Officer 1 said: “You need to take off your shirt – it says globalise the in-fri-ta-duh.”
When asked what the term means, Officer 1 shrugged. Presumably not an egg-based brunch dish.
Officer 2 chimed in: “It’s a violent uprising.”
Earlier this year, I was arrested on the premise that my t-shirt, which read “Globalise the Intifada” was capable of “inciting hatred”.
So what does the word intifada actually mean?
The Arabic term directly translates to the verb ‘shaking off’. In popular culture, it is used mainly in political contexts, where it colloquially implies a specific action: shaking off the chains of oppression.
Following its widespread use in the 1987 Palestinian protests against Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the word gained a supposedly antisemitic edge—where Israeli discourse has since re-interpreted the term as a direct threat against the state.
For many however, particularly across the Global South, intifada remains an expression of the desire for freedom from oppression—for all.
Because of this, according to guidance issued by the Crown Prosecution Service, the use of the word “intifada” alone does not meet the threshold to be an arrestable offence.
After explaining this fact to Officers 1 and 2, they appeared rather confused. They then instructed me to remove the shirt. I complied, turning my shirt inside out so the text was no longer visible.
It was about twenty minutes later Officers 1 and 2 reappeared, accompanied by Officers 3, 4, 5, and 6. I do not blame them for their numbers—they were, after all, facing an incredibly difficult decision—to follow the guidance outlined by the Crown Prosecution Services, or the directions of another officer.
They chose the latter, and I was arrested, taken to, and booked at Islington Police Station.
Over the next 14 hours, I spent the majority of my time in a cell.
That cell provided me ample time to consider the increasing distance between the law as it is written, and the law as it is executed.
In my case, I feel this sentiment is obvious. Whilst the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), one of the highest legal authorities in our country, is clear on their stance towards the word intifada, during my time in Islington Police Station’s interview room, the CPS’ guidance existed only in abstract, failing to offer me any credible defence.
Here, where the documented legal standard can be overridden by the direction of a superior officer who cannot pronounce the word they are policing, let alone understand it, we find ourselves facing a systemic breakdown—the rule of law is disintegrating; instead, we are finding ourselves under the rule of whim.
This is the dangerous absurdity of our policing system: in the mouth of a protester, intifada is a cry for liberation—a literal ‘shaking off’ of oppression. In the ears of Officers 1 and 2, it is a sort of quiche-turned-threat.
Somewhere within that liminal space of linguistic misunderstanding, our right to freedom of speech is dying.
The issue is not merely one of phonetic confusion or a lack of vocabulary—it is that the state has begun to treat “feeling threatened” as almost interchangeable with “breaking the law.”
By allowing officers to arrest based on an impression rather than a statute, we have handed the police the power to censor by instinct.
This establishes a precedent not dissimilar to the American approach to policing—one which has drawn great controversy following the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in January this year.
A similar normative tension is emerging in the UK.
But this is not new—it is a continuation in this government’s not-so-subtle slicing into civil liberties in this country, achieved less through headline-grabbing legislation, than through the steady broadening of police and prosecutorial discretion.
The treatment of Palestine Action is illustrative. Acts that would once have been processed as criminal damage or public order offences are now being reframed through the language of terrorism, bringing with them more severe charging decisions, longer pre-trial detention, and tighter restrictions on communication and bail. The law has changed; not so much in its content as in its posture: it now leans instinctively towards suspicion.
The hunger strikes that have since followed should be understood in a similar light. They are not merely protests against detention, but against a legal environment in which procedural safeguards—timely trials, meaningful access to counsel, clear evidentiary thresholds—have come to be treated as negotiable inconveniences, rather than foundational rights. As we watch innocent people spend what has now been over a year in remand, the fundamental ethos of being ‘innocent until proven guilty’ has quietly been turned inside out.
Above all, what links these developments is method. Power in the UK is being exercised earlier, more forcefully, and with less need for justification. The legal threshold no longer appears to be one which questions whether an offence has taken place, but one which asks: Do I agree with this?
It is my opinion that the popular narrative of police overreach is often one of malice or high-level conspiracy. My arrest suggests something more banal and, in doing so, suggests something far more concerning: I wasn’t arrested because “Globalise the Intifada” is an inherently hateful term; I was arrested because a police officer was free to believe that it was.
The danger here lies in seeing such discretion normalised—until the law no longer restrains the state, but merely explains it after the fact.
This is how civil liberties are lost in practice: not by their formal repeal, but by their conditional application. Rights remain on paper, guidance remains published, but the way in which these are enforced (or whether they are even enforced at all) becomes far less reliable—often guided by an unsavoury combination of mood, hierarchy, and institutional anxiety.
A legal system that allows this cannot meaningfully distinguish between dissent and disorder. It can only respond to what unsettles it.
But liberation has never come without disruption. And if a misspelled brunch dish is enough to splinter the operation of British law so severely, I would say that our legal system has already surrendered its claim to serving any sort of real justice. The question being asked is no longer what the law permits us to say, but whether the state feels comfortable hearing it.