Cultural Complicity
The Scottish polymath Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) has been a presiding influence across a range of Scottish cultural institutions over the last two decades. Earlier this year, the Scottish International Storytelling Festival held an event ‘celebrating’ Patrick Geddes, describing him as “an ecologist and town planner who believed that our future lies in the merging of the natural world with human culture.”[1] They go on to translate Geddes into contemporary artspeak, saying he “championed the need for science and society to work together, citizen action, creative learning, and the need for green space”. In 2017, Edinburgh Art Festival’s commissions programme, under the directorship of Sorcha Carey, was entirely dedicated to exploring “the extraordinary legacy of Sir Patrick Geddes”,[2] citing Geddes’ assertion (presumably for its vague, holistic sense rather than its horrific implications) that “Art and Industry, Education and Health, Morals and Business must… advance in unison.” At Deveron Projects, in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, close to Geddes’ birthplace, Geddes’ philosophy has been cited by its former director and Geddes megafan Claudia Zeiske as central to the organisation’s ethos and values:[3] “Deveron Projects has drawn inspiration from the work of Patrick Geddes over the last several years. The Aberdeenshire born father of town planning viewed society as a bio-diverse interconnected system. We share this opinion and consider Place/Work/Folk in all that we do here…”.[4] In the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, a Patrick Geddes Room can be booked for wedding receptions and corporate events.[5] There is a Geddes institute affiliated to the University of Dundee, and a Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust in Edinburgh.[6]
The list goes on…but nowhere within the enthusiastic contemporary uptake and upholding of Geddes by Scottish cultural institutions is there ever more than a cursory or obscured mention of Geddes the imperialist and Zionist, whose town planning explicitly manifested in colonial projects of sites in India and Palestine, forming the main part of his entire cultural output. Between 1919 and 1925, at the onset of the British ‘Mandate’ (its conquest) over Palestine, and at the behest of the World Zionist Organisation, Geddes worked in Jerusalem, developing plans for ‘The Hebrew University,’ as well as developing town plans for Tiberias, Jerusalem and ‘Tel Aviv’. The latter would become the first urban colony in Palestine, and is laid out according to Geddes’ plans. His colonial city planning in Palestine constitutes a significant intellectual contribution to the Zionist project of displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians, and is illustrative of the workings and techniques of of twentieth century racial capitalism more broadly. Although not deployed wholesale, Geddes’ plans have been recognised by Palestinian scholars, such as Nazmi Jubeh as instructive in the Zionist propagandist techniques in which Palestinian land is stolen to the present day: “When we review Israeli plans for the so-called national parks, which include archeological sites and ‘green areas,’ we can see that they are drawn more or less in accordance with British urban planner Patrick Geddes’ scheme.”[7] Geddes’ contribution to the subtlest and most insidious framing of Zionist occupation and colonization presages the project of “greenwashing”—of controlling land and urban space through its use of “national parks” and green spaces: sites of erasure in which claims of Palestinian territory are elided and disappeared beneath a ‘natural’ site in which occupation is made genteel, naturalised within the landscape and justified as civilization. His plans for the ‘The Hebrew University’ in Jerusalem perfectly demonstrate the way that architectural space and town planning reifies ideology, aiming, in his own words, to bring “more and more clearly into view the yet wider claims of Israel throughout the ages.”[8] Geddes is, in many ways, at the heart of a project of colonial realism that has reified and naturalised ‘Israel’’s position in the world, as it naturalises “Israel’s claims” over the land of Palestine, and beyond.
The nature of Geddes’ culturally violent, imperial role in the establishment of the Zionist entity cloaked by his status as an environmentalist and humanist with a pliability to contemporary liberal Scottish arts and cultural institutions reveals a fundamental dynamic: the way colonialism is cloaked in processes of ethical justification (here ecology) and the way that official culture, and the liberalism of contemporary arts organisations across the imperial core facilitates this process. It also reveals the way in which the bourgeoisie increasingly finds recourse to the ecological to obscure the class domination it holds over ‘culture’. It is representative of the wider way in which Scottish cultural complicity—both historical and contemporary—in the genocide we are currently witnessing, is hidden, unspoken, obscured and disavowed. For example, a 2020 book by Murdo Macdonald, Patrick Geddes’ Intellectual Origins, decentres and almost completely glosses Geddes’ imperialim and Zionist worldview, framing his work instead within a Scottish tradition.[9] In truth, the intellectual tradition associated with his Scottishness cannot be separated from the sense of affinity, cultivated during Geddes’ life, between Scotland and ‘Israel’. Noah Rubin identifies this: “Geddes joined his countrymen, fostering the spiritual and intellectual qualities of a small nation forging an independent identity.”[10] This projected affinity—between Scotland and “Israel”—is pervasive across the twentieth century, and is also reflected in the front cover of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 tract Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, where even Gray, otherwise an ardent anti-imperialist and later supporter of Palestinian liberation and an early champion of the cultural boycott of Israel, uses the ‘Israeli’ flag on the book’s front cover, alongside other nations of a similar size to Scotland as a way of making the case for Scottish independence.[11].
