forms of collective action to take at work, such as organising a bake sale or taking a group photo with flags and keffiyehs.

In the culture sector, staff at the Royal Court Theatre organised a walkout along these lines, with those mobilising the effort seeking approval from HR to take action at a time that would coincide with many peoples’ lunch breaks. At a Workers Assembly, a RC staff member reported that a set of redundancies were later felt to be targeting the members of staff who managers had identified with coordinating the walkout.

Workers in the schools and universities were most well-placed to engage in the walkout tactic, as they could do so during lunch hours, or in the case of universities, generally have more leeway when it comes to rearranging their work schedules. This, coupled with student energy is a good basis for action. It is probably not entirely uncoincidental that much of the building for these ‘day of action’ events was done with support from UCU union branches.

Flaws aside, the workplace days of action were commendable for raising the profile of worker-led responses to the political crisis. They doubtlessly helped workers build connections, trust, and confidence across workplaces, where people might otherwise have felt isolated in their views and desires to take action.

Spontaneity Now! Now! Now! Now!

While the official trade union movement and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) were conspicuously quiet on the issue of worker-led solidarity actions throughout these initial months, groups of art sector workers were mobilising.

In addition to STWUK and CND’s prompt to consider industrial action, was the more radical call for a ‘Global Strike Day’ on 20th October. This event was announced by a number of activist social media channels and seemed to take root in visual culture worker communities. It was reported as having been called for by ‘Palestinians’, though it is difficult to accurately trace its source through publicly available information.

Certainly, Palestinian groups do and must call for solidarity strikes across the world, though more as an ambition than a concrete demand, given the difficulty and risks involved with coordinating a mass strike. Nevertheless, such calls are necessarily open to interpretation by people in a wide array of circumstances. While there was never any realistic possibility of trade unions in the UK taking up the call, a graphic began to spread across the social media accounts of small arts organisations such as Cubitt, Mosaic Rooms, Peer Gallery, and Eastside Projects, with text announcing their temporary closures on the 20th October and an encouragement for readers to “join in solidarity”. These galleries have established strong, radical cultures that use a similar language to parts of the labour movement and worker organising. Critical art/social theory, however, doesn’t usually have the same direct stakes, and there proved to be a danger of trying to apply the methods of one across to the other.

In the case of smaller galleries, calls like this could be made with approval from their managerial boards in a generally collaborative way. However, at larger workplaces with larger staff bodies, higher public profiles, and a trade union presence, calls like this would generally meet hard pushback rather than acquiescence. The largest institution to participate in this call was the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London.

Managing a medium-to-large scale contemporary art gallery, ICA’s leadership were thrown into crisis by an upsurge of commitment on the part of staff to present the institution as being in overt solidarity with Palestine. Along with the ‘global strike’ social media post, the gallery publicly advertised itself as a space for protesters at the national demonstration to congregate. But reprisals from management followed - a number of staff who ICA management considered most involved were targeted during a round of redundancies.

According to affected staff, the Bectu officer handling the ICA redundancy negotiations reportedly dissuaded them from putting the case that these redundancies were politically motivated so as to maintain a better negotiating position for individual settlement packages. After the deals had been formally settled, some of the ex-staff members produced a statement expressing their honest appraisal of the redundancy process.⁵

In November, ‘23, At the Tate Modern, a sit-in event was organised with demands made for Tate to sign up to PACBI and publicly call for a ceasefire. The protest organisers also criticised one of Tate Modern’s largest individual benefactors, Lev Blavatnik, over his ties to Israel. As a protest, it was organised by an informal grouping of individuals, under the banner ‘Arts Workers for Palestine’. At this stage in the broader protest response, public building sit-ins, such as those organised in train stations by groups like Sisters Uncut, were a prevailing Palestine movement tactic outside of the PSC’s A to B march model.

The Tate sit-in protest did not openly reach out to workers at the Tate via their PCS and Prospect union branches. The reasons for not doing so were a felt need to keep the sit-in secret until the last minute and the perception that any extended back and forth with workers and their unions might take more time than was deemed available for the action. An organisational focus on the safety of protesters ironically neglected to consider the job security of workers at the venue who had not been adequately briefed on their rights and responsibilities as employees in the situation. Rumours circulated afterwards that a few staff members had left their posts to join the protest who were then subject to disciplinary proceedings.

