Palestine Action and the distortion of terrorism

New Statesman​

30-07-2025

Photo by Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images
On a Wednesday morning in early July, dozens of female MPs gathered in parliament's Westminster Hall. It was a relatively cool day, a relief in the middle of a London heatwave, and the MPs were upbeat as they convened to celebrate the 97th anniversary of women getting the vote in Britain. Seamstresses had sewn 264 sashes, one for each sitting female member of parliament, made of white twill with purple and green ribbons stitched along the sides, the colours a tribute to the suffragettes. Although there is a statue of the law-abiding suffragist Millicent Fawcett outside parliament, law-breaking suffragettes were just as instrumental to the campaign. They smashed windows, bombed letterboxes and threw acid on to golf courses for women's right to vote. In 1914, one even marched into the National Gallery and slashed a Velázquez painting.
MPs lined up with their sashes for a photo to commemorate the moment. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, a long-time admirer of the suffragettes, stood beaming, front and centre. Just hours later, MPs voted on a proscription order put forward by Cooper that would ban the direct-action protest group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
Founded in 2020 in response to intensifying Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestine Action was a network of campaigners that embraced direct action in order to obstruct the British infrastructure that supplies Israel with weapons. For the past five years a favourite target has been Elbit Systems, Israel's largest privately owned weapons company, which has British subsidiaries with a number of factories in the UK. Over the years, campaigners have occupied factories that manufacture drones, spray-painted head offices and chained themselves to gates.
The group revelled in disruption and damage to property. Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told the New Left Review earlier this year, 'If you stop a weapons factory from running, even for a day, you've already achieved something significant.' The group didn't encourage violence or attacks on people, though one campaigner has been charged with grievous bodily harm with intent for allegedly striking a police officer with a sledgehammer during a blockade of a warehouse linked to Elbit in Bristol in August 2024. (The campaigner denies the charges and the case is ongoing.)
The network ramped up after 7 October 2023 and the launch of the war on Gaza. Palestine Action campaigners sprayed 'Free Gaza' in red across the Piccadilly head office of a weapons company. They dug up and painted 'Gaza is not 4 sale' on Donald Trump's Ayrshire golf course in Scotland. Then, on 20 June, campaigners are alleged to have broken into Brize Norton, the largest air force base in the UK, approached two Voyager aircraft on e-scooters and sprayed red paint into their engines.
The vandalism reportedly cost £7m in damages but undoubtedly more damaging was the dent to the government's credibility when it came to security. Three days later, the Home Secretary told parliament the government would 'not tolerate those who put that security at risk' and that she planned to ban Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000.
When MPs voted on whether to proscribe Palestine Action the following week they were simultaneously voting on the proscription of two other groups: the Maniacs Murder Cult, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation that explicitly encourages violence, particularly against homeless people; and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that aims to create a new Russian Imperial State and has a paramilitary training programme that has been linked to bombings in Sweden.
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Many saw the decision to lump Palestine Action in with these groups as cynical. 'It was like, come on,' one MP said to me, 'no one had ever heard of the other two before. But no one wants to vote against proscribing these groups and then be asked 'why do you support the monster raving fascist party?'' MPs voted to prohibit all three, by 385 to 26. It marked the first time parliament had ever banned a protest group, adding it to a list that includes al-Qaeda, the Wagner Group and Islamic State.
'I just couldn't see how you can consider Palestine Action to be the equal of a terrorist organisation,' said Ian Byrne, a Labour MP who voted against proscription. While Byrne and others acknowledged that many might disagree with or even be outraged by the group's tactics, they also noted it was clear that the group did not advocate violence against people. And Palestine Action's cause, if not necessarily its methods, has broad support: a recent YouGov poll found that 69 per cent of the British public think Israel should immediately call a ceasefire; 55 per cent think the UK government should not approve the supply of parts for F-35 fighter jets to Israel.
I asked all the parliamentarians and legal experts I spoke to for this piece about the possibility that the Home Office has secret intelligence on Palestine Action indicating it was planning to engage in violence, or was otherwise more dangerous to the public than had been openly reported. And while no one could rule out the possibility completely, most said that if that was the case, it was very unusual that Cooper wouldn't disclose that fact, particularly considering the potential backlash.
Unnamed Home Office officials briefed the press that they were investigating reports that Palestine Action had received funding from Iran. Yet there is no mention of the group in the recent report from the Intelligence and Security Committee, which details Iranian state threats to the UK.
Cooper's husband, Ed Balls, suggested on a recent episode of his podcast with George Osborne that people had been charged 'for actions, which… are not yet in the public domain'. Balls didn't respond when I asked him about his statement. When I asked the Home Office about the comments, they said it 'would not be appropriate to comment further due to ongoing legal proceedings'.
The UN, Amnesty International and other international organisations have condemned the proscription as 'disproportionate' and 'unnecessary'. 'This is such an escalation compared to any previous proscription order,' one legal expert told me. 'It is beyond international understanding of what terrorism is.'
