For nearly two years, the British state has collaborated directly in the Zionist genocide in Palestine. It has given Israel a free pass to commit crimes against humanity rarely paralleled in modern warfare, using mass starvation, carpet bombing of residential areas, the deliberate targeting of health and other infrastructure on a mass scale and the war crime of ethnic cleansing. Most recently we have seen daily massacres by the IDF of hungry Palestinians queuing up for food and explicit plans to create a concentration camp in southern Gaza. This, for the British state, is not terrorism, as it goes about business as usual in funding, arming and defending genocide to shore up its imperialist outpost in the Middle East. It is, instead, those who protest against genocide and British complicity and defend the right of the Palestinian people to resist, who face ever-more draconian repression and criminalisation under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’. The proscription of Palestine Action in July was the most egregious example to date of the British state’s clampdown on Palestine solidarity, exposing the sham of bourgeois democracy. CAT WIENER reports.
British state repression
Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced plans to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000 following an incident on 20 June at the Brize Norton RAF airbase, where activists on e-scooters sprayed two Voyager military aircraft with red paint to symbolise blood, after cutting through a wire fence. The RAF has secretly flown more than 500 surveillance flights over Gaza in support of Israel. Voyagers have also been used in imperialism’s war against the Houthis in Yemen. Four young activists now face an 18-month wait on remand before their case comes to court.
The proscription legislation was rushed through parliament on 2 July, with just 26 MPs voting against the proscription. Cooper deliberately and ludicrously lumped Palestine Action with two violently racist, but tiny and hitherto unheard of, neo-Nazi organisations – the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement – to ensure the legislation was passed. Despite a last-minute application to the High Court in London which drew hundreds of supporters, the proscription went ahead, taking effect at midnight on 4 July.
Although further challenges continue through the courts, it is now illegal – and punishable by penalties ranging from six months to 14 years in jail – to be a member of Palestine Action, express support for it, or publish or display any image or logo that could suggest support for or membership of the organisation.
Since 7 October 2023, the British state has stepped up its attack on expressions of solidarity with Palestine. These have ranged from ludicrous attempts to criminalise the use of slogans including ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Victory to the Intifada’ to the serious application of Section 12 of the Terrorism Act to those, like the SOAS 2, who have defended the right of Palestinians to take up arms against Zionist oppression. Journalists who defend Palestine, including an FRFI supporter, have been detained at airports under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act, or had their homes raided and their computers seized. The Filton 23 have been held on remand following alleged attacks on Israeli arms manufacturers, and police have launched a criminal investigation into the use of the chant ‘Death, death to the IDF’ by the punk duo Bob Vylan at Glastonbury.
It is clear that the ban reflects the Labour government’s frustration that despite all its efforts it has entirely failed to quell a rising movement increasingly radicalised by the atrocities being carried out by Zionist forces in Gaza and its own complicity in them. It is a repressive state’s time-honoured attempt to split the movement between its ‘respectable’ and ‘radical’ components. Labour Home Office minister Dan Jarvis told Parliament, ‘Palestine Action is not a legitimate protest group. People engaged in lawful protests don’t need weapons… [or] throw smoke bombs… [or cause] millions of pounds of damage to national security infrastructure including submarines and defensive equipment for NATO… what we are seeking to do today is ensure the security of our country’.
Plans to proscribe Palestine Action pre-date the Brize Norton action. For months the government has been in consultation with, among others, the Israeli embassy, Israeli arms manufacturers Elbit Systems, and We Believe In Israel – a Zionist lobby group headed until last year by Labour MP Luke Akehurst. The latter group published a pamphlet, Red line crossed: the case for proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist-linked organisation, that made explicit the real fears of the British state; it accuses Palestine Action of ‘radicalising younger activists’ with the ideology of anti-imperialism and defending the right of the Palestinians to armed resistance. Its list of ‘terrorist’ activity by Palestine Action includes:
- Referring to the IDF as ‘Zionist occupation forces’ and likening their British business partners to ‘war criminals’;
- Glorification of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad through coded language and praise for ‘resistance fighters.’ [elsewhere it includes the PFLP in the organisations supported by PA, wrongly including them in the list of Britain’s proscribed organisations];
- Claims that ‘direct action is the only language the coloniser understands’;
- Advocating for escalation and confrontation;
- Disparaging UK courts and legal systems as ‘tools of imperial repression’.
The road to social fascism
The ramifications of the proscription of Palestine Action are already chillingly clear, as across the country police widely and deliberately use their powers to accuse people of supporting terrorism for flying Palestine flags or using the word ‘genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza. On 19 July an 85-year-old man was arrested under counter-terrorism legislation in Liverpool for displaying a placard that read: ‘Who are the real terrorists? The ones bombing or the ones destroying the bombs?’ A week later another protester was arrested under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for holding up an image of a Private Eye cartoon lampooning the proscription of Palestine Action. There have been similar arrests in Scotland over T-shirts displaying any combination of the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘action’, while a woman in Canterbury was harassed by police for flying a Palestine flag and displaying signs condemning Israeli genocide. The police are constantly testing their powers, with the aim of creating a ‘chill’ effect, where people fear to express any kind of solidarity with Palestine for fear of falling foul of the law.