On 5th December, following an open letter campaign aimed at garnering support from as many in the sector as possible for the demand that the Sadler’s Wells cut ties with Barclays, Culture Workers Against Genocide physically protested the theatre. The static demonstration was to be the first of an impressively sustained campaign that has taken up a variety of tactics, from repeated protests at the venue to stage invasions, panel discussion disruptions and celebrity endorsement videos. It has developed a collaborative relationship with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign branches local to Sadlers Wells, and has refined its demands to principally call for the removal of Nigel Higgins from the Sadler’s board (Higgins also holds the position of group chairman of Barclays) and an end to the funding relationship with Barclays. One missing piece in this campaign so far would seem to be the workers at Sadler’s, whose capacity to strike would add another powerful lever to the protest.

Elsewhere in the theatre world, on 13th December, Israel detained workers, including the director, of the Jenin refugee camp based Freedom Theatre - an organisation with strong links to the British theatres and institutions. Actors and theatre workers in Britain were able to rapidly mobilise their professional networks to mount an online public pressure campaign that convinced high profile institutions such as the Royal Court Theatre to support a call for the release of these workers in Palestine. Much as in the rest of the sector, the British institutions could not find it within themselves to call for an outright ceasefire, however this campaign demonstrated that they could, when pressed by workers and audiences, take a public stand on more sectorally specific issues of injustice.

These initial, largely spontaneous actions in our sector did not have any clear authoritative or centralised leadership and clearly outpaced the traditional labour movement. The activity has made media headlines and generated thousands of social media posts, they kept hopes alive, spurred innumerable efforts towards self-education, built collaborative networks and articulated mass horror and outrage at Israel’s actions. However, what these actions have generally lacked has been any direct confrontation between workers and their own employers.

Base-Building via Palestine

Workers For a Free Palestine (WFFP), another group formed in response to October 7th, held a series of ‘worker assembly’ meetings for rank-and-file worker-led discussions. WFFP ran these sessions alongside a wider set of initiatives aimed at creating activist blockades at military production sites in the South East region, attempting to embolden workers there to refuse work on any orders designated for Israel. The particular relevance of the assemblies to the culture sector was in making a dedicated space for individual workers to find one another in a sectoral ‘breakout group’. From here we could begin to solidify a network and a strategic approach for action.

Artists and Culture Workers LDN emerged as a formalisation of the culture sector breakout group into an organisation. Modelled on the Art Workers Forum and supported by a number of activists previously involved in organising through AWF, BDZ, and Artists Union England, we used the space created by WFFP to regroup after the disorganising effect of the Covid pandemic. Work as ACW LDN began gradually, many of those attending the workers assemblies had little previous experience organising as ‘workers’ or through trade union structures. Some could not be convinced of the rank-and-file approach.

Those of us attending the assemblies with prior experience of worker-organising generally recognised that the political identification, ‘worker’, requires a certain degree of fidelity to pre-existing labour movement structures and approaches to leveraging power. The category, for us, pivots around an ability to withdraw labour because the power of a workers’ political movement is based on the power to strike. Our group therefore prioritises the task of building up a base of activists who understand the necessity of unions and organised labour power in pursuit of political demands, working towards the realisation of this power in concert with other social movement forces.

BDS Coalition Success: PACBI and APUK

As the months passed, different strands of activism coalesced and the effects of an organised BDS movement in British culture came into view. In cases where an institution had flagrantly censored Palestinian artists, or artists with critical views on Israel, defence campaigns were mounted by activist groups, artists, and culture workers with guidance from PACBI and Artists for Palestine UK.

At HOME arts centre, Manchester, a Palestinian-led event that the institution had cancelled (according to a recently published FOI request, under pressure from the British state’s anti-terrorism programme, Prevent)⁶ was reinstated. The reinstatement followed from a widely publicised open letter with celebrity signees, a large-scale withdrawal of artists’ work from an open-call art exhibition the centre was hosting at the time, the decision of Palestine demonstration organisers to end a mass protest at the site, and (presumably) internal complaint from staff members.⁷

In Bristol, the Arnolfini Gallery’s cancellation of a Palestinian film festival resulted in a sector-wide boycott campaign against the institution lasting five months. The Arnolfini eventually apologised and publicly committed to putting new policies and internal governance procedures in place. A PACBI press release responded to the news:

“We salute the artists, culture workers and human rights defenders in Bristol and beyond who took strategic, principled and persistent action in boycotting Arnolfini until their goals were met. All British arts organisations and venues should take note that targeted grassroots mobilisations are a potential consequence of racist anti-Palestinian censorship.”

Because of their high-stakes timeframes, arts festivals have proven especially susceptible to boycott campaigns. Artists working on a freelance basis have found that if enough of them threaten not to show up, there effectively isn’t a festival. Once a critical mass of artists or contributors commit to pulling out, it becomes difficult for the others to justify staying in. The Bands Boycott Barclays campaign effectively ended Barclay’s sponsorship of End of the Road Festival, and activists coordinating through Fossil Free Books forced the termination of Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of both Edinburgh and Hay literary festivals.

