Why We Are All Palestine Action, and Why Direct Action to Prevent Genocide Is the Opposite of Terrorism

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Today, July 2, is a truly bleak day for fundamental human rights in the UK, as MPs have voted, by 385 votes to 26, to uphold legislation introduced on Monday by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to proscribe Palestine Action, a direct action group, as a terrorist organization, along with two international neo-Nazi groups, the Maniacs Murder Cult (MMC) and the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). Under the legislation, it is now a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for anyone to become a member of, or even to support the direct action of Palestine Action.

This article, for example, may get the police knocking on my door, but I’m not going to be deterred, because this is very clearly a cynical and illegitimate piece of legislation that, horrifically, is designed primarily to allow Israeli arms companies — and allied British interests — to continue supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Dan Jarvis, the Home Office minister tasked with explaining the move, declared, in a presentation dripping with startling hyperbole, that, “By implementing this measure, we will remove Palestine Action’s veil of legitimacy, tackle its financial support and degrade its efforts to recruit and radicalize people into committing terrorist activity in its name.”

After claiming that Palestine Action was “not a legitimate protest group”, Jarvis stated, “People engaged in lawful protests don’t need weapons. People engaged in lawful protests do not throw smoke bombs and fire pyrotechnics around innocent members of the public. And people engaged in lawful protests do not cause millions of pounds of damage to national security infrastructure, including submarines and defensive equipment for NATO.”

He added that proscribing Palestine Action would “not impinge on people’s right to protest”, claiming that “those who wish to protest or express support for Palestine have always been able to and can continue to do so”, but as the Guardian explained, he “faced a backlash from some MPs who described the move as a ‘draconian overreach’ and aptly ‘likened the group to the Suffragettes.’”

Formed in 2020, Palestine Action’s sole, razor-sharp focus is on disrupting the work of companies involved in providing weapons used by the State of Israel to murder Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, illegally occupied by Israel since 1967; primarily in the Gaza Strip, a besieged death camp for the last 20 months, but also in the West Bank.

The group’s main focus is Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which supplies the Israeli military with 85% of their drones, including the armed quadcopter drones that have been used in the targeted killing of numerous children in Gaza. Elbit has factories and other facilities in the UK (as well as in many other countries in the west), many targeted by Palestine Action, who have also targeted financial organizations and other companies supportive of, or complicit in their deadly trade.

The group is resolutely opposed to any actions that would endanger human beings in any way. Most of its direct action has involved occupations designed to temporarily shut down operations. On some occasions, it has engaged in what, at most, is limited criminal damage aimed at disabling the manufacture and/or delivery of weapons, and on other occasions it has done nothing more than spraying red paint on buildings.

The decision to proscribe the group took place after two activists embarrassed the government by entering RAF Brize Norton on June 20, spraying two British military planes with red paint, and evading security and police. Quick to express outrage, much of the mainstream media parroted unattributed claims that the cost of the damage was at least £30m, although no official announcement has been made, and, countering absurd nationalist propaganda about national security, former Ambassador Craig Murray conducted an investigation in which he discovered that the planes aren’t even owned by the RAF, and are leased via an opaque chain of shell companies leading to a hedge fund. Even patriotism, it seems, has been privatized.

A long history of UK direct action against military targets to prevent genocidal actions

Despite the efforts to portray Palestine Action as a uniquely dangerous direct action group, they are, of course, nothing of the kind, and are, instead, just the latest iteration of direct action groups opposing the machinery of war going back several generations.

For anyone with any knowledge of modern British history, the most celebrated direct action movement opposed to British militarism was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, outside RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, which was established in September 1981 to oppose the Thatcher government’s decision to allow the US to establish a US-controlled cruise missile base on UK soil.

The camp lasted until 2000, although the missiles were moved between 1989 and 1991, and its most celebrated activities — “locking on to the gates, breaking into the grounds and climbing on top of missile silos”, as the veteran activist Suresh Grover described it in a recent article for the Guardian, calling Palestine Action “part of Britain’s proud history of protest” — took place between 1981 and 1983.

