The UK is pulling out all the stops to persecute a pro-Palestine activist group, including blanket gag orders and courtroom deception
Imagine you know about a brutal gang of serial killers openly committing one sadistic crime after the other. Imagine you recognize your obvious moral obligation to do something to stop or at least impede these crimes as best you can, but your country’s morally perverse and politically corrupt authorities are in cahoots with the murderers, so you cannot simply call the police.
Indeed, if you try to resist the killers and their accomplices, the police and state prosecutors will relentlessly go after you instead of them, and in effect, protect the criminals. Imagine, finally, that while you cannot strike the killers directly, you can make committing their heinous crimes harder for them by disrupting their business activities and alerting the public to their scandalously uninhibited activities and shocking power in your society.
That is the situation in which the activists of the British direct-action group Palestine Action find themselves. Except it is even worse than the schematic thought experiment sketched above, because, in reality, we are not speaking about a gang of serial killers but a whole state. Small but extremely aggressive and far too well armed – including with entirely ‘rogue’ nuclear weapons – that state is committed to a relentless agenda of proudly announced (Amalek and all that) genocide and gleeful ethnic cleansing, systematic torture and sexual violence on a mass scale, ceaseless territorial aggression (attacking more countries last year than any other country on the planet), ethnic (in this case Jewish) supremacist racism and apartheid as anchored in its laws, and the conquest of ‘lebensraum’ (a term let slip in that state’s own mainstream media).
And that monster of a state is closely, almost symbiotically allied, even capable of intermittently dominating the single most powerful country on the planet, which also happens to hold international law and basic ethics in open contempt – the US. That state, in addition, has extraordinary and nefarious influence in many other countries of the West, that odd place so proud of its ‘values’ and so complicit in genocide at the same time. Palestine Action, in short, is up against Israel and its form of internationally virulent fascism – Zionism.
It is certain that in the not-so-distant future, Palestine Action’s activists and their supporters, currently braving persecution as well as government and mainstream media smears, will be remembered as heroes. In the same manner we now rightly celebrate those who openly stood up against the Nazis where they held power and committed their crimes, including a genocide of Jews. In the UK today, it is Palestine Action that has made it its declared mission to end British complicity in Israel’s crimes.
For now, however, they face prosecution, harassment, and worse, by the same British state and judicial system that we all remember well for its years of obstinately torturing the most important political prisoner in the world at the time, Julian Assange. Indeed, on an individual scale, the hounding of Assange displayed the same cynicism, cruelty, and contempt of the law – domestic and international – that the West has also shown with regard to Israel’s crimes against large numbers of victims, particularly in Gaza.
The persecution of Palestine Action has taken many shapes. After the group targeted the Royal Air Force’s collaboration with Israel, the British government, in particular Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, tried to proscribe it as a terrorist organization. This mislabeling was so absurd that even a British court ended up canceling it. That has not stopped the British authorities’ consistent misuse of the police to mass-arrest protesters who dare do oh-so-terrible – and perfectly legal – things, such as peacefully holding up signs that they oppose genocide and support Palestine Action. Amnesty International UK is not alone in denouncing these arrests. Police officers with a conscience should refuse orders to make them.
Palestine Action’s activists themselves have been harassed even more violently. Especially a group commonly known as the Filton 24 and, within that group, a smaller circle often called the Filton or Palestine Action Six: Samuel Corner, Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, and Zoe Rogers. What they have in common is that they took part in a raid on a branch of Israeli weapons maker Elbit systems in Filton, which is in effect a suburb of Bristol.
The activists stormed the Elbit facility on August 6, 2024, smashing their way in with the help of a truck and then destroying or damaging as much of the Elbit equipment as they could before the police arrived. Clearly, their targets were things, not people. Yet one of them is also accused of striking a police officer and harming her spine. The circumstances of that specific incident are still unclear, with the alleged attacker, according to recent statements by police officers, possibly suffering “confusion and disorientation” from being sprayed with PAVA spray by the police.
On the whole, there is no doubt that the Palestine Six’s aim was to harm as much as possible a company that represents Israel’s militarism and is deeply involved in its crimes. Attacking Elbit, Israel's largest arms company, is, as investigative journalist Max Blumenthal put it, the contemporary equivalent of sabotaging the railway lines to Auschwitz – a morally noble act of resistance and an attempt to shield its victims by disrupting the perpetrators’ organization.
For this, official Britain has subjected the Palestine Action activists to harsh pretrial detention of unusual length, provoking international protests, hunger strikes, and a suicide attempt. With by now thousands of arrests over the mere act of showing solidarity with them – and the harrowing of other individual resisters such as Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan – it is no exaggeration to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s UK is turning into a police state to protect the criminal regime of another country, Israel.
And this policy is persistent. After the Filton Six were acquitted in a trial by jury, the prosecution is now subjecting them to a second trial. It is clearly designed to be, in Blumenthal’s words, a “stitch-up.” Indeed, the defendants are being framed and deprived of elementary rights so obviously that the UK authorities are also using massive preventive censorship to hide their own manipulations from the public. The defendants are not allowed to explain their motivations; they must not mention Israel and the genocide it is committing. The jury is being systematically deceived: While it is deliberately left in the belief that it is only finding on ordinary criminal charges, the judge has the right to misuse its findings to sentence for terrorism. Since this is obviously unfair, the British press has been given orders not to report on it, which it is following.
It has fallen to alternative media outside the UK and one courageous member of the UK’s House of Commons to speak about the above. Fortunately, in practical terms, the evolving Starmer police and censorship state is unlikely to have the real capacity to fully insulate its subjects. But this makes no difference to the fact that we are witnessing a brazen attempt to impose a massive erosion of human rights, civil liberties, and last but not least, the rule of law.
And all of it in the service of Israel. Worst of all, Britain is not alone, but typical. In the West, protecting Israel has led to similar effects in many countries, including Germany, Australia, and of course, the US. The struggle for justice and freedom for Palestine is truly a struggle for all of us in a very concrete way. The only way for Israel to get away with its crimes forever is to subject all of us to ever more oppression.