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LONDON: Green energy tycoon Dale Vince plans to keep flying the Palestinian flag at his company’s headquarters, saying a “shadowy” group of pro-Israel lawyers is forcing local authorities to remove them across the UK.

Vince said he would fly the flag at the Ecotricity headquarters in defiance of Stroud district council, which told him he needs to seek permission as Palestine is not recognized by the UK.

He said as Palestine is recognized by 147 countries, the flag counts as a national one — which can be flown without permission — rather than an advert, as Stroud council suggested. 

Vince added that a group called UK Lawyers for Israel may have complained to the council, prompting the request for him to remove it.

“There’s a shadowy group called UK Lawyers for Israel that do complain to councils about flags and to hospitals about pin badges and all kinds of trivia that they don’t like because it’s in support of Palestine and they consider to be racism, which is just an incredible thing to say,” Vince said in the Stroud Times.

“I think what they do is in the shadows, that’s why I say shadowy. They send threatening letters to people that do innocent things like fly a flag, wear a pin badge and that kind of stuff.”

In the local paper, Vince wrote earlier this week: “Nobody ever got asked to take down a Ukrainian flag. With Palestine it’s different and much of this is due to a shadowy group of lawyers acting for Israel.

“They’ve bullied several councils into forcing the removal of flags and into event cancellations — it’s a pernicious stifling of free speech on behalf of a foreign power.”

Vince said no one should feel threatened by the flag, which is being flown “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people.

“What’s been happening these last two years has been exceptional,” he said. “It is genocide, it is ethnic cleansing, it’s daily acts of barbarity against civilians, mass starvation of millions of people.

“I mean it’s off the scale in terms of human abuse and there’s not enough by far being done about it by western nations who have punished Russia incredibly for their invasion and occupation of Ukraine in a recent timescale.

“Half the G7 will recognise Palestine in September and it’s absolutely important that we show our solidarity with the Palestinian people and we show Israel that we can see what they’re doing and we don’t accept it, we don’t condone it. They won’t get away with it, they will be judged for it in the future. It’s an absolute atrocity.”

Vince added: “Obviously what Hamas did on October 7th (2023) was an atrocity but the atrocity visited on Palestine in return in the last two years is off the charts.

“It’s unimaginably bad and this is from a democratic country that we call an ally, not from a terrorist organisation known as Hamas.

“So they’re not comparable and I don’t think anybody that’s Israeli should look at the Palestinian flag and feel threatened. I don’t understand that.

“This is not the flag of Hamas and these are the shadows that UK Lawyers for Israel operate within, conflating the flag of a country with the flag of a terrorist organisation.”

UKLFI calls itself a “voluntary association of lawyers which seeks the application of rules and laws to counter boycotts and other actions targeting Israelis.”

Last year, it succeeded in forcing the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to remove Palestinian flags from local authority buildings, after suggesting that flying them broke the law.

A spokesperson for the group denied it had contacted Stroud council because officials had already contacted Vince to remove the flag when they learned of its presence.

Stroud council said it received complaints from members of the public about the flag, so was “obliged to take (legal) advice on the matter.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the UK will recognize Palestine at the UN next month unless a ceasefire is reached in Gaza before then with commitments to plans for a two-state solution.

WARSAW: A large Polish city could have had its water supply cut off on Wednesday as a result of a cyberattack, a deputy prime minister said after the intrusion was foiled.
In an interview with news portal Onet on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, who is also digital affairs minister, did not specify who was behind the attack or which city was targeted.
Poland has said that its role as a hub for aid to Ukraine makes it a target for Russian cyberattacks and acts of sabotage. Gawkowski has described Poland in the past as the “main target” for Russia among NATO countries.
Gawkowski told Onet that the cyberattack could have meant there would be no water in one of Poland’s big cities.
“At the last moment we managed to see to it that when the attack began, our services had found out about it and we shut everything down. We managed to prevent the attack.”
He said Poland manages to thwart 99 percent of cyberattacks.
Gawkowski last year that Poland would spend over 3 billion zlotys ($800 million) to boost cybersecurity after the state news agency PAP was hit by what authorities said was likely to have been a Russian cyberattack.
The digital affairs ministry did not immediately respond to an email requesting further details.
On Wednesday Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has warned that Russia is trying to drive a wedge between Warsaw and Kyiv, said that a young Ukrainian man had been detained for acts of sabotage on behalf of foreign intelligence services, including writing graffiti insulting Poles.
PAP reported on Thursday that a 17-year-old Ukrainian man detained, among other things, for desecrating a monument to Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists in World War Two has been charged with participating in an organized criminal group aimed at committing crimes against Poland.