AS elders of the female persuasion, we are sometimes referred to — and not always kindly — as “little old ladies,” although many of us are not particularly small, a lot of us do not feel as old as the startling number on our IDs, and some of us are far too impolite to be termed “ladies.”

Nevertheless, the angry (but cordial) granny has become the iconic new symbol of freedom of speech in Britain, with scores and even hundreds now getting arrested at events opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in support of the proscribed non-violent group, Palestine Action.

The original Raging Grannies in their ostentatious floral hats (not to be confused with Monty Python’s similarly behatted but decidedly more sinister Hell’s Grannies) are a protest group founded in British Columbia, Canada, in 1987. The impetus for their formation was concern at the time about the presence of US Navy nuclear-powered ships in Victoria Harbour.

Soon, their protests — in the form of satirical parody songs of their own composition — became ubiquitous at anti-nuclear, peace and justice rallies. Today, as we march relentlessly for a free Palestine, “We Are All Raging Grannies.”

The online memes are already viral, but the grannies are very real, and they are not going away. Elizabeth Morley, a longtime activist who will turn 80 in November, was arrested on August 8 in Parliament Square at the Defend Our Juries protest in support of Palestine Action. At least 532 people were arrested that day, more than half of them over age 60, although not all of them grannies.

Morley was seen on widely shared footage, engaging with what she said was a “very sweet” police officer, helping her walk to the police van after she had stood for two and a half hours — her arthritic knees won’t allow her to sit for long periods.

“My arresting officer himself said, ‘Elizabeth, uniform or no uniform, we all feel the same.’ That’s a big statement,” she told me when we spoke after she was safely back home in Aberystwyth. “And I don’t think he was talking just for himself. He said ‘we’.”

Carole Stuart McIvor, 80 and a great-grandmother, was also arrested on August 8. Now suffering from Parkinson’s disease, McIvor has been campaigning for a free Palestine “for decades” but also took part in the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in the 1980s, where she was among a group arrested for dancing at dawn on the roof of the silos where cruise missiles were stored.

For that, she said she spent two weeks in Holloway prison. “They said I might have broken the Official Secrets Act, but no-one was charged with terrorism,” she told me. The peace camp was widely credited as the impetus for the creation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 and the removal of the nuclear missiles from Greenham a year later.

Stuart McIvor chose to risk arrest on August 8 “because it’s no good waiting for the people next to you to do something,” she said. Many who joined her in Parliament Square were familiar faces from the protest movements of the 1960s. “The demographic was striking.”

Morley said she has been engaged in activism in support of Palestine since Israel’s Operation Cast Lead invasion in 2008-09. In 2017, she submitted written evidence to Parliament decrying the treatment of Palestinians. “Are the Palestinians to grovel forever before their occupier? Do they have to beg for permission to be free?” she asked.

In a May 15 2023 letter to the editor in the Guardian, Morley, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Hungary, described presciently the already looming crackdown on protest. “Today, at the age of 78, having never knowingly committed a single law infringement in my life, I nevertheless have to fear being arrested if I as much as take part in a peaceful demonstration. My parents would turn in their graves,” she wrote.

When Palestine Action launched, she said she wished she could join them, “but I’m older and arthritic and I couldn’t climb ladders and I couldn’t climb over fences and I probably wouldn’t be able to lift a sledgehammer,” she lamented.

Instead, she contributes to the group financially, and was happy when Defend Our Juries presented her with an action she could take. “I thought, ‘this is it! This is now something I can do,” she said, “and I have absolutely no excuse not to stand up and be counted.”

Referring to the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration that led to the eventual creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, Morley said, “The Middle East will never be right unless and until Britain acknowledges its crime.”

Despite that history, Morley did not expect her own government to actively support a genocide. “I never thought we would get to see a genocide happening with the direct participation of our government. It’s absolutely horrendous,” she said.

La Pethick, an 89-year-old retired psychotherapist, became the poster granny of the August 8 Parliament Square protest when a photo of her in her white hat being carried away by police spread like wildfire across the internet. Pethick, a retired psychotherapist from near Hastings, East Sussex, told the Times, “We are having our right to peaceful protest being taken away.”

Claudia Cotton, 89, a Jewish refugee also interviewed by the Times and whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, told the newspaper: “I am prepared to be arrested. In fact, I think it’s a good thing because it shows how ordinary people are willing to go to prison to oppose governments that are doing evil things.”

Grandmother Manji Mansfield, observed in an interview with Al Jazeera during the August 8 protest, “This isn’t the Britain that I grew up in. We are now living in an alternative universe.”

Marianne Sorrell, an 80-year-old retired teacher who was arrested on July 12 in Cardiff during another Gaza protest also supporting Palestine Action, was similarly defiant.

“I just feel if I’m put in prison for this, and even if I die in prison for this, I can’t think of a better thing to die for, really, than for the justice of the people who’ve been persecuted now for almost my lifetime,” she said. Sorrell was detained for 27 hours, during which time her home was searched and personal property taken.

Perennial arrestee Angie Zelter, 74, cited the Geneva Convention as police officers prepared to carry her out of Parliament Square at the August 8 protest.

When asked if she understood that she was being arrested for contravening section 13 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, Zelter replied: “No, I don’t really understand that because you know there’s a Geneva Convention Act and a genocide act and you’re not arresting the real terrorists.”

Turning over her sign, Zelter said: “On here we have various rights — right to assembly, right to free speech,” then added, “There comes a time when the police have to say No.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.