Most memorably, 30,000 women joined hands to ‘Embrace the Base’ in December 1982, and, in April 1983, 70,000 protesters formed a 14-mile human chain from Greenham to Aldermaston, home to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, and the location of CND’s first protests in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and an ordnance factory at Burghfield. In December 1983, after the first arrival of cruise missiles, 50,000 women encircled the base and took down sections of the perimeter fence, as they did on numerous occasions during the Peace Camp’s existence, resulting in hundreds of arrests.

In 1996, Seeds of Hope, a group of four women, broke into the British Aerospace Warton Aerodrome site in Lancashire. and damaged a BAE Hawk warplane with hammers, causing what the media, citing government figures, alleged was damage costing between £1.4m and £2.5m. The activists were motivated to act to prevent the plane being used in the Indonesian government’s genocide in East Timor, as part of a £500m deal between the governments of the UK and Indonesia, and, noticeably, they were part of the international Plowshares movement.

Inspired by the Catholic left movement of the late 1960s and, in particular, the Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the US in 1933, the Plowshares movement was named after the following passage in the Book of Isaiah: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

The US Plowshares movement began in September 1980, when a group of eight activists, led by Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, anti-war activist and Christian pacifist, entered a military base used as part of a nuclear missile program, attacking equipment with hammers, pouring blood on documents, and offering prayers for peace. They were arrested, convicted and imprisoned, but the movement they inspired has continued ever since. In 2019, Art Laffin, a Plowshares activist and Catholic Worker, who I am proud to have got to know through my work on Guantánamo, noted that 101 plowshares and related disarmament actions had taken place since 1980 — 58 in the US, and 43 internationally, including in Australia, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK.

In the UK, the Seeds of Hope activists were charged with causing, and conspiring to cause, criminal damage. The charges carried a maximum ten-year sentence, but they pleaded not guilty, arguing that what they did was not a crime, but that they “were acting to prevent British Aerospace and the British Government from aiding and abetting genocide.” They were found not guilty after a jury described their actions as reasonable under the Genocide Act of 1969.

In 2003, as Suresh Grover explained in his recent Guardian article, “five protesters known as the Fairford Five were arrested and charged for disrupting military operations at RAF Fairford.” Astonishingly, given the current government’s position, one of the defendants, Josh Richards, who “was acquitted because the jury failed to reach a verdict”, was represented by Keir Starmer, who “argued that while the actions broke the law, they were justified as the protesters were trying to stop the planes from committing war crimes.”

In 2004, another significant direct action group, Smash EDO, “anonymous, non-hierarchical and fluid, as much a slogan as an organization”, began in Brighton, targeting a factory owned by the EDO Corporation, a US company that was, as the CrimethInc website explained, “a major supplier of Raytheon as well as an arms manufacturer in its own right”, and which was bought by the US arms conglomerate ITT in December 2007.

For the next six years (and sporadically since), activists persistently targeted the factory, culminating, in January 2009, when six activists broke into the factory, armed with hammers, “determined to carry out a ‘citizens’ decommissioning’ of the facility.” As the CrimethInc article proceeded to explain, “They barricaded themselves inside and wreaked havoc for over an hour, causing up to £500,000 of damage before being arrested.” Significantly, the occupation took place on what was the last day of one of Israel’s many sustained and brutal attacks on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which lasted for three weeks, and in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, and 46,000 homes were destroyed.

Before he entered the factory, one of the activists, Elijah Smith, explained his motivations, saying, “I don’t feel I’m going to do anything illegal tonight, but I’m going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually work or produce munitions, [which] have been provided to the Israeli army so that they can kill children.”

When the trial took place in July 2010, the defendants were all found not guilty, having successfully demonstrated to the jury that, “by supplying weapons to the Israeli air force, the factory was implicated in violations of international law.”

