Wikipedia Deep Dive

Palestine Action

9 min read

On the fifth of July, 2025, the British government did something it had never done to a domestic protest movement: it declared Palestine Action a terrorist organization. Within weeks, police had arrested nearly 2,500 people—not for vandalism or trespassing, but for the crime of showing support. Some were detained for attending silent vigils. Others for sitting in Parliament Square.

The question hanging over all of this is deceptively simple: where does protest end and terrorism begin?

Fire Extinguishers and Fighter Jets

Palestine Action burst onto the scene on July 30, 2020, when activists broke into the London headquarters of Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer, and spray-painted the interior. It was audacious, illegal, and set the template for everything that followed.

The organization was founded by two people with very different backgrounds. Huda Ammori, daughter of a Palestinian father and an Iraqi mother, brought the urgency of personal connection to the cause. Richard Barnard was a veteran of the British left, someone who had spent years in the trenches of direct action politics. Together, they built something that would prove remarkably effective at one thing: making life difficult for arms manufacturers.

Their tactics evolved quickly. Spray paint gave way to occupation. Activists would scale buildings, chain themselves to gates, and camp out on rooftops for days at a time. They targeted factories, smashed windows, and in one case allegedly sprayed expanding foam into internet cable boxes. The goal was disruption—making it expensive and inconvenient to do business with Israel's military.

And it worked, at least partially. Elbit's facility in Oldham closed permanently in January 2022 after repeated Palestine Action visits. A supplier called Hydrafeed allegedly cut all ties with Elbit subsidiaries after activists caused an estimated million pounds in damage. Barclays Bank divested from Elbit in October 2024 following months of branch blockades and property damage.

The Leicester Acquittal

The most remarkable moment in Palestine Action's legal history came in Leicester. In May 2021, four activists in red boiler suits climbed onto the roof of an Elbit drone factory. They stayed for six days before police made ten arrests.

What happened next surprised everyone.

At trial, the judge instructed the jury to consider two defenses. The first was necessity—the common law principle that sometimes breaking a smaller law is justified to prevent a greater harm. The second came from an unlikely source: Section 5(2)(b) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, which allows property destruction to protect other property.

The jury cleared all defendants.

This was extraordinary. A British court had essentially accepted the argument that damaging a weapons factory might be legally justified if you believed the weapons would be used to harm people. The precedent suggested that Palestine Action's entire premise—that direct action against arms manufacturers was legitimate—had legal foundation.

Escalation

By 2024, the actions were becoming more confrontational. In August, during a break-in at Elbit's facility in Aztec West near Bristol, a police officer was allegedly struck on the spine with a sledgehammer. The injury was severe enough to keep the officer off work for three months. Six activists were arrested.

This was different. Property destruction is one thing. Injuring a police officer crosses into territory that even sympathetic observers find difficult to defend. Palestine Action had always maintained that its targets were buildings and machinery, not people. The sledgehammer incident complicated that narrative.

Then came the cherry picker.

In March 2025, four activists used what the BBC described as a "cherry picker style vehicle and a hammer attached to a rope" to smash second-floor windows at the same Aztec West facility. They doused the building in red paint. Three were charged with assault by beating.

By September 2025, the Aztec West site had closed unexpectedly. The Guardian reported finding it deserted except for security staff, despite a lease running until 2029. Palestine Action claimed victory. Critics pointed to the violence that accompanied it.

The RAF Brize Norton Raid

The action that finally triggered proscription was almost cinematically audacious.

In June 2025, Palestine Action members rode electric scooters onto RAF Brize Norton, one of Britain's most important military bases. They carried repurposed fire extinguishers filled with red paint. Their targets were two Royal Air Force Airbus A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport aircraft—massive planes used for aerial refueling.

They sprayed paint into the engines.

They painted red across the runway.

They left a Palestinian flag.

The symbolism was unmistakable. RAF Brize Norton is the departure point for flights to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, from where the British military conducts reconnaissance over Gaza. Palestine Action argued they were preventing British complicity in genocide.

The Ministry of Defence pushed back on the specifics. Those particular aircraft, officials said, hadn't been used to refuel Israeli jets. The BBC confirmed this while noting the planes had been used in British airstrikes in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

But the damage was done—to the aircraft, and to Palestine Action's legal status.

Proscription

Proscription is the nuclear option of British counter-terrorism law.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, a proscribed organization is treated like a criminal conspiracy. Being a member becomes a crime carrying up to fourteen years in prison. Fundraising for the group is illegal. Wearing clothing or displaying items that might arouse "reasonable suspicion" of membership or support can bring six months in prison.