In his pioneering study, On Zionist Literature (1969), the Palestinian literary critic, resistance icon and political actor Ghassan Kanafani identifies another nineteenth century Scottish cultural figure as significant in the development of cultural zionism: Sir Walter Scott.[12] The figure of Scott literally towers in public monuments in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and metaphorically towers as the cultural progenitor of modern notions of Scottishness, the father of a nation. But again, hardly ever commented on within the cultural sphere in Scotland is his role in the development of another nation, ‘Israel’, something Kanafani’s study brings to the fore. We might ask why a key figure of the Palestinian resistance devoted so much time in a critical period of revolutionary struggle to a critical analysis of the British literary canon of the nineteenth century—the novels of Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot etc? The revelation of Kanafani’s study is profound. In it, he argues that the development of cultural Zionism across the (predominantly British) literature of the nineteenth century preceded, prefigured and laid the conditions for the development of political Zionism. In doing so, he identifies the vital role of culture and cultural production in any colonial (and therefore anti-colonial) project. The horrors we are currently witnessing, in the Zionist genocide in Gaza, did not begin in 2023 or even in 1967 or 1948. They were incubated, and continue to be so, in sites across the imperial metropole. They began here in Scotland in the nineteenth century. It is our attendant historical duty to contest the settled consensus around Zionism that was inaugurated here.
World Revolution
Palestine has called into question and thrown into sharp relief all of the contradictions in the imperial core and the liberal public sphere of societies across the Global North, revealing the depths of colonial brutality that underwrites every facet of the bourgeois-capitalist order, from the circuits of capital that are sustained by imperialist state militarism, to the arms industry and its intersections with universities, tech and surveillance infrastructure, pension funds, public bodies, to the ideological apparatus that sustains and justifies the existence of the supremacist Zionist entity as an established fait-accompli, manufactured in the imperial centres—media, education, culture, art and so on. Every document of civilization is revealed by the livestreamed genocide—the power of Palestinian witnessing and testimony—to be a document of barbarism. The long-cultivated gearing of the Palestinian resistance to an international revolution, a project consciously undertaken by the Palestinian resistance since the 1960s and epitomised by figures such as Leila Khaled and Ghassan Kanafani, has awakened an anti-imperialist consciousness in millions of people to the contemporary brutality of imperialism across the Global South, from Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan to Congo, Haiti, the Philippines, Kashmir, the Sahel, and so on, performing as well as demonstrating the universalising dimension of the Palestinian cause and the essential internationalism of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Indeed, new identities and subjectivities are being formed by both racialised and non-racialised people in the imperial core along explicitly anticolonial lines. The spontaneous uptake of the rallying cry ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’ runs counter to the discourse of staying-in-one’s-lane and the essentalism of ‘lived experience’ that has kept struggles of the oppressed atomised over the last decades, and signals a mode of engagement with the Palestinian cause based around elective affinity and international revolution. As Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa said:
Gaza is now all the world
Gaza is our collective moment of truth, the meaning in our lives
It is the clarity we need and seek
It is the definitive divide between us and the ruling class that tramples us
It is us or them
There is no middle place now.[13]
And as Palestinian intellectual Abdaljawad Omar said in an interview given in November 2023, less than a month after the start of Al Aqsa Flood:
Many think that solidarity with Palestine is a unidirectional action meant to provide Palestinians with support, a sense of psychological relief that our struggle does not meet deaf ears. I am more interested in the other side of the equation, on what the Palestinian struggle uncovers about the institutional, economic, and structural realities for those in the global north, the Arab world, and global south. To me the Palestinian struggle exposes truths, reveals fascisms, and emboldens trajectories of change, radical political, and economic change in these societies–or at least it should do so. Palestine is not a nationalist, nor a religious, nor a feel-good cause. It is not simply a ceasefire movement. Our gift to the world [was] given through our blood, especially for those interested in a more just, more economically equal, decolonial, deracialized world. The struggle we lead reveals hidden discourses of imperialisms and forces centres of power to reveal their schizophrenic stances and hypocritical posturing. This is why Palestine is a universal struggle, a place for the condensation of truth in a post-truth historical conjecture. It is also a place from which the imperial metropole, and those within it suffering from racialized inequalities, can see in Palestine and its struggle a natural and political affinity. Historically the Palestinian struggle galvanised the left, and helped construct new modes of political engagements.[14]
What Omar identifies as “the other side of the equation” is neglected to our detriment, and its neglect also signals the NGO-isation of the Palestinian solidarity movement, in which Palestinians are figured simply as victims and recipients of a paternalistic, Western philanthropy, rather than world-historical agents at the vanguard of international revolutionary struggle against imperialism. I would like to apply Omar’s framework of thinking to the class relations and industrial struggles within the imperial core, here within the cultural sector in Scotland, an arena in which the question of Palestine has inflamed the bristling contradictions and tensions that were already present under the surface and revealed the extent to which the Scottish arts is controlled by a fundamentally racist, imperialist bourgeoisie. Over the last 18 months, as I will sketch out, we have been witnessing arts and culture workers asserting their labour power for Palestine who have been achieving a series of remarkable victories as workers. Solidarity with Palestine has been a vehicle for more workplace organising in the arts, more class consciousness, more deploying of power, and has revealed the true nature of a sector in which conversations around class are frequently glossed under a supposedly ‘non-hierarchical’, uncritical, anti-intellectual and anti-antagonistic framework.