In another celebrated direct action case, in August 2006, the Raytheon 9, a group of anti-war activists from the Derry Anti-War Coalition, broke into a factory owned by the giant US weapons manufacturer Raytheon, and “hurled computers out the window, causing an estimated £350,000 worth of damage.” The action, as the Morning Star explained on its 10th anniversary, “was a direct response to Raytheon’s involvement in Israel’s war on Lebanon when bunker bombs made by the US arms firm were being used to massacre civilians.”

Following the action, as the Morning Star also explained, “the nine were arrested for criminal damage but were let off two years later, with the jury deciding that they had occupied the factory to prevent a greater crime — the murder of Lebanese civilians.” The factory itself closed in 2010, after years of campaigning by local people, in which the actions of the Raytheon 9 had, of course, played a major part.

The precursor to Palestine Action: lessons from 2014

The Raytheon 9 also provided direct inspiration for activists on the UK mainland to begin targeting Elbit Systems, with activists from a predecessor to Palestine Action, the London Palestine Action network, occupying the roof of a factory in Shenstone in Staffordshire, run by the Elbit subsidiary UAV Engines Limited, in August 2014, shutting the factory for two days before they were arrested.

The action took place during another of Israel’s many deadly assaults on the Gaza Strip before the latest unparalleled atrocities, which have now been ongoing for nearly 21 months. In the seven-week assault in the summer of 2014, over 2,000 people were killed, up to 10,000 homes were destroyed, and an additional 89,000 homes were damaged.

London Palestine Action wrote an article for the Guardian, explaining their actions, which is particularly poignant now, in light of the almost immeasurable horrors of the last 21 months, in which at least 60,000 people — mostly civilians— have been killed by Israel (although the final death toll may well be in the hundreds of thousands), and almost the whole of Gaza has been destroyed.

After noting that Elbit “manufactures engines for a type of drone called Hermes, which has, according to Human Rights Watch, been used in attacks that killed Palestinian civilians and in incidents that may have been war crimes”, the activists explained that the factory was also “a fundamental part of the Watchkeeper programme, under which Elbit Systems is leading production of a new generation of drones for the UK military that is modelled on the Hermes drone.”

As they also stated, “Elbit uses the murderous impact of its weapons for profit, marketing the drones as ‘field-tested’ — in other words, proven to successfully kill Palestinians with nowhere to run. The UK government is importing technology that has been developed through the course of Israel’s military operations against Gaza.”

The activists added that, “As has so often been the case, the international community has done nothing to prevent the aggression by Israel, a state with the world’s fourth largest military. In the words of Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, the world stands disgraced.”

They also stated, “By allowing the export of drone engines and other military equipment to Israel, the UK government is aiding and abetting Israel’s actions. The government itself in effect admitted this when it acknowledged that British-made components were almost certainly used during the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-9.”

As the government discussed suspending arms export licenses to Israel, the activists noted that, “given the scale of the UK-Israel military trade, which included £185m worth of military exports to Israel in the period 2008-12, the UK government must go further than suspending just a fraction of the currently active export licences. What is needed is a full two-way military embargo on Israel. Without this, the UK’s complicity in Israeli militarism will continue to put us all to shame.”

They added, “When those in power stay silent in the face of crimes against humanity, and indeed facilitate them, ordinary people must take direct action and put serious pressure on the UK government to stop arming Israel.”

Actions continued in July 2015, with a number of coordinated ‘Block the Factory’ occupations at Israeli-owned factories, as The Electronic Intifada reported at the time — at Shenstone, despite the police issuing an injunction, at Elbit’s Elite KL factory in Tamworth, Staffordshire, where production was halted, and at another Elbit-owned factory, Instro Precision, in Broadstairs, Kent, which had briefly been occupied in February 2014.

Further actions took place throughout the decade, and in July 2019, activists held a three-day protest on the roof of the Elbit-owned Ferranti Technologies factory in Oldham, while others blockaded the gates of the Instro Precision site, returning in August 2019, when they shut the factory down for two days. Elbit then pressed charges of “aggravated trespass” against seven activists, but the charges were dropped in January 2020, evidently because the company didn’t want to have to respond to the defendants’ argument that, as The Electronic Intifada described it, “their actions were a proportionate response to the factory’s work arming repressive states, including Israel.”

