The current Home Secretary is proposing to proscribe human rights pressure group, Palestine Action, and declare them terrorists. There will be a vote in Parliament today, Monday 30 June 2025, to that effect. This means that all those associated with members of Palestine Action are also to be considered terrorists. That’s us; around a million Brits.
Has Yvette Cooper thought this through?
Seemingly not. Palestine Action is a very British outfit, moulded in the image of previous direct-action elements within political movements like the Suffragettes, utilising low-intensity, manual sabotage to put a pacifist spoke in the wheel of war.
And we are at war. That is an open fact. The UK/Israel agreement of 2020 and subsequent memorandum of understanding in 2021 lay out for all to see just how closely UK politicians have ensured UK is involved in everything illegal Israel does.
Due to the proclivities of our elected politicians, therefore, we sovereign Brits are at war with the sovereign Palestinians, bound to everything Israeli government commits in breach of International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice directives, and overwhelmingly against our collective British will.
The Palestinian human rights movement in UK has consequently found itself thrown into being the pacifist, non-violent resistance and voice of reason against Israel’s world-wide war of aggression and, crucially, UK’s participation in Israel’s war. Being in a war-time resistance is not a choice any of us actively made. The choice was thrust upon us by UK politicians in government.
Looking at the political thought behind this rum decision, the Home Secretary has indicated her preferred political ideology with reference to Israel is Zionism but she doesn’t appear to know what Zionism is and, if she did, she would run a mile screaming, rather like all those starving Palestinians escaping execution for lining up to get aid.
Zionism (political ideology) has naff all to do with Judaism (religion and cultures).
Zionism is the racist, secular, nineteenth century political ideology that underpins the establishment and actions of modern Israel, an apartheid state currently illegally oppressing its Palestinian and other minority populations within its unsettled borders and illegally occupying or illegally waging wars of aggression on its neighbours in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. Even leftwing Zionists (the ultimate oxymorons about whom we more rational, clearer thinking observers just roll our eyes) are balking at the majority of Israeli population’s nationalistic fervour for sadism and glorification of Palestinian slaughter.
Zionism being secular, political ideology, meant it was roundly rejected by most European Jewish communities at its inception and continues to be rejected by large numbers of Jewish communities around the world, some more emphatically than others. To many Jewish communities, Zionism isn’t just wrong, it’s sacrilegious.
Judaism should never be homogenised into one stereotype, and absolutely never conflated with Zionism. Judaism is an ancient religion much morphed and disseminated over millennia with multiple forms of adherence enjoyed by diverse ethnicities with rich cultures and histories and schisms that make the Sunni Shia split sound like a mild dose of sibling rivalry. If you think Jews from Tehran to Tigray, Birobidzhan to Brooklyn, or Scheveningen to Stamford Hill are all the same, let alone get on, think again.
To talk about “the” Jewish community, in the singular, is to be deeply anti-Jewish, denying Jewish diversity, in the same way it is nonsensical to talk about “the” Christian community or “the” Muslim community. There are plural “communities” but not the singular monoliths into which commentators lump everyone.
It is bafflingly lazy for so many politicians and journalists to apply all-solidifying definite articles to varied, juxtaposed religious and cultural practices; baffling because self-professed intelligent people seem unable to resist the grand conflation of Zionism with Judaism, and adding in the Israeli state, to create the spectre of an unholy and unsustainable disaster of an extreme, belligerent political ideology, aberrations of an ancient religion and a military junta masquerading as democratic governance. Except it’s not a ghost, it’s real and it’s committing extermination (UN wording) of the Palestinian people.
What makes so many of our politicians and journalists bend the knee to the Israeli state, and conflate ever more tightly Israel, Zionism and Judaism, even whilst drowning in verified footage of heinous Israeli military atrocities against millions of Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and other civilians?
Terror. Yes, indeed, the UK does have an awful problem with terror, but it’s not with Palestinian human rights activists, it’s with the Zionist supporters of Israel, most of whom are not Jewish. Most western politicians and journalists have been terrorised and subjected to extreme intimidated and emotional blackmail over decades by a fulminating Israeli government and its proxies into repeating the lie that black is white.
At any given moment, the Israeli government’s impressive military propaganda units and network of tightly managed client organisations and individuals swiftly and slickly deliver succinct and authoritative-sounding packages of information and commentary, backing up each message with public and private threats (frequently death threats) that if said politicians or journalists do not toe the propaganda line, they are all automatically antisemitic. Worse, if they are critical about the Israeli propaganda line, they are automatically branded terrorists. One notes Israel’s definitions of terror, terrorism and terrorist are intentionally vague, specifically very broad and succinctly catch-all. And, of course, the Israeli government deems any terrorist a legitimate target for extrajudicial silencing.
There is not a single politician, journalist or mildly effective pacifist activist that might have expressed criticism of Israel in the last thirty years or more who hasn’t been on the receiving end of heavy weight pro-Israel influence, intimidation and, frequently, explicit death threats. I’ve been graced with a range of pro-Israel death threats in my time since I first entered politics in the early 1990s, via the short-lived assaults on me in 2011 that included a Mossad spin off, mickey-mouse outfit in Israel blacklisting me as a terrorist, to the most recent this February, and I quote “Just curious about where your home is, so we can send you a pager, you dirty fucking sand nigger loving slagx” from another Mossad spin off, mickey-mouse outfit that can only be associated with the Campaign Against Antisemitism, whom twice I reported to counter-terrorism police during last year’s election.
Yet, the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister and the rest of government and the police are directed by Campaign Against Antisemitism. Campaign Against Antisemitism is crowing publicly about being behind proscribing Palestine Action as terrorists. As we in Palestinian human rights constantly point out: every accusation is an admission. The rule of thumb is: if the psychotic Israeli government or its equally psychotic agencies make a statement accussing one party or another of atrocities or acts beyond the pale, one can be quite sure that is an admission of their own guilt.
(That’s why 07 October was so horrific to behold: not just