No one denies that Palestine Action has routinely broken the law. Yet there are existing laws in place that address the group's actions: laws against aggravated trespassing, vandalism, criminal damage. The state could – and did – prosecute any campaigner they reasonably suspected of those crimes. There wasn't, however, any way to prosecute those who supported Palestine Action. Now there is.
Under sections 12 and 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, inviting support for or wearing clothes or carrying items suggesting support for a banned organisation is a terrorism offence. In the weeks since Palestine Action was proscribed on 5 July, dozens have been arrested under terrorism charges. On the day of the ban, an 83-year-old retired vicar was arrested in London's Parliament Square for holding a sign that read 'I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.' A 67-year-old retired teacher was arrested in Leeds on 19 July for holding a placard featuring a gag printed out from Private Eye about unacceptable Palestine Action ('Spraying military planes with paint') and acceptable Palestine Action ('Shooting Palestinians queueing for food'). (Ian Hislop, the magazine's editor, called the arrest 'mind-boggling'.) On 14 July, a 42-year-old in Canterbury was threatened with arrest by police under terrorism charges for holding a Palestine flag and signs that read 'Free Gaza' and 'Israel is committing genocide', but made no reference whatsoever to Palestine Action. 'It's just a mess,' Byrne told me. 'It's just pensioners and priests and vicars and doctors being arrested.'
In the US, Donald Trump has overseen a draconian crackdown on pro-Palestine protests by deporting foreign students who have demonstrated against Israel's war. With the proscription of Palestine Action, the UK can arguably go even further: some protesters, depending on what sign or badge they sport, could be imprisoned for up to 14 years.
Over the course of my many conversations with MPs, peers, legal experts, civil rights lawyers and campaigners, many of them off the record, the same word surfaced among critics of the government's decision: 'overreach'.
If the definition of terrorism has become so wide it includes pensioners holding up placards, what does it even mean to be a terrorist any more? More fundamentally, what kind of country is it that the UK wants to be? The law used to ban Palestine Action, after all, was never supposed to be used in this way.
Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, at a pro-Palestine protest in 2018. Photo by Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News
At the end of the last century, Tony Blair's government aimed to streamline the UK's approach to anti-terrorism. Rather than relying on a patchwork of temporary measures that had been put in place during the Troubles, the government wanted to enact a single, overarching law. On 14 December 1999 MPs gathered in the House of Commons for the second reading of that proposed legislation known as the Terrorism Act. Jack Straw, the home secretary at the time, opened the debate by defining terrorism as that which 'involves the threat or use of serious violence for political, religious or ideological ends'.
Many MPs were concerned about the act's broad definition of terrorism, which includes actions involving serious violence, damage to property, or endangering life for a political, religious or ideological purpose. Could that not potentially be applied to activist groups that engaged in peaceful direct action, asked several MPs. What about Greenpeace? The organisation had in recent years made headlines for occupying and destroying genetically modified crops, among other direct-action campaigns. Straw dismissed concerns. 'I know of no evidence whatever that Greenpeace is involved in any activity that would fall remotely under the scope of this measure,' he said. 'We are not talking about demonstrations that get out of hand.'
Furthermore, he suggested that dwelling on theoretical future applications of the act were pointless. 'Of course, we can all invent hypothetical circumstances – fantastic circumstances – in which any of us, according to the criminal code, could be charged and subject to conviction,' he said. 'We know that, in the real world in which we live, the criminal law is subject to a significant series of checks and balances… Such circumstances therefore do not arise, and I do not believe that they ever will.'
Assurances made, the bill passed into law the following summer. But campaigners and many legal experts were unnerved. Mike Schwarz, a civil liberties lawyer who has represented Greenpeace for 25 years, told me 'the legislation had a chilling effect – perhaps it was intended to have a chilling effect on campaigners because suddenly the word 'terror' was bandied around in as much a political, as legal, way'.
He was particularly concerned with the 'vagueness' of the definition: section 1 defines terrorism as an act that involves 'serious violence' or 'serious damage' to property. 'The word 'serious' – it's so susceptible to a fluid interpretation, it's uncertain and it was a deep concern at the time.' Another legal expert told me that 'it was always very, very concerning that at its lowest, even a threat of serious damage to property is terrorism if it's ideological in motivation'. They said 'you're giving the executive a blank cheque, almost'.
Yet just 14 months after the bill was passed, 9/11 happened and the spectre of terrorism in the West shifted. As the debate on how to tackle terrorism was dominated by responses to al-Qaeda, arguments about Greenpeace and domestic groups fell away. Though several aspects of the Terrorism Act and its interpretation sparked controversies over the next two decades – including section 44, which allowed for random stop and searches – proscription power, which is at the discretion of the home secretary, was arguably used relatively carefully.
Even in the febrile atmosphere of post-9/11 Britain, direct action wasn't viewed harshly by the public. When anti-war protesters broke into RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire in 2003 in order to sabotage US bomber jets and prevent them from flying to Iraq, they were caught and charged with criminal damage. In a series of trials, the protesters, known as the Fairford Five, argued their actions were justified because they were trying to prevent an atrocity. One was represented by a young human-rights barrister named Keir Starmer. Most of the trials either ended with hung juries or acquittals; one defendant was fined, another was given a curfew for several months.