It is notable that in these successful campaigns, trade unions have remained largely absent, dare we say, irrelevant. Yet in each case, there remains a discreteness of effort, with the primary actors being relatively high profile artists and the throughline in each appearing to be PACBI and APUK’s involvement.

Without wishing to discredit the genuinely excellent work that PACBI and APUK do, it should be said that neither operate in ways that seem particularly democratic or transparent relative to grassroots Palestine solidarity organising in Britain. Both organisations will work with movement activists to pick out the most effective media framing for a campaign and will help push it into the public eye. They will also put organisers in contact with one another through the large and well-established networks they have developed over the years. However, they leave the task of mass mobilising to others, and will sometimes withhold information about negotiations in a centralised way, making it difficult for lessons learned from one campaign to be transferred to another. The two bodies can seem more concerned with winning over high-profile figures than base building, which may perhaps signal more than just a different emphasis, but a different strategy for change. Practically, PACBI and APUK representatives will generously advise movement activists or campaign leaders, using their established, high-profile position to legitimate or discourage certain courses of action.

In addition to working directly with movement activists and organisers, PACBI, as a founding member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, is able to authoritatively outline targets for the movement. Boycott campaigns must select their targets carefully, as failed challenges can make similar campaigns appear less of a serious threat and therefore harder to win. To have an authoritative body operating in the sector helps cohere a movement into an effective force, but it’s important for that body to be accountable to its grassroots base and that differences of approach can be argued through at all levels of the movement.

Culture industry networks are of course international, and campaigns take shape in similar ways across borders. Boycotts called against the Berlinale film festival and the Venice Biennale seem to have been coordinated in similar ways to End of the Road and the British literary festivals mentioned earlier. I won’t be able to address those international contexts here in depth because they seem to have been coordinated mostly at the level of professional networks that fall outside of the worker-led, base-building organising that is Artists and Culture Workers LDN’s strategy. The alliance, however, between professionally established artists and more day-to-day workers, is a very useful one that should be developed further.

Trade Unions

Trade unions, as mass membership organisations with long-established (and often reprehensibly conservative) bureaucratic structures, move at what can feel like a glacial pace compared to protest groups; their leaderships can be obstructive and even actively hostile to activists in their ranks. Yet they are a necessary part of any strategy that seeks to engage workers in sustained efforts at leveraging their economic or class power around the cause of Palestine.

Trade union members can and must put their trade union’s authority and resources to use in supporting campaigns that pressure employers to uphold BDS principles. Some unions will be more amenable to this than others, but in all cases, internal organising within the unions is necessary to access their leverage.

Union policies are set by members at conferences, and where a democratic mandate to support Palestine can be set - e.g. by passing solidarity motions - pushing for action becomes easier at all levels of the union, from its elected leadership, to the union’s unelected employees, down to the rank-and-file members organising in their own workplaces. A democratic mandate is a powerful thing. It takes organisation to transform our unions. Formal and informal groupings of union members can do work such as drafting motions, outlining goals, and exchanging information. These groups can exist as an official committee within the union, or informally as a network. There are advantages and disadvantages to either, though usually it’s best to have both so that activists can work both outside and inside the purview of political opponents within the union.

Some unions (e.g. Equity, Artists Union England) have relatively open doors when it comes to their steering committees, whereas others are more stitched up by conservative blocs (e.g. Bectu/Prospect, Writers Guild of Great Britain). With internal trade union organising, however, it is important not to forget that the primary goal is to empower rank-and-file members through democratising the union. Getting the union officials to lobby at a high governmental level is important, but all of this must be carried by pressure from the ground up, where numbers and persistence are key, and all of it must ultimately be brought back to bear on conflicts arising between union members and their own employers.

Trade union members may find it difficult to engage with fast moving protests when they have to gain democratic consensus for any significant actions at branch meetings that are not always frequently held. This does not prevent them from doing so and must not prevent protest groups from trying to engage them. Finding models for collaboration between workers ‘on the inside’ and protesters ‘on the outside’ of workplaces is an increasingly relevant task for many activists in the movement today, particularly as target institutions prove how resilient they can be to public pressure.

The Rank-and-File?

I want to round off this survey by acknowledging the difficult job that workplace activists have been doing up to now, with varying degrees of success. It is absolutely vital that we continue to experiment with ways of pushing against the state and directly against employers, however we can, wherever we are, regardless how experienced or qualified we feel to do it. Every effort and every counter-response is an occasion to learn and deepen the breadth of understanding in our movement.

