Lizzie Eldridge's Blog: Lorca by Candlelight

This piece was recently published in the Palestine International Broadcast. Based in Ramallah, Palestine, the Palestine International Broadcast is “the first public, multi programmed international broadcast of its kind. Its mission is to project the authentic Palestinian narrative and achieve a balanced view globally by way of integration through media.” It’s an honour and a privilege to have work published by this brave and brilliant team. Please follow and support their work.

My article details the absurd consequences of proscribing the non-violent direct action group, Palestine Action, as terrorists, including arrests made under the Terrorism Act (2000) for wearing a t-shirt saying: Genocide in PALESTINE. Time to take ACTION.

After the piece was submitted for publication, further arrests occurred on top of those detailed in the article. On Monday 21st July, 2 arrests were made outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court where people had gathered in solidarity for the anticipated appearance of the 3 Leonardo activists referred to in the piece. One of those arrested was Mick Napier, founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The arrests were made under the Terrorism Act and in relation to the previous Saturday’s protest. While one arrestee was charged and released, Napier was held in police custody for 30 hours, but managed to successfully overturn his bail ban on entering Edinburgh city centre when his case reached court. A person involved in the Defend Our Juries protest was also arrested.

When the case against the 3 activists involved in the Leonardo action came to court, on the 21st and 22nd July, all 3 were charged with Aggravated Malicious Mischief, the ‘aggravated’ making this a terrorist offence, and they were released on bail. ‘Terrorists’? Released on bail?

Meanwhile the 2 activists arrested outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court have been receiving twice daily visits at their home from Police Scotland, each time ‘to check they understand their bail conditions.’ To call this intimidation and harassment is an understatement, as is describing the situation in Britain as an authoritarian police state.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” ~ George Orwell 1984

They’re Calling Me a Terrorist https://pib.news/article/theyre-calling-me-a-terrorist?lang=en&fbclid=IwY2xjawL4JnlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFWSmhqS3NiYWFKdWpCTGN2AR63tR2gRgPEVhdO7zSDAjB59oMlutcmDjrhA5gyJ_NYv9u9b52i6INSymgmxw_aem_w27lnQe3ZKE-MA9X94D35A

This is a piece I wrote and performed recently at the Glad Cafe, Glasgow (29/6/25). It was part of fundraising event for Palestine, organised by my mega-talented friend and artist, Euan Sutherland, under the title 19 Flags for Palestine.

Disclaimer: This piece was performed before the proscription of Palestine. I haven’t worn this t-shirt again since midnight on the 5th July 2025. The photo is an historical record of a performance and is not designed now to endorse or support a proscribed organisation.

Love Outsteps Infinity

Love, yes, that appears from nowhere and lasts forever.

In amongst the carnage and the murder, the monstrous brutality and the evil, the grotesque butchering of beauty and the blood-soaked depravity, there is compassion. There is love. There is humanity.

Burning people alive; shooting children in the heart and in the head; slicing the tiny heads off newborn babies; firing missiles into flimsy tents where families huddle for safety which they tried to find in bombed-out schools and UN shelters and hospitals now totally destroyed; blowing up the last remaining homes of fathers and mothers, grandparents, children and toddlers with teddy bears frayed at the edges from being held so tight to hug away the nightmares; a little girl, running through the flames that scorched the flesh and skin of her mum and her dad, her sisters and brothers, her aunts, her uncles.

We are running out of words. We don’t have the vocabulary. The searing horror of this reality defies the comfort, the structure, the meaning, the logic that language hopes to give. How to describe this repulsive agony as it’s repeated time after time, minute after minute, day after screaming day? We don’t have the words for this.

But even at the very end, the words remain. That young man who reassured his mother that he’d done the right thing. Even as he knew that he was going to be executed along with his brave and beautiful colleagues, this young man prayed to Allah, finding the words he needed in the face of inconceivable death. Even at the very end, this young man spoke his truth.

The mechanical men with their sadistic laughter could never butcher his untainted soul. In these demonic depths, humanity holds its head up fearlessly, knowing that goodness can never be destroyed.