That public sympathy might still exist. Juries previously found a number of Palestine Action members not guilty, including for a six-day rooftop occupation of a drone factory, after defendants argued their actions were justified in order to save Palestinian lives and protect property at immediate risk of drone bombardment.
Yet over the past five years or so, the state's approach to direct action has changed. A tightening noose of restrictions under successive Conservative governments has led to protest being increasingly curtailed. In 2022, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act made 'intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance' a statutory offence, which now carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. The Tories then introduced the Public Order Act 2023, which made it an offence for protesters to obstruct transport networks or to chain themselves to any objects. These laws were passed in an effort to clamp down on the increasing direct action by environmental protest movements such as Just Stop Oil – and were effective. After a series of multi-year sentences were handed down to Just Stop Oil activists, the group announced in March this year that it would no longer engage in direct action.
But the outright ban of a protest group is a step change. Huda Ammori is fighting to challenge proscription, in a case still pending at the Royal Court of Justice. Legal experts told me that the Human Rights Act, which mandates that the state has a legal obligation to protect the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, could lead to the proscription being overturned. But the underlying state hostility towards protest in general and direct action in particular isn't something that will be easily erased.
That hostility seems only to be escalating. The amount of time between Jack Straw's assurances in parliament and the proscription of a direct-action group was more than 25 years. The amount of time between the proscription of Palestine Action and police threatening to arrest a woman in Kent for terrorism because she held a sign that read 'Free Gaza' was just nine days.
[See also: Keir Starmer's Palestine stance risks pleasing no one]
Many of the people I spoke to stressed that branding a non-violent protest group as a terrorist organisation undermines what the average person considers as terrorism. Terrorism exists in the public imagination as IRA car bombs, suicide vests and hijacked planes. As one parliamentarian told me, proscribing a group for direct action just means that 'the entire process of proscription is called into question'.
Palestine Action campaigners are unlikely to be arrested under terrorism charges now it has been proscribed. The group, amorphous to begin with, has already functionally dissolved. 'The reality is, it's a campaign organisation,' said Rachael Maskell, now an independent MP after losing the Labour whip. 'So if it will just shut down, something else will come up in its place. These are people that are seeking peace in the Middle East, so different from proscribed organisations.'
Instead, it's those guilty by association – the protesters who scrawl the words 'Palestine Action' on a placard or T-shirt – being swept up on terror charges. Throughout the entirety of 2024, there were 248 arrests for terrorist-related activity in the UK, which was the highest number of arrests in a single year since 2019. In the three weeks after Palestine Action was proscribed on 5 July, there were more than 170 arrests for terrorist-related activity.
The number of arrests will likely only increase. Pro-Palestine and civil society campaigners are planning a 500-person demonstration in London on 9 August, in which protesters will march holding placards in support of Palestine Action. Tim Crosland, a coordinator for the campaign group Defend Our Juries, told me he expects the Met police to be overwhelmed if they decide to arrest all those publicly supporting the group. 'I think it would take up the majority of the cell space in police stations in London,' he said. 'And you'd be filling them with people holding cardboard signs who are appalled at a genocide.'
If dozens of pensioners and student protesters aren't afraid of being arrested on terrorism charges, why would a jihadist or a neo-Nazi? As a legal expert put it to me, 'When everyone is a terrorist, no one is.'
Many of the worst-case scenarios raised by MPs during New Labour's introduction of the Terrorism Act have now come true. And many of the critics of this Labour government's decision are letting themselves do what Jack Straw was so reluctant to do back in 1999: imagining the hypothetical circumstances in which the criminal code could be used to charge ever greater numbers of people.
A number of the people I spoke to were quick to point out that if the Terrorism Act 2000 had existed at the beginning of the previous century and had been interpreted in the same way it is now, then any number of history-shaping movements could have been snuffed out: the suffragettes, anti-apartheid groups, the Greenham Common women. Who else, they asked, could be banned in the future, perhaps under a leader with more authoritarian instincts than the current government?
The scenarios put to me were disturbing. Climate activists, such as Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion, with their years of damaging property, or any other direct-action group could easily be proscribed. Again, that looseness of the act's language – which so worried MPs, campaigners and legal experts back in 1999 – means the law's interpretation is almost impossible to predict. What if 'damage to property' was reinterpreted, one suggested, not just to mean physical damage to infrastructure but economic harm of any kind? Could a future government ban a trade union that strikes in certain critical sectors?
These scenarios might seem far-fetched, fantastic even. Yet once a state crackdown on protest begins, it's impossible to know where it will lead. As the Labour MP Clive Lewis put it to me, 'We should be building a firewall around our democracy, strengthening and deepening it. Because we know that a storm is potentially coming if Nigel Farage wins the next election.' The precedents set and upheld now will underpin what happens to our future.
[See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels]
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