The emergence of Palestine Action and the need for “constant, sustained direct action”

Palestine Action emerged in the summer of 2020, and in 2021 two of its co-founders, Richard Barnard, then 47, and Huda Ammori, 26, spoke to Peace News to explain their motivations. As Ammori explained, “Last summer, a few of us who had already done one-off direct actions against Elbit Systems — maybe once a year we would have a blockade — realized that, to be effective, what we needed was constant, sustained direct action.”

Typifying the broad constituency of Palestine Action’s activists, Ammori explained how her family had left Palestine after 1967, and cited her influences as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the Raytheon 9. Barnard, meanwhile, while also citing XR, made specific reference to the Catholic Worker movement in the UK, and especially Martin Newell, the Catholic priest, imprisoned on numerous occasions, who has been prominent in the Plowshares movement, Christian Climate Action and Extinction Rebellion.

As Barnard also explained, “The tactics we’ve used, throwing red paint — that’s a Catholic Worker tradition. It’s nothing new even though it seems to have created a large storm online. We’re just reappropriating it for the modern world.”

Having decided to embrace “constant, sustained direct action”, Palestine Action have been true to their word, and have been remarkably successful in their aims. As Rivkah Brown explained in an article for Novara Media when the planned proscription was announced, “It has shut down two of Elbit’s factories and chased the company out of its London headquarters. It has isolated Elbit, forcing its metal manufacturer, couriers, property managers and even lobbyists to drop it. It has temporarily halted the manufacture of F-35 parts. It has rendered the company such an unreliable supplier that the Ministry of Defence axed hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of its contracts, which fell 18% the month one contract was pulled. For five years now, PA has wreaked havoc for Elbit and, thanks to the consciences of jurors and the uselessness of police, mostly gotten away with it.”

Particularly impressive have been the actions that actually forced two factories to close — the Ferranti factory in Oldham, which shut in 2022, and the Elite KL factory in Tamworth, which shut last year, with its new owners, a UK investment syndicate, telling Palestine Action in an email that they the new board had “unanimously agreed to withdraw from all future defence contracts and terminate its association with its former parent company.”

UN experts condemn the government’s “misuse” of terrorism laws

Until Monday, no government had realistically attempted to suggest that direct action endangering no one, and involving, at most, fairly trivial levels of criminal damage, could be defined as terrorism.

This is because, as five UN experts explained in an urgent letter to the British government yesterday, “According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.”

As the experts added, “While there is no binding definition of terrorism in international law, best practice international standards limit terrorism to criminal acts intended to cause death, serious personal injury or hostage taking, in order to intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

They also pointed out that the UK “supported this approach in voting for Security Council resolution 1566 in 2004,” and stated, “Mere property damage, without endangering life, is not sufficiently serious to qualify as terrorism.”

This ought to have been obvious to the government, and the fact that it wasn’t reveals two particular aspects of its approach to law and order, and to threats to national security, that ought to be particularly troubling.

The alarming authoritarianism of Keir Starmer and his Cabinet

The first is that it reveals the alarming authoritarianism that runs through the Starmer government’s approach to our fundamental rights, an authoritarianism that is endemic, having begun with a long and deeply cynically campaign to depose the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by falsely portraying him as antisemitic, accompanied by a deliberate effort to root out all left-wing politics within the whole of the Labour Party.

When you treat your Party as the enemy, a combative and paranoid streak begins to run through everything you do, although that alone isn’t sufficient to explain the Labour leadership’s overarching hostility. Shamefully, as we’ve seen through their treatment of the disabled, the most vulnerable members of society, and their dismissive approach to winter fuel payments for the elderly, Labour treats both its base, and its supposed values, with contempt, and it’s difficult, if not impossible to escape the conclusion that most of the members of its Cabinet are, fundamentally, just not very nice people.

As another example, Starmer’s government has also built on the equally vile authoritarianism of the Tory government that preceded it.