Fascism feeds off fear and jealousy and spite. Fascism feeds off violence and false power and debauchery. Fascism eats away at the vile ugliness of its own bile-churning contempt, relentlessly destroying what it can never be.

A man searches frantically through the rubble till he finds a little child alive. A woman cradles a white shroud to her chest. A little boy carries his baby brother on his back. In this burnt-out smoke-filled void of ash and tears, people bow their heads and pray with dignified respect to another journalist, doctor, nurse, teacher, aid worker, artist, writer, academic, to yet another thinking feeling human being who’s been martyred.

In this obscene cesspit of merciless cruelty, in this deranged bedlam of infinite despair, goodness defies all forms of torture. Goodness defies this psychotic mirth. Goodness keeps its steady gaze as guns are raised, missiles rain down, as manic distortions of anything once remotely human dance demonically around the funeral pyres.

Goodness stares its opponent full in the face, unafraid, smiling, because even in death, even in the darkest, darkest times, goodness never dies.  

FREE PALESTINE

Defiance

Filton 18: At the jagged underside of justice

To be Untameable

Christmas in Prison

Happy New Year and let’s hope 2025 sees an end to the cruel genocide in Palestine and all the barbaric war criminals – all of them – held to account. Let’s hope 2025 sees the liberation of Palestine because, as Nelson Mandela knew so well, ‘Our freedom is incomplete without the liberation of the Palestinians.’

For me, as for millions across the world, 2024 was focused on protesting, boycotting, blockading arms factories, mounting campaigns against Israeli-supporting entities, and making new and lifelong friends in the process. Let’s hope that 2025 sees the triumph of good over evil.

My New Year began with something beautiful and unexpected. It began with an in-depth and heart-stopping review of my recently published collection of short stories and flash fiction. The review is a poem in itself and I’m deeply moved that a fellow writer, Paul Trembling, wrote his response with such care, compassion, and deep insight. It’s a huge privilege to be included on his Best Reads 2024 and I thank him with all of my heart.

Here’s what Paul wrote, and the link to his blog as well as the book are below:

This is a short collection of very short stories – just over a hundred pages, two or three pages at most in each story. But it is not an easy read.

It is not easy because the stories are often dark. Some are outright horror, but many are disturbing or (the word that first came to mind) harrowing in both content and subject matter. They deal with the darker side of life. Loss, injustice, pain, anger. Even those with a lighter side are at most, bittersweet. Take, for example, the stories that deal with the fading and passing of a much loved father. In some ways, quite uplifting, as they show someone at the end of life who is still full of joy and gratitude: they left me hoping that I might show some of those qualities when my time comes. But non-the-less, it is loss, and it is grieving.

It is also not easy because they are sometimes very subjective. They come from a unique point of view, from the writer’s very personal perspective, and she does not dilute her vision to make it more palatable or accessible. Many of these stories present an intellectual challenge, you have to take time to ponder and think on what is being said. And sometimes I found myself having to simply accept what I read, not understanding but letting the flow of the words carry me towards a deeper connection.

And what words they are! Lizzie Eldridge has a talent for vividness, for descriptions that give a whole new way of looking at the world, a way of seeing things that may not be comfortable but which carry a powerful reality into the readers mind. There are no cliches here!

Sad, unpleasant, challenging or just difficult to grasp, these are stories which give the opportunity to share something deep and real. To stand alongside people in darkness. To perhaps even develop some empathy for those whose life experience is so different from our own.

‘Poetry is there, it’s there in everything’ Eldridge says in one of these stories (All that have dark sounds, page 37). In this collection she shows us what that means.

Review by Paul Trembling

Purchase It Doesn’t Matter When

Eat the Storms – A Podcast for Palestine -Season 9

Ceasefire NOW! poetry series #2

Below is a speech I gave at the Glasgow protest against the genocide in Palestine on December 30th 2023. Since I gave this speech, the number of Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF has increased dramatically and every single day, this brutal genocide continues. It must be stopped and we must stop this. Israel is a terrorist state, backed to the hilt by the US and the UK.