Art Workers for Palestine Scotland (AWPS), a group that I organise with, was formed in 2021. AWPS came about through heeding the call made by Palestinian trade unionists during a General Strike called across the whole of historic Palestine, the first since the General Strike that sparked the revolt against the British Mandate in 1936[15]. The group was set up following this call for mobilisations of organised labour and trade unions towards the Palestinian cause. In an interview with Harvey Dimond in The Skinny, it was noted:
Importantly, the organisation decided to name themselves as ‘art workers’, rather than ‘artists’: the group says this “signifies that there’s a rift between workers and bosses, workers and institutions, and because there had been conversations about workers within the cultural sector being under-unionised and artists not thinking of themselves as workers.[16]
Since then, AWPS has been instrumental in challenging the silence around Palestine from a number of liberal cultural institutions who have long used the traction gained from ‘the decolonial’, and from public anti-racist commitments made in the wake of Black Lives Matter uprisings (but later in many cases quietly shelved and unceremoniously reversed). This exposes the structural racism and conditional solidarity of a sector whose main funding body, Creative Scotland––a highly neoliberal, non-elected quango which effectively regulates cultural production in Scotland (aka mitigates the risks asssociated with cultural production)––has zero people of colour across any of its Senior Leadership Team or Specialism Leads (a total of 22 people).[17] The chair of its board, Robert Wilson, is the multimiliionaire owner and founder of Jupiter Artland, a private sculpture park near Edinburgh, on which he also lives in a mansion, surrounded by peacocks in the grounds, cosplaying a feudal lord or latter-day Medici. It also contains corporatist, neoliberal board members such as Louise Wilson, whose biography cites her experience in “top tier blue chip corporate companies including Accenture, Proctor & Gamble and The Coca-Cola Company.”[18] During the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Creative Scotland was quick to issue a statement offering solidarity to Ukrainian artists and cultural workers. No similar statement has been forthcoming after 18 months of genocide of Palestinians.[19] Other studies, such as those cited by Malini Chakrabarty in 2024, have shown the dearth of racialised leadership across the Scottish arts: “Shockingly, among Creative Scotland’s regularly funded bodies, “no chief executives, artistic directors, or chairs, and less than 2% of board members, permanent staff, freelance staff, and volunteers had a BME background”.[20] The 2024 employment statistics of Glasgow Life, the arms-length body that runs Glasgow’s cultural venues, show that there are no people of colour beyond a band 7 (there are 15 bands)[21]––expressing the truth of cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s famous formulation that “race is the modality in which class is lived.”[22]
Since December 2023, AWPS’ campaign around the cultural boycott of Israel (PACBI) has gained over 190 endorsements across Scottish cultural organisations, making Scotland one of the geographies with the highest endorsement of the cultural boycott of Israel anywhere in the world, a testimony to the radical currents running through Scottish culture. What is revealing about the endorsements is that the cultural boycott is split along class lines, with grassroots, politicised, artist-led, racialised and queer cultural organisations and groupings strongly represented but larger organisations (including organisations explicitly geared towards political causes and injustices such as Glasgow Women’s Library and Projectability) remarkably absent. Of the 251 cultural organisations that were recipients of Creative Scotland multi-year funding earlier this year, less than two dozen were PACBI signatories.