Under two notoriously intolerant and politically malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, the miserable merry-go-round governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rich Sunak implemented draconian impositions on our right to protest, in response to knee-jerk outrage about the actions of two particular groups.

The first of these were the Black Lives Matter activists who toppled a statue of the notorious Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour in June 2020, and the second were environmental activists — initially, Extinction Rebellion, founded in 2018 and then their offshoot Just Stop Oil — who enraged the government by, primarily, blocking roads to highlight the government’s own failure to fulfil its legally-binding commitments to drastically reduce fossil fuel emissions.

On the first front, Patel and Braverman — both the descendants of immigrants of colour — shamefully demonstrated that, in the culture wars that the statue-toppling activists were emblematic of, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the US, they were resolutely on the side of the slave-masters, furious that anyone should dare to criticize Britain’s violent, blood-soaked colonial history.

On the latter, the hidden sub-text of their actions was that, like all the far-right ministers elevated after the Brexit fiasco, in which Boris Johnson connived to remove all the reasonable ‘One Nation’ Tory MPs, they were all slaves of the fossil fuel industry. Significantly, the Starmer government has shown zero interest in addressing either of the draconian pieces of anti-protest legislation introduced under the far-right Tories, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and the Public Order Act 2023.

Yvette Cooper is a paid agent of Israel, as is Keir Starmer and over half of his Cabinet

The second reason for being alarmed by the Labour government’s authoritarianism, and its specific targeting of Palestine Action, is so shocking that it almost defies belief.

To put if bluntly, I believe that Yvette Cooper took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization not for the benefit of the UK, but because she is a paid agent of the State of Israel, along with the majority of her ministerial colleagues, up to and including the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Most members of the Cabinet are members of Labour Friends of Israel, a lobbying group that won’t disclose its sources of funding, indicating that it is probably directly funded by the Israeli government.

According to investigations by Declassified UK, significant donations have been made to the most prominent members of the Cabinet by pro-Israeli lobbyists, including the businessman Sir Trevor Chinn, with estimates that Yvette Cooper has received £215,000, foreign secretary David Lammy has received £102,640, and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has received £101,710. Keir Starmer received a donation from Chinn of £50,000 for his leadership campaign in 2010, while nine other Cabinet members have also received donations to support Israel.

In her article for Novara Media, Rivkah Brown noted the extent to which the UK and Israel “have poured vast resources into beating back” Palestine Action, which she described as “a testament to just how seriously both understand the threat to their individual and joint military and business interests (not to be confused with their citizens’ interests).”

As she also explained, “Earlier this month, Declassified reported that Northumbria police spent £210,000 protecting the Newcastle outpost of Pearson Engineering, owned by Israeli weapons company Rafael”, and this week it found that Elbit lobbied the Home Office to retry PA’s co-founders Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard after they were acquitted in December 2023.” As she added, “The Israeli embassy tried something similar with the attorney general’s office, which has been remarkably obliging.”

This is all sordid enough, of course, and raises alarming issues of complicity by the UK government with a country that is, without any doubt, engaged in a genocide, but it remains most troubling that, fundamentally, the Labour government of Keir Starmer, under the home secretary Yvette Cooper, has persuaded Parliament to proscribe a direct action group as a terrorist organization for the benefit, primarily, of another country, and not for the UK’s own national interests.

Anyone who has managed to see through the UK’s long efforts to portray itself as a benign and civilized country knows how false that picture is. The wealth and power of our elites was founded on horrendous exploitation and often genocidal slaughter around the world, and those in power have never managed to wash that blood of their hands, but all of those crimes were committed for the benefit of our own elites, and not for another country, and, moreover, one that is a psychopathic, genocidal bully that exploits and abuses its so-called allies, and laughs at them when their backs are turned.

Israel cares about no one but itself, and Britain’s slavish servitude, as well as laying it open to complicity in genocide, is also a profound national humiliation. With today’s proscription, it seems that the Starmer government is now flirting with fascism in obeisance to its genocidal master. This truly horrific legislation needs to be ditched as soon as possible.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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