The first set of attendees in the culture worker breakout group at the WFFP meetings took demands to their employers. They did this with the means available to them: established trade union branches, employee forums, informal groupings of workers and individual conversations taken up with management or HR. Where the stakes involved are job security, career prospects, and peaceable relations with colleagues, really standing up for one’s political principles is a risk that takes bravery and commitment.

Reporting back to the breakout group after a number of months, worker-activists reported having to deal with complacent or obstructive trade union reps and officers, interminable rounds of employer committee meetings that led nowhere, the stupefying affect of senior management weasel-words and opaque, unaccountable boards. Hour after unpaid hour is spent mobilising and organising co-workers with little to show for it while the bombs keep falling.

But each round of effort builds a culture of resistance. You may be limited in your collective capacity to fight now, because you are only getting started, but through this work we become ready! “Ready for the improbable, for the unexpected, for what happens.”⁸ The people in a culture can leap into action, there can be sharp turns. There is no easy way to chart cause and effect in setting this up, there is only the work that goes into a gradual accretion of experiences, expectations, confidence and unity amongst workers.

When an IDF fundraiser event was scheduled at London’s Apollo Theatre in Feb 2024, workers refused en masse to pick up the shifts and a protest was announced to collide with the event, which the venue ultimately had to cancel.⁹ A manager at the Apollo remarked to me afterwards that because of the furor, “there’s no way we would ever book anything like that again.” At one art gallery in Dec 2024, an Israeli cyber security firm was permitted to host their Christmas party in one of the venue spaces, resulting in around 90% of the front of house team spontaneously walking out on the day, causing such a crisis for management it again resulted in a progressive change to the venue hires booking policy.

The presence and politicising practices of a trade union at workplace level, even one as conservative as BECTU/Prospect, can embolden workers to take action that goes beyond what the trade union can formally permit. It’s about workplace culture, it’s replicable at scale, and vast numbers of us can do it.

Collabs

Modelling itself on the Boycott Divest Zabludowicz, the Strike Outset campaign group successfully created a new BDS target in the sector - Outset Contemporary Art Fund, a prolific and demonstrably very Israel-complicit philanthropic arts organisation. With advice from PACBI and APUK, it was possible for the SO activists to launch a campaign that opened up new avenues for worker-led activism across a host of institutions. Drawing from a well-networked set of arts professionals and supported through the base-building work of Artists and Culture Workers LDN, on Nov 24, one of Outset’s co-founders, Candida Gertler, resigned from the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and all voluntary positions with UK arts institutions. Goldsmiths University students tore down the Outset signage that had been on the wall of their Centre for Contemporary Art. Across numerous institutions, workers echoed the demand to cut ties, they refused to work in spaces named after the foundation and applied pressure through their trade union branches, resulting in the further removal of signage and association with Israel.

In the culture sector, ongoing campaigns with the most support involve collaboration between multiple groups of different types. A quick enumeration of the most prominent should suffice to demonstrate:

Sadler’s Wells - (Targeting Barclays) - Culture Workers Against Genocide x Palestine Solidarity Campaign nationally x Camden and Islington Palestine Solidarity Campaign
British Museum - (Targeting BP) - Energy Embargo for Palestine x Workers For a Free Palestine
Science Museum - (Targeting BP, Adani) - Parents for Palestine x Culture Unstained x The National Education Union x South Asia Solidarity Group x ACW LDN x Prospect Science Museum Branch
Tate - (Targeting Outset, Zabludowicz, Barclays, HP) - Strike Outset x ACW LDN x Artists Union England x PCS and Prospect Tate Branches

As different parts of the movement settle into more trusting and collaborative relationships with one another, there seems to be a growing recognition that being ‘in it for the long haul’ will entail more creative work. Not just political creativity, but also working in ways that draw from the unique faculties within our sector. “The role of the artist in a liberation movement is the same as any member of that movement. Accept the obligation to participate in the climb.”¹⁰

Art initiatives such as the Gaza Biennale and the White Kite Collective honour the international cultural basis of the work we engage in, while providing occasions that bring creative workers into shared spaces, further expanding our ability to organise with one another. The relationship between art work and art worker organising requires both further analysis and practical experiment. We are learning a different relationship to cultural production.

Threats

Despite the progress of the past year and a half, it’s hard to not to feel disappointed by the slow rate of change. It is understandable, perhaps necessary, to feel angry and upset about this. We should try to look directly at the obstacles or impediments that we face.

