The Moral Duty of Direct Action and Civil Disobedience

By Dr Asim Qureshi

Henry David Thoreau once declared that when government demands complicity in injustice, “break the law.” His words, written in nineteenth-century America, ring with painful resonance today as we confront the reality of a live-streamed genocide in Palestine and the role Britain plays in sustaining it.

The problem is not one of distance. It is not simply that we bear witness from afar to the suffering of another people. It is that Britain’s hands are deeply embedded in the machinery of violence. From arms sales to surveillance flights, from trade deals to diplomatic cover, this country helps keep the edifice of Zionist apartheid upright. Our taxes, investments and political acquiescence make us complicit. The question is what we intend to do about it.

Activism in Britain has too often been confined to petitioning, marching, and appealing to the very institutions that enable violence. Such methods have value, but they remain bound by a system designed to neutralise dissent. The proscription of Palestine Action has revealed the sharp edge of that system. Here was an organisation that directly impeded the flow of arms intended to support Israel’s ongoing genocide, and it has been treated as a threat to national security. Its proscription is less about terrorism than about protecting the uninterrupted delivery of weaponry to an apartheid genocidal regime.

In the aftermath, campaigns such as Defend Our Juries have turned civil disobedience into a collective challenge to unjust laws, deliberately courting arrest to expose the repressive use of counter-terrorism legislation. Yet a striking silence endures within Britain’s Muslim community. While individual Muslims have stood among the Filton 23 and elsewhere, no Muslim organisation has openly embraced direct action or civil disobedience. The reason is not hard to discern: years of disproportionate policing and over-criminalisation in the global War on Terror have fostered a climate of fear. But fear cannot be the compass by which we navigate genocide.

Britain’s complicity is not abstract. The International Court of Justice has confirmed that Israel’s occupation and practices amount to apartheid. Yet Britain provides reconnaissance support, facilitates arms production, and maintains billions in trade with Israeli companies. Fifteen percent of the Israeli F-35 jet — used in devastating assaults on Gaza — is manufactured here. Our government issues licences worth hundreds of millions to arm Israel, and our financial markets reward Israeli firms. This is not mere association; it is partnership in a project of racial domination.

To live in Britain is therefore to sit at the nerve centre of Zionism’s supply lines. For Muslims here, proximity brings responsibility. Islamic ethics demand that when evil is manifest, it is to be opposed with the hand first, with the tongue if not, and with the heart only if all else fails. In the face of a genocide broadcast daily to the world, to confine ourselves to words and sympathy risks sinking into that lowest level of faith.

Direct action — sabotaging the machinery of oppression — is neither novel nor marginal. Andreas Malm has chronicled how striking at infrastructure has been decisive in struggles from South Africa to Palestine. The Suffragettes, often sanitised in liberal memory, were militant to their core: cutting telegraph wires, smashing windows, planting explosives. Their militancy sat alongside mass mobilisation, each amplifying the other. Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko — now canonised by states that once vilified them — understood that in the context of apartheid, oppressive systems must be disrupted.

There are diverse examples of solidarity being expressed for Palestine that require a great deal of sacrifice. Across the world, we are hearing of political prisoners using the last form of autonomy they have – their own bodies – to enact solidarity for the Palestinians by engaging in hunger strikes. Being confined has done little to deter them from expressing solidarity. Last year, a 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell self-immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy to protest the complicity of the US – an ultimate act of personal sacrifice.

Civil disobedience works differently but with the same moral thrust. It refuses obedience to laws that sanctify repression, placing bodies on the line to expose injustice. Thoreau himself captured it with stark simplicity: “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” Martin Luther King Jr wrote from his Birmingham cell that one has “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The Qur’an offers parallel guidance in stories of prophets and the righteous who defied rulers and decrees: the mother of Musa defying Pharaoh’s order to kill infants; Yusuf choosing imprisonment over acquiescence; Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal enduring flogging rather than distort the truth of revelation. These are legacies of sacred disobedience.

What, then, are the implications for us today? To stand idle while Britain arms Israel is to live in quiet collusion. To march but never disrupt is to signal opposition without cost. But the crisis demands more. Direct action targets the factories, the drones, the pipelines of repression. Civil disobedience unmasks the cruelty of laws that criminalise solidarity. Together they form a twin strategy of resistance: halting the flow of weapons, and forcing society to reckon with its own complicity.

There will be consequences. Those who act will be criminalised, condemned, vilified as extremists. Yet history’s arc is clear: yesterday’s terrorists are today’s heroes, their courage repackaged by the very states that once broke their bodies. The real danger lies not in being accused, but in being absent from the struggle.

In the end, the question is not whether Britain is implicated — it is. Nor is it whether Muslims have a tradition that justifies disobedience — we do. The question is whether we will act, or whether fear will hold us in paralysis while bombs fall on Gaza.

Thoreau’s injunction remains the call of our time: break the law when the law is an instrument of injustice. The machine is grinding on. Will we allow it to do so unopposed, or will we throw ourselves against its gears?

CC photo courtesy of Alisdare Hickson on Flickr