Theft of land on Diva Harris’s doorstep begets theft of land, liberty, and life 2000 miles away in Palestine.

Ground cover: tarp, barrier, tape, big metal wall. Cracked cement. Empty baggies and crushed lager cans. New grass trodden back into mud. 

In the week the Supreme Court rules to protect public access rights on Dartmoor — a credit to the steadfast, peaceful resistance of the Right to Roam campaign, and a win for land access rights in the UK — there is also a court ruling concerning land access on our south London doorstep. 

 It is determined by the High Court that Lambeth council’s extensive, drawn-out walling off of a large section of the park for events every summer, to the detriment of park users and the benefit of private enterprise, is  unlawful. Celebration is brief; an Instagram statement from the organisers — an electronic shrug in tasteful colours — interprets the ruling selectively, and states that the events will go ahead regardless. 

 It simultaneously emerges that this matter of access, illegal construction and land theft is intricately entwined with the matters of access, illegal construction and land theft currently afflicting the people of Palestine on an industrial and devastating scale. The council don’t make a profit from leasing the park — they’re not allowed to — but the companies that run the events do. The profits of Superstruct (owners of Field Day, Cross the Tracks and Mighty Hoopla festivals) are banked offshore by their global parent company in the tax haven of Luxembourg, before the co-owners of that parent company, the US private equity firm KKR, invest it — including, heavily, in Israeli arms manufacturing, and the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Theft begets theft: of land, of liberty, of life. 

Despite the council’s best efforts at suppression, dissenting residents paint slogans and bombs on the metal fences designed to keep them out. They make it easy to see the thorny, hideous, brazen interconnectedness of it all.  They make it hard to ignore. 

A fox screams. People being thrown around the fairground rides scream. Parents scream for their children. 

Usually the most serene hour of frenetic days, our walks become stressful. Festival vehicles and generators spew diesel fumes, security guards and police officers constantly circle, and the dog pins back her ears at the clanging of metal on metal, the soundclash of multiple stages. The high walls that slice across the body of the park are oppressive to the eye and brain. 

With our usual vista of trees and sky interrupted by the hoardings of big, dirty business, I think of the landscapes 2200 miles away, once rich with olive groves, farmland, wildflowers and families, that are now reduced to dust and rubble. I think of the absurdity of a supposed homeland that has never called my name. I think of the useless Yiddish phrases (delicious babkas, aching backs) taught to me by the app I use sporadically to taste the language of resistance and resilience left in the pogroms and gutters by my forebears — the way it assumes I want to know how to say מיין מאמע איז אין ירושלים, my mother is in Jerusalem, and not what I rudimentarily thread together in its place, דאַס וז נישט קײַן מײַן לאַנד, this is not my land. 

I think of the interconnectedness of land justice, climate justice and humanitarian justice. I think of the responsibility of those of us who write about the outdoors to acknowledge the connectedness, to untangle the roots and unhook the pervasive barbs of capitalistic and colonial exploitation. I think about how to care about the struggle for land access rights in vast swathes of the country should also be to care about access in the city; in places we can only see though our phones, and places we can’t see at all. 

I think about the seeds of basic crops, and the figurative seeds of peace, that the Palestinian earth cries out for — how a gentle hand and the land and the rain could make fruitful and nourishing what has been made heartlessly, deliberately barren. 

Bat wings flutter, and I sing a Woody Guthrie song to myself. I tune out the carnival sounds just long enough to listen to the two sets of kite ribbons, flown high by two boys and their dad, that dance above it all.