AWFPS has also fought financial complicity in the Scottish cultural sector in the form of campaigning against Baillie Gifford, an Edinburgh-based investment company directly complicit in the genocide and which has been embedding itself extensively across Scottish cultural institutions for a number of years.[23] A combination of workers, audiences, artists and campaigners have forced several arts institutions, such as Fruitmarket gallery, Collective, and Stills—all in Edinburgh—to relinquish their sponsorship deals with Baillie Gifford. These victories yield a juncture at which the corporatisation of culture that Baillie Gifford’s enmeshment in the Scottish arts signifies, can be wrested by the people—workers and audiences—who actually constitute these institutions, away from the genocidal bourgeoisie who hold power within them. For instance, Melanie Reid, a current board member of Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh, in 2010 commented in The Times: “It is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back…They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything.”[24] And more recently, with recourse to neutrality, called for “shame on pro-Palestinian activists who target the arts” stating that “the arts” are a “protected neutral space for everyone, a way of promoting understanding and dialogue.”[25] On the one hand, the proclamation of neutrality and dialogue, while on the other, support for a genocidal entity’s “refusal to debate anything”. When these comments resurfaced in April 2025, alongside transphobic comments made by Reid,[26] AWPS, alongside Embassy Gallery and Sett Studios, launched an Open Letter[27] to Fruitmarket, demanding the removal of Reid as a board member. Amanda Catto, the former Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland, replied to a social media post made by AWPS, in which she said “I doubt Melanie will get the opportunity to reply to this – and I agree that these words are hateful and I will never excuse them – but I am interested in enabling a space for somebody to speak in response to what you are saying rather than cancelling them with a rather dog whistle line – if you know her story you will know she has characteristics that are protected and respected – maybe an opener would be to ask how she feels now – rather than go on an attack?”[28] Catto’s reply is remarkable in a number of ways: the suggestion that a powerful right-wing journalist for The Times has no right of reply; the suggestion that Reid’s ‘protected characteristics’ absolve her from any accountability or criticism; the evocation of ‘cancel culture’ to the same ends. It all highlights the trend of the bourgeois fragility, the bourgeoisie within the art world closing ranks with recourse to a self-victimhood that again serves to foreground bourgeois subjectivity, erase class domination and imperial violence, with an ameliorative, anti-antagonistic language so ubiquitous and familiar to those in the arts.
In February 2025, Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) was forced to drop Coca-Cola products (a target of the Palestinian led BDS movement) from its venue, a demand made together by unionised front-of-house and cleaning workers of the Unite Hospitality branch of GFT, and AWPS. The external pressure from AWPS—in the form of an open letter demanding GFT drop Coca-Cola, drop Barclays (another BDS target) and British Army adverts that had been screening prior to some films, and endorse PACBI thereby boycotting Israeli films and cultural organisations—made public demands that workers at GFT had made internally months previously and which had reached an impasse. The open letter was signed by over 1,400 audience members, film-workers, filmmakers and others. GFT initially refused to budge, at which point the Unite Hospitality workers carried out a service boycott, refusing to sell or handle Coca-Cola products.[29] This action was the first of its kind in the British hospitality sector: a refusal by hospitality workers to handle a product linked to Israel, and, as with situations around Baillie Gifford, GFT had no other option but to enact the will of the workers and audiences to limit damage to its reputation. The other demands—around Barclays and British Army adverts and PACBI—hang in the balance. If GFT cede those demands, workers, organisers and audiences will have turned one of Glasgow’s most beloved cultural venues—whose progressive facade has been revealed to obscure the class struggle underneath—into a culturally liberated zone; they will have also demonstrated the power of workers to stage a cultural takeover and steer the direction of art and culture towards collective liberation.[30]
Scottish International Storytelling Festival, ‘By Creating We Think – Celebrating Patrick Geddes;, www.sisf.org.uk, 29th January 2025,
https://www.sisf.org.uk/news-post/newsid/26184-by-creating-we-think-celebrating-patrick-geddes/ ↑
Edinburgh Art Festival, “2017 Commissions Programme: The Making of the Future: Now,”
https://www.edinburghartfestival.com/about/edinburgh-art-festival-archive/edinburgh-art-festival-2017/ ↑