The lack of leadership from the trade union establishment is grounded not purely in the moral failings of its personnel, but in the prohibitive laws around political strikes. Trade unions are an embedded part of capitalist society and are subject to material interests that do not necessarily align with those of the working class at large. Unions that call for, or could be construed as permitting, industrial action that is not based on a workplace issue - i.e. most social justice movement issues - face legal threats that may incur fines if seen through.

Rather than pushing for militant action in defiance of the law, union leaders will more often instruct their staff to prohibit and discourage anything that might put union finances at risk. The capitalist establishment understands how this can seriously disempower protest movements. Efforts to convince union bureaucrats to dissent from this view, in relation to Palestine solidarity, have - according to an article in the New Socialist that details extended attempts in this direction¹¹ - fallen short. It is perhaps nothing if not grimly reassuring to have this confirmed. The answers to our political problems are not to be found in the heroically principled actions of trade union bureaucrats.

At a more local or sectoral level, threats to employers are channelled through regulatory bodies and frameworks around public funding and charitable status. Nearly every challenge we have put to cultural institutions over the past year and a half has been met with apprehensive references to charity commission and Arts Council England guidance.

The fear for arts organisations of being defunded was racked up a notch in December 2023 when Arts Council England (ACE) updated their guidance on ‘reputational risk’, warning arts organisations that “political statements” could break funding agreements. A Freedom of Information Request submitted to ACE by Equity, the actor’s union, uncovered that this vague threat was in fact a direct result of discussion between ACE and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport about ‘Reputational risk relating to Israel-Gaza conflict’.¹²

In addition to threats around public funding, lies the murkier world of private philanthropy, where formal decisions can be based on whether or not they might contravene ‘implicit or implied’ agreements. Those tasked with mitigating organisational risk on behalf of cultural institutions may fear the knock-on effect of offending private funding circles by agreeing to meet our movements’ demands.

Added to the problems posed by state and capital funding strictures, is the potential for malicious lawsuits taken out against arts organisations on behalf of zionist legal pressure groups. The organisation UK Lawyers for Israel have been notorious in this regard, making high profile cases that have hit arts organisations with negative press attention and the additional workload (plus financial cost) of defending against the claims. While it should be noted that not one of UKLFI’s lawsuits have resulted in a penalty for any art organisation, it is an effective form of intimidation that leverages the already precarious resources of a sector stricken by over a decade of gradual defunding through austerity governance.

This is the weight against which trade unionists and popular protest groups must push. At an Artists and Culture Workers LDN meeting, advice given by a PACBI representative to the director of one arts organisation facing these threats was to ‘just stand up to them’. Indeed, as anti-trade union laws must be challenged, the same is true for bullying tactics used by those threatening lawsuits or making pathetic complaints to ACE and the Charity Commission.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us now, and what should we do next?

As workers, organising in the context of employers and trade unions, we must hold fast to the demands we have developed over the past year and a half. Workers need to maintain pressure along BDS lines, normalising a more politically conscious approach to industrial action. By ensuring that every worker is in a union and every union branch meeting has an agenda item about Palestine, we can keep our arguments (and hope) in the minds of our co-workers.

As people involved in protest movements, we need to keep developing new connections between the streets and workplaces, and strengthening those that already exist. Demonstrations are exhausting to build, but when aligned with the sustained pressure from workers organised collectively, they can form popular and persuasive reasons for employers to stare down the financial and legal risks of divesting and boycotting. It is a contest of will, and while institutions can try kicking the can down the road as far as they can, there must come a point when protest from within and without becomes so disruptive to the organisation that they finally do what they must.

There remains work to be done in the media. At one recent workshop led by a representative from the group, Workers in Palestine, it was voiced that we need to ‘break out of siloes’, and this remains the case. Our sector has a certain degree of closeness to media, with stories about art and culture more readily able to capture attention than those from sectors with less glamorous associations in the public imagination. There are open questions about how we use this to advance our political goals.

Finally, we cannot neglect the necessity to ensure that mass, participatory, rank-and-file politics remains the model for change. Our methods must be replicable at scale if our struggle is to win. On this point I would like to speculate that activists in our sector may find potential in turning towards the hospitality component of what we do. As bar workers at Glasgow Film Theatre recently discovered, it is possible to get backing from a major trade union (Unite) for a political boycott demand. Workers at the theatre refused to serve Coca-Cola and negotiated an agreement with the company to switch to an ethical alternative. Unite commented, “We believe that the removal of Coca-Cola sends a clear message to those companies that continue to profit from genocide, and we hope this act will encourage similar venues to take a stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza.”¹³ Replace the word ‘venues’ with ‘workers’, and you can see the outline of a decent recipe for the present.