Most remarkably, expressing an opinion supportive of the organization—if done "recklessly" in a way that might encourage others to support it—is also criminal.

On July 2, 2025, the House of Commons voted 385 to 26 to proscribe Palestine Action alongside two other groups. The House of Lords approved the order the next day. From July 5, the organization ceased to exist as a legal entity in the United Kingdom.

What followed was a wave of arrests unlike anything Britain had seen for a protest movement. Within months, police had detained nearly 2,500 people for showing support. Many were arrested at sit-ins—Parliament Square on August 9 and September 6, Trafalgar Square on October 4. Silent vigils were planned for November.

The Suffragette Comparison

Palestine Action's lawyers have drawn a pointed historical parallel: the suffragettes.

This comparison deserves examination. The Women's Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, engaged in systematic property destruction during its campaign for voting rights in the early twentieth century. Suffragettes smashed windows, bombed buildings, and set fires. They were imprisoned, force-fed during hunger strikes, and widely condemned as terrorists by the establishment of their day.

Huda Ammori has argued that if today's terrorism laws had existed a century ago, the suffragettes would have faced proscription. The implication is clear: today's terrorist might be tomorrow's freedom fighter.

The analogy has obvious limits. The suffragettes were fighting for the right to vote—a cause that today enjoys near-universal support. Palestine Action's cause is the end of arms sales to Israel during an ongoing conflict whose moral dimensions are bitterly contested. The suffragettes also operated in an era before comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation; they faced prison, but not the systematic criminalization of their support network.

Yet the comparison raises uncomfortable questions. How do we distinguish between terrorism and militant protest? Is the difference in the tactics, the targets, or the cause? And who gets to decide?

The Civil Liberties Response

Civil liberties organizations have not been silent.

The criticism centers on what they see as a conflation of protest with terrorism. Proscription was designed for groups like Al-Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army—organizations that killed civilians in pursuit of political goals. Palestine Action, whatever one thinks of its methods, had not killed anyone. Its violence, when it occurred, was directed at property and, in the controversial incidents, at police officers during confrontations.

The legal challenge began on November 25, 2025, when Huda Ammori initiated proceedings against the government's designation. The case would test whether Articles 9, 10, and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights—protecting freedom of thought, expression, and protest—could shield a movement from being labeled terrorist.

Then something strange happened.

At the last moment, a three-judge panel was substituted for Justice Chamberlain, who had been scheduled to hear the case. No explanation was given. Critics called the change "profoundly concerning." Whether this was routine judicial administration or something more significant remains unclear.

The Broader Context

Palestine Action did not emerge in a vacuum. It was born during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of social isolation and intensified online activism. It grew during years of escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence—the 2021 crisis, the 2023 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza that international courts have examined for potential genocide.

The organization represents something larger: a radicalization of pro-Palestinian activism in the West. Previous generations of activists focused on boycotts, divestment campaigns, and protest marches. Palestine Action took the position that these methods were insufficient—that direct interference with the machinery of war was morally required.

This mirrors developments elsewhere. Climate activists have glued themselves to roads and thrown soup on paintings. Animal rights groups have released animals from farms. The tactic of disruption, designed to impose costs on systems activists oppose, has become increasingly common across the political spectrum.

What makes Palestine Action different is its target: the defense industry and, by extension, the British state's military relationships. This brought it into direct confrontation with national security apparatus in a way that climate or animal rights activism, however disruptive, generally does not.

What Comes Next

As of late 2025, the organization exists in a strange legal limbo. Its public activities have been criminalized, but its cause—ending British arms sales to Israel—continues to command significant public support. The silent vigils planned for November suggest that people are willing to risk arrest simply by associating with the movement.

The legal challenge continues. If successful, it could result in the release of those detained solely for expressing support. If unsuccessful, it would establish a precedent that property destruction campaigns can be legally classified as terrorism, regardless of whether they cause human casualties.

The Aztec West factory is closed. The RAF planes were damaged. Barclays divested. By Palestine Action's own metrics, they achieved results that decades of conventional protest did not.

But at what cost? The sledgehammer. The injured officer. The 2,500 arrests. The criminalization of an entire support network.

History will judge whether Palestine Action was a terrorist organization or a protest movement that pushed too hard against an unjust system. That judgment will depend largely on what happens next in Gaza—and whether the cause they championed comes to be seen, like the suffragettes' cause, as self-evidently just.

For now, they exist as something the British legal system had never quite encountered: a domestic movement proscribed not for killing, but for caring too much about killing elsewhere.