We should never forget that, under capitalism, the law is a ruling class weapon aimed at the suppression of all those who challenge its interests. Yet even in these conditions, the working class has consistently pushed back and such bourgeois democratic rights that exist have been won through a long history of civil disobedience, including the targeting of property. The Suffragettes smashed up shop fronts in Oxford Street and carried out bomb and arson attacks; in their campaign against Cruise missiles the women of Greenham Common regularly cut through perimeter fences at the camp and damaged the silos in which nuclear weapons were kept. While many were prosecuted at the time under criminal law, even in the eyes of the capitalist state, history has long since absolved them.
Today those who stand peacefully in British cities holding placards denouncing genocide and supporting Palestine Action are being carted away by anti-terrorism police. While their courage and principled stance is to be applauded, and it is crucial that all legal steps to deproscribe Palestine Action are supported, communists and anti-imperialists need to not just focus on this one case – we oppose the Terrorism Act 2000 in its entirety. It is an instrument of British class rule used to quash all those who challenge British imperialist interests. The proscription order is not an aberration from democratic norms by the British state: it is a naked expression of a reality that has been apparent to oppressed peoples for decades, that bourgeois democratic values are a veneer, to be dropped in a flash when the ruling class feels threatened.
With Keir Starmer now prime minister and Labour once again in power, it is worth remembering how in 1996 FRFI described the Manifesto of the New Labour government-in-waiting as ‘the road to social fascism’ – to the horror of the rest of the left. We wrote:
‘The concept of social fascism dates back to the early 1930s, when the communist movement argued that social democracy and fascism were the twin pillars of capitalism, and that social democracy in government was prepared either to use military force to crush working class revolt or to surrender to those forces which would – open fascism. In Italy and Germany the strength of the revolutionary and communist forces…meant that social democracy could not carry out the programme capitalism required, and so the naked terror of fascism was necessary…Today, in the absence of any working class movement…New Labour has a free hand to establish the sort of dictatorship of capital that is a precondition to salvaging British imperialism’s fortunes.’
Just nine Labour MPs voted against the proscription of Palestine Action. Immediately, there were calls from within the party for them to be expelled. The Labour government has a job to do for British capitalism and achieving it means increasing repression of the working class. Yet no real movement has emerged in response to this creeping authoritarianism anywhere other than amongst those who stand with Palestine.
In our thousands, in our millions…
They cannot win. The movement is vibrant, angry and resilient with the courage and determination that comes from being on the right side of history in standing against the Israeli genocide and Britain’s unstinting collaboration with Zionism’s final solution. Immediately after the government proposed banning Palestine Action, a new direct action group calling itself ‘Yvette Cooper’ was busily engaged in targeting the investment firm BNY Mellon, a major investor in Israeli death merchants Elbit. Within days of the BBC tying itself in knots over broadcasting the Glastonbury performance of Bob Vylan, the slogan ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was ringing out at football stadiums and on marches, spray-painted in letters a foot high in cities across Europe from Belfast to Berlin to Rome. The Irish-language rappers Kneecap, with their powerful blend of revolutionary Irish nationalism and support for Palestine, have seen popular support grow despite establishment attempts to cancel and silence them, with crowds of tens of thousands waving Palestine flags and joining them in chants of ‘Free Palestine!’. On 19 July, a performer at London’s Royal Opera House displayed a vast Palestine flag during a performance of Il Trovatore – to overwhelming audience applause. Anyone who has ever held a Palestine flag for five minutes on a street corner in working class areas of Britain will know the chorus of car horns and shouts of ‘Free Palestine!’ that greet them. The cause of Palestinian liberation is the cause of the international working class. It is, as others have put it, today’s Vietnam. Israel is exposed on the world stage as a pariah state.
Those in Britain today who stand with Palestine and against state repression are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement in this country. Our task now is to mobilise the millions of people in Britain amongst the most oppressed layers of the working class who support that struggle into an organised, anti-imperialist movement that fights back against British state support for Zionism and all attempts by the Labour government to suppress it. That movement will oppose the Terrorism Act in its entirety. It will support all those facing criminal charges and harassment for their solidarity with Palestine. It will oppose every form of British state collaboration with Israel and demand total sanctions to isolate the Zionist state. It will defend without hesitation the right of an occupied people, enshrined in international law, to take up arms in the struggle for national liberation. We will not be intimidated and we will not be silenced.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 307, August/September 2025
