Childcare worker protesting genocide arrested and held for 7 hours – for writing on ground in chalk

Hastings childcare worker and anti-genocide campaigner Grace Lally, 46, was arrested on Thursday July 3 outside the General Dynamics weapons arms factory in Hastings for ‘causing criminal damage’ – by writing with chalk on the ground outside the factory.

Ms Lally was then held at Hastings police station for seven hours and interviewed by police before being released on police bail pending further investigation.

Speaking on her release to campaigners who had set up a solidarity camp outside the station, Lally saidthat Sussex police were investigating her for causing ‘criminal damage with a rock’ and had suggested to her that General Dynamics might need to ‘retarmac’ the road because of the ‘damage’ from her chalk writing.

The protest, organised by the Hastings and District Palestine Solidarity Campaign (HDPSC), had been advertised to stop arms to Israel and as a show of solidarity with Palestine Action, a direct action group targeting Israeli arms company Elbit systems, which at that time had not yet been banned, or ‘proscribed’, by the Starmer government, which designated it as a terrorist group at midnight on Friday.

Ms Lally began to write ‘Stop Arms to Israel’ and ‘Stop Genocide’ in chalk on the ground outside General Dynamics in protest at the firm’s role in Israel’s genocide of around 400,000 people in Gaza, before police arrested her and dragged her away with her hands cuffed behind her. Footage shows her writing in thin classroom chalk on the road surface and telling police that: “I am not a  risk or a threat to anybody – I am writing protest slogans on the ground in chalk. All I’m doing is protesting war crimes”, then asking them who has put them up to intervening: “Who is asking you to do this? Who are you protecting? What are you protecting them from – chalk?!”

As she was violently handcuffed and dragged away from the protest, she shouts:

We are carrying out peaceful protests to stop arms to Israel, to stop Israel carrying out war crimes.

This incident followed a string of protests by local people at General Dynamics, including one in June where police took the names and details of two protestors who wrote slogans on the ground in chalk, and who are also still awaiting the outcome of that investigation.

Arms firm “cannot tolerate chalk”

Writing on her Facebook page after the arrest Ms Lally said:

I was arrested for writing protest slogans in chalk but people should know that the police were there before we arrived for our peaceful protest, with two vans and two police cars, with the express intention to frighten and intimidate us, on the direct request of General Dynamics who told police they ‘cannot tolerate chalk’. This is what policing to protect genocide profiteers looks like. Lucky I’m a childcare worker and tools of my trade are pavement chalks!!!

This was not Grace Lally’s first experience of using chalk in a protest. Last year, she used chalk sprays to “emblazon walls with slogans questioning why [a housing association] block is empty” in Hastings when the town has many homeless people. No police seemed to feel the need to get involved then, despite the far more extensive use.

A spokesperson for HDPSC said of last week’s arrest:

The violent arrest of one of our members for writing chalk slogans on the road was a disgraceful display of excessive and inappropriate force at a peaceful protest. 

This is another example of repressive police tactics to deter our solidarity actions with the Palestinian people in Gaza. But it won’t work. It didn’t work with the Hastings Three, who were all found innocent in January of the trumped up charges against them, and it won’t work with the Chalker One. We have protested at General ‘Genocide’ Dynamics over 20 times since the genocide started and we will continue to be there as long as they continue to arm the apartheid Israeli state.

The Starmer regime is waging an escalating war against free speech and peaceful protest against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, frequently misusing anti-terror legislation to harass, raid, arrest and often prosecute peaceful protesters and even journalists for covering the slaughter and exposing Israel’s crimes. Starmer’s government is also both enabling Israeli military aircraft to conduct the genocide and using UK armed forces to participate directly in it.

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