The Letter I Can't Send

FAO: Lucy Powell, MP

Lucy,

Before you read this letter, I need to explain why you’re receiving it. Why I can’t send it to the woman it is actually addressed to.

Leona “Ellie” Kamio is one of the Filton 4: four Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage following direct action at a Filton factory belonging to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. None of the four was convicted of a terrorism offence. Nevertheless, in June, a judge ruled that their actions had a “terrorist connection”, subjecting them to harsher sentences and years of additional restrictions. Amnesty International described the decision as a dangerous and unprecedented escalation in the treatment of direct-action protesters. The Filton 4 are currently serving between 5-8 years each in prison.

I began writing to Ellie after her supporters published a list of the ordinary things she would enjoy hearing about: music, plants, dating shows, celebrity gossip and funny stories from the outside. Before I could send it, however, I learned that Ellie and her co-defendant Lottie Head had been placed under enhanced contact vetting. Their contact with the outside world is now restricted to a maximum of 20 approved people. Only those people may telephone, email, write to or visit them. This means that my letter, like hundreds of others, cannot reach her.

It feels as if these restrictions have been created not only to silence the people inside the prison, but those of us on the outside too. I’m sending this letter to you, Lucy, as well as publishing it online, in the hope that it will help you see Ellie as a human being, instead of a case number. I hoping it will perhaps spark even a momentary flicker of humanity and compassion within you and force you to ask yourself, “what kind of society punishes those who refuse to look away?”

Ellie may never be permitted to read these words. But they can still serve as a record of who she is, of what has been done to her and of the fact that people are watching. I hope those encountering her story for the first time will come to see her as more than a defendant or political symbol. & I hope those with the power to challenge her treatment will understand that reading this letter brings with it a responsibility to act.

Dear Ellie,

It’s so hard to know what I could say in your appalling circumstances that could possibly be of any value. In the face of the horrific miscarriage of justice you are currently enduring, every sentence feels inadequate.

Today, however, it occurred to me that you might have known that feeling too, as you watched the genocide unfold, and you acted anyway. I can’t pretend to know you but I imagine there were moments in the months before your Elbit Systems protest when the scale of the Palestinian extermination felt so overwhelming you wondered, like so many of us, what one person could possibly do. & That feeling of helplessness can feel so heavy.

No matter how many protests I’ve attended, my relentless posting on social media, the countless emails I’ve sent to my MP, the funds I’ve helped raise for families, nothing has felt like it could ever be enough. But I know we have to keep trying. However futile it may seem, we all must refuse to forget what is happening. Because there are so many in Palestine, in Lebanon and beyond who do not have that privilege.

If this letter does nothing else, I hope it lets you know that so many of us are refusing to forget you too. Each one of you Filton 4 took a stand despite the risk and at great personal cost. Perhaps because you decided the price of allowing such catastrophic human suffering would be greater.

There’s a quote I keep thinking about in reference to your case, a quote that is attributed to a peace activist called AJ Muste who protested outside the Whitehouse during the Vietnam War: “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

As we encounter even more extreme forms of fascism, refusing to allow our governments and media to chip away at our humanity feels like an act of resistance. Because we now live in a society that rewards those who are complicit while punishing those who refuse to look away. It is a society that often makes me ashamed to be British. But you and the rest of the Filton 25 make me proud to be human. You are the very best of us.

History is full of people whom the state once called criminals, extremists and threats to public order, only for later generations to celebrate their courage. Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis and the suffragettes are now comfortably woven into stories of progress, as though the societies that honour them today were not once responsible for their persecution. Perhaps, one day, Britain will tell itself a similarly sanitised story about this moment. So, it is the responsibility of those of us who have witnessed your horrendous treatment to tell the truth about what we have seen and to pass that truth onto future generations.

We will tell them about the time cruelly stolen from you, the ordinary moments, relationships and freedoms. That you were only allowed contact with 20 people in the outside world because of a vetting process specifically designed to make you feel isolated. We will tell them that, whatever prominence you have in history years after your release, the system failed you and did not treat you as a human being when it counted the most.