What can we do?

like and share social media postskeep informed via a variety of media sourcesgo on demosgo to vigilsget involved with your local protest groupspeak to people, sharing thoughts, feelings and ideaswrite to your MP/MSPsign and share petitions

Here’s the words I shared at the demo in Glasgow on Saturday 30th December, organised by #GGEC and #ScottishPSC:

I’m Lizzie Eldridge, and I’m here representing Scottish PEN. We’re the Scottish centre of PEN International, an international NGO which advocates for peace and campaigns for writers facing censorship, oppression, torture and death right across the world.

Over the past few years, we’ve issued a number of statements concerning the situation in Palestine, including statements on the plight of writers in Gaza; the killings of journalists Shireen Abu Akleh and Ghufran Hamed Warasneh by Israeli forces; July’s so-called military operation in Jenin; PEN International’s call for a halt to hostilities; and, very recently, the demolition of the shrine to Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces. First, on 11th May 2022, the IDF killed Shireen; shortly after, they attacked mourners at her funeral; then, on the 26th October 2023, they desecrated her shrine in the West Bank and bulldozed over the site of her murder.

These are the Israeli forces that Biden and Sunak are busy supporting. These are the Israeli forces who, funded and armed by the West, have been trying to obliterate Gaza long before October 7th. These are the Israeli forces who, led by Netanyahu who deliberately ignored warnings about a possible attack by Hamas, used the 7th of October to whitewash more than 75 years of violence, oppression and occupation, and used it as the excuse they always wanted to commit genocide; to exterminate the Palestinian people; to slaughter babies, children, women and men, and to ensure their brutal dying by destroying their hospitals, kidnapping and killing their doctors, dropping bombs on the sick, on the injured and the dying to mercilessly smash up any chance of survival.

None of this began on October 7th. October 7th saw the rabid, mercenary, bloodthirsty intensification of decades of persecution of the Palestinian people by the Israeli Zionists. Gaza had already been turned into a prison, with Israel able to turn off its water, its electricity, its internet, its basic necessities at the cruel flick of a switch. Now, the tiny stretch of land that makes up Gaza has been turned into a killing ground, the scale and nature of which is beyond our capacity to fully take in.

It is callous. It is monstrous. It is psychopathic. It is bloodcurdling. It is insane. It is fascism on the rampage. It’s a horror movie on a loop – except it’s real. We see the photos. We watch the videos. We hear those agonising screams.

There are too many stories, thousands of stories, and each one moves us to tears. Just the other day, a doctor spoke of a little boy called Ahmed – 9 years old – dying in a hospital that had barely any supplies. The doctors gave him sedatives to try and ease his dying. A 9-year-old boy, brutally attacked by Israeli bombs, and still the Palestinian doctors tried to alleviate his final moments of pain.

The genocide in Gaza is like nothing we have ever seen. The number of people who have already been killed – a number which increases every minute of every day – is inconceivable.

I want to finish by drawing attention to the writers, the poets, the artists who have been brutally massacred by the murderous Israeli fascists whose appetite for blood knows no bounds. In addition to the huge number of journalists killed, at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers have been murdered in Gaza. The fascists hate the artists. They hate the truth-tellers. They hate the creators of beauty.

On the 7th December 2023, the Palestinian poet and academic, Refaat Alareer, was killed in his home by the Israeli bombs. Refaat refused to leave his home, knowing that nowhere in Gaza was safe. He was killed along with 6 members of his family.

In an interview given shortly before his death, he speaks as bombs fall outside. It is terrifying and it is also testimony to his strength and courage in the face of the barbaric attacks by the Israeli aggressors.

Testament to his strength, courage and integrity is the final poem he wrote and I’d like to share this with you now:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.

If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a story.

Never stop speaking this story. Never stop speaking out against this inhuman genocide. Never stop shouting THIS IS WRONG BEYOND WRONG.

Never stop demanding CEASEFIRE NOW.