See Claudia Zeiske ‘Place Art Folk‘, https://www.deveron-projects.com/placeartfolk/. With thanks to the co-directors of Deveron Projects who are currently producing information on Geddes’ imperial worldview, and the implicationsof this for understanding the organisation and its work. ↑
Deveron Projects,’“Geddes in Action: Public AGM 2017’,
Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, “Patrick Geddes Room”, https://www.rbge.org.uk/venue-hire/weddings-at-the-botanics/patrick-geddes-room/ ↑
See Geddes Institute for Urban Research https://app.dundee.ac.uk/geddesinstitute/ and Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust https://patrickgeddestrust.co.uk/ ↑
Nazmi Jubeh, ‘Patrick Geddes: Luminary or Prophet of Demonic Planning’, Jerusalem Quarterly Issue 80 (Winter 2019) https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1649528 ↑
Rubin, Noah Esther Hysler. ‘Geography, Colonialism and Town Planning: Patrick Geddes’ Plan for Mandatory Jerusalem.’ Cultural Geographies 18, no. 2 (2011): 231–48. ↑
Murdo Macdonald, Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) ↑
Rubin, Noah Esther Hysler. “Geography, Colonialism and Town Planning: Patrick Geddes’ Plan for Mandatory Jerusalem.” Cultural Geographies 18, no. 2 (2011): 231–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44251520 ↑
Alasdair Gray, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992) see https://canongate.co.uk/books/220-why-scots-should-rule-scotland-1997/ for image of the front cover. ↑
Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature (Oxford: Ebb, 2022) ↑
Susan Abulhawa, ‘Gaza is our moment of truth’, Electronic Intifada, May 14 2024, https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-our-moment-truth/46401 ↑
Abdaljawad Omar, ‘An unyielding will to continue’, Ebb Magazine, November 17th 2023, https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/an-unyielding-will-to-continue?fbclid=IwAR0YWd2eNDhCSYkmxBVtP8wxdEEQi9OjgSSIFNBFuAlZ7NS4dSN3CgV_AiE ↑
Workers In Palestine, ‘Palestinian Trade Unions Call for immediate and urgent action from international Trade Unions’, https://x.com/workersinpales1/status/1396034862432260099?s=46&t=79hwzWYljz2wrmrnb8MpTA ↑
Harvey Dimond “Resisting Complicity: Art Workers For Palestine Scotland on their activism”, The Skinny, January 10 2024, https://www.theskinny.co.uk/art/interviews/resisting-complicity-art-workers-for-palestine-scotland-on-their-activism ↑
See Creative Scotland’s web pages ‘Senior Leadership Team’ https://www.creativescotland.com/about/our-people/senior-leadership-team and ‘Specialism Leads’
https://www.creativescotland.com/about/our-people/specialism-leads (accessed May 7 2025) ↑Creative Scotland, ‘Our People’ https://www.creativescotland.com/about/our-people/board/louise-wilson ↑
Creative Scotland, “A statement on Ukraine”, March 2 2022, https://x.com/CreativeScots/status/1499040586199969798 ↑
Malini Chakrabarty, “Scotland’s vibrant cultural tapestry is fraying at the seams”, The Herald, May 28 2024,
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/24348043.scotlands-vibrant-cultural-tapestry-fraying-seams/?ref=wa ↑
Glasgow Life, “Workforce Profile By Ethnicity”, March 31 2024, https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/media/0oibznds/workforce-profile-ethnicity-at-31-march-2024.pdf ↑
Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In: H. A. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara and R. Lindborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies Reader. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996) ↑
Billy Briggs, “Revealed: Edinburgh investment firm’s links to illegal West Bank settlements”, The Ferret, December 17 2023, https://theferret.scot/edinburgh-investment-firm-west-bank/ ↑
Melanie Reid, “We’re All Thrilled By Mossad the Movie.” The Times, March 31, 2010 on [https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/article/were-all-thrilled-by-mossad-the-movie-z93p2bk9qmv] ↑
Melanie Reid, “Shame on pro-Palestinian Activists Who Target the Arts.” The Times, March 4, 2024 on [https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/shame-on-pro-palestinian-activists-who-target-the-arts-d2jw9tv6q] ↑
See Melanie Reid, “Failing to use the word ‘woman’ puts lives at risk”, The Times, 18 October 2021, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/failing-to-use-the-word-woman-puts-lives-at-risk-bz0s5wdl3) ↑
Alekia Gill, “Artists send open letter to Fruitmarket after unearthing “abhorrent” comments from board member”, Deadline News, April 25 2025, https://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2025/04/25/artists-send-open-letter-to-fruitmarket-after-unearthing-abhorrent-comments-from-board-member/?amp=1 ↑
See Catto’s comment beneath AWPS’ instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/DI1pDh8oABi/?img_index=1 ↑
Mark McDougall, “Coca-Cola to be removed from GFT bar after staff boycott,” March 3 2025, The Herald https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24977095.coca-cola-removed-gft-bar-staff-boycott/ ↑
With thanks to all of my comrades within AWPS and especially Xuanlin Tham for reading a draft of this essay. ↑