I know that our so-called “justice” system has chosen to make an example of you in order to strike fear into those of us who still wish to exercise our right to protest. In the face of this, I know it’s important that I don’t reduce you to a symbol either.

So, who are you beyond the headlines? There’s not a lot in the public domain but, from what I do know, I think we would get on well.

I discovered recently that I’d come across you (or rather, your work) long before your arrest, via your feature on the CASISDEAD track “Pineapple Juice”. I’m a big CASISDEAD fan and that was one of the songs I played over and over when Famous Last Words first landed. The lyrics “I'll lick razor blades for you/You'll lick the pain away for me” so perfectly capture that weird, dangerous and often toxic infatuation phase of a new relationship (or situationship!).

Speaking of infatuation and new relationships - I hear you are a fan of dating shows. I’ve never really watched Married at First Sight but First Dates used to be a regular in my viewing schedule. My favourite part is always that bit at the end where they reveal if the couples that chose to go on another date actually went the distance.

I wonder if you are a Love Island fan too. I still watch every season (for my sins!) and this latest has been as rife with drama as you would expect. Casting have played a blinder and I actually liked all of this season’s OGs right from the first episode, which I don’t recall ever happening before. The finale is next Monday and there are 6 couples, 3 of which have already said “I love you” (which feels like a record!) and a fourth is absolutely on the brink. I can only guess which ones will survive the outside world once the show is over but, romantic that I am, I hope all of them are in with a solid chance.

The star of this season is, undoubtedly, Jasmine Muller. She’s a gorgeous South Asian and Iranian goddess who speaks her mind and whose motto is “she who loves never loses”. Away from the show, she has a Substack where she writes about toxic masculinity and she used to date footballer Hector Bellerin (who has also been outspoken about the genocide and still has a tattoo of Jasmine’s face on his hand… allegedly).

On the subject of football, I’m wondering if you got to watch any of the World Cup as I’m not sure of the exact privileges you get whilst incarcerated. I hope you at least got to watch the final. The list of your interests I found posted online did not mention football as one of them but I know you are, of course, interested in justice, so I hope Spain’s win (or rather, Argentina’s defeat) gave you as much joy as it did so many of us here on the outside. After a tournament in which a suspicious amount of decisions went in Argentina’s favour, it was incredibly satisfying to see that be reminded that influence and favour can perhaps only carry you so far. & That, in the end, those who cheat become the biggest losers.

I think that lesson resonated so deeply with so many people watching because the corruption surrounding this World Cup seemed to mirror the corruption poisoning so much of the world beyond it. To watch it fail, even in this one small arena, left me with a little hope: that power and money do not always get the final word, and that justice might yet prevail elsewhere too.

Until then, I, like so many others, will continue to lobby for your freedom. You deserve so much better than what is happening to you right now.

Shortly before writing this letter, I finished reading Kafka’s The Trial and I think it’s part of what motivated me to write to you because it was impossible to read without thinking about your case. The novel explores a justice system so deliberately opaque that the accused can never fully understand it, the rules by which they are being judged or the true extent of the forces arranged against them, which seem to shift and change shape without notice. What was written as satire more than a century ago now feels horribly recognisable. In your case, too, the withholding of information and the blurring of legal boundaries seem designed not only to punish, but to disorient you, the jury and the public.

The system in The Trial is most powerful because it isolates Josef K., trapping him inside its version of reality until it becomes almost impossible to imagine another. & I know that is exactly what our justice system is attempting to do to you too by limiting the amount of contact you have with the outside world.

But, whatever they tell you, you are not alone and that is where your fate entirely diverges from that of Josef K.’s. People are watching, questioning and saying your name and there is a collective refusal to let injustice become normalised. A hundred years ago, Kafka already understood that power hides behind closed doors and incomprehensible procedures. The task for those of us on the outside is to keep opening those doors by naming what is happening, demanding answers and reminding one another that the system’s judgment is not the same thing as the truth.

What you did came from a place of love. & “She who loves never loses”.

At least, not in the end.

With so much love and solidarity,

xK

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