The British direct action activist group Palestine Action is now banned in the United Kingdom after a High Court judge refused to grant an application for interim relief, following the passing of a vote in Parliament that proscribed the group as a terrorist organization.
That means that expressing support for the group has itself become a criminal offense, theoretically punishable by up to 14 years in prison. An 83-year-old vicar was one of many individuals arrested at protests in support of the now-proscribed group.
The British direct action activist group Palestine Action is now banned in the United Kingdom after a High Court judge refused to grant an application for interim relief, following the passing of a vote in Parliament that proscribed the group as a terrorist organization.
That means that expressing support for the group has itself become a criminal offense, theoretically punishable by up to 14 years in prison. An 83-year-old vicar was one of many individuals arrested at protests in support of the now-proscribed group.
I am a Middle Eastern war correspondent and political commentator who has a long history of supporting the expansion of proscription in the United Kingdom. However, I personally regard the claim that this decision is in the public interest as absurd and risible.
Palestine Action is not now, nor has it ever been, a terrorist organization. Its proscription by the Labour Party government demonstrates a total failure to deal appropriately with the problem posed by the group. Watering down the definition of terrorism will have lasting consequences for law enforcement, counterterrorism, and national security.
To be clear, this is not a defense of Palestine Action nor its methods, nor would I agree with pundits who have argued that Palestine Action is a strictly “non-violent” protest group. Police officers were assaulted with sledgehammers and other weapons during the action that the now-proscribed organization undertook in Bristol in August 2024.
A more recent action undertaken by the group in late June at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, during which members broke into the military airfield and caused millions of pounds worth of damage to two Voyager aircraft, was a major embarrassment for the Royal Air Force and the British government. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was right to point out that these activities “meet the threshold set out in the statutory tests established under the Terrorism Act 2000” in that they represent a “risk.” The question is whether that risk is serious enough to merit proscription.
The use of the nuclear option of proscription in this instance is a mistake. Not every group banned under the Terrorism Act in British law needs to be as dangerous as al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or as extreme as domestic terrorist organizations such as National Action. Palestine Action, despite its criminal activities, still falls well short of the definition of terrorism as it exists in British law.
The threshold for banning a group entirely has previously been high. Previous British governments have agonized over proscription and the justifications for it, with David Cameron failing to ban the extremist, though nonviolent, Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir during his time as prime minister despite his threats to do so, although the organization was eventually proscribed in 2024. It took decades to finally proscribe Hezbollah, and the British state still has not proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the branch of the Iranian Armed Forces that coordinates terrorism throughout the Middle East and has been linked to several foiled terrorist plots in Britain that are going through the courts.
Palestine Action’s campaigns predate the current Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. The group dates back to 2020, when a group targeted Elbit Systems, an Israeli military technology contractor that operates 16 different sites across the United Kingdom with an export license granted by the British government.
Any campaign needs to be judged on its merits, and without endorsing Palestine Action’s violence against police officers or attacks on Israeli charities, the government should recognize that anger toward the Israeli military and British support for it is both widespread and driven by very different motivations than terrorism.
A useful comparison here is the environmental group Just Stop Oil, which regularly engaged in criminal damage in the pursuit of goals that the wider British public sympathizes with. No amount of prosecution or threat of prosecution of Just Stop Oil’s activists stopped them from direct action, but the United Kingdom’s decision to end new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea did.
The British state should not acquiesce to the demands of any random activist group, but the Labour government claims to be committed to both a green agenda and opposing Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. There are substantial policy proposals that the government could enact tomorrow—such as banning export licenses for Israeli military contractors—that would render Palestine Action obsolete overnight without risking the dilution of British counterterrorism legislation. One of the first acts that the Labour government undertook with regards to foreign policy was the suspension of 30 arms licenses to Israel, a major break with the Conservative Party’s policy of overt support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Because South Africa’s case accusing Israel of the crime of genocide is still ongoing at the International Court of Justice, the legal scrutiny behind the British state’s actions with regard to its relationship with Israel is only going to intensify. The government’s position following its last arms export review does not go far enough to defend it from charges of actively aiding Israeli military atrocities.
Palestine Action is not an admirable group. While Syrian paramedics and medical facilities were being targeted in a systematic Russian and regime bombing campaign that included the use of chemical weapons, Huda Ammori—the founder of Palestine Action—was engaged in conspiracy theories parroting Russian conspiracy theories about Syrian rescue workers as they were being systematically targeted in Russian air strikes. These are not people who should be able to claim the moral high ground over a Labour government.
But rather than prosecuting individual activists for criminal damage or other established charges, the government has effectively handed Palestine Action a massive moral victory by the use of extreme measures. Every well-meaning pensioner who faces a draconian penalty for holding up a sign makes a mockery of not just justice, but also of the definition of terrorism itself.
It will be hard for the government to make a much-needed U-turn on this action. The legal challenges could eventually offer it a way out with grace. But this is an ignominious chapter for the young Labour government, and one that may set a precedent to target other direct action protest groups. That would undermine the very serious need for robust counterterrorist legislation in the United Kingdom. Palestine Action is simply not in the same basket as groups such as Hezbollah that have actively sought the death of British citizens.
But even if it foolishly insists on keeping Palestine Action on this list, the U.K. government can still remove the drivers of criminal action. By reversing the remaining Israeli arms export licenses and suspending the activities of groups such as Elbit Systems in the United Kingdom, Labour can defang public anger—and prevent itself from being further complicit in Israeli military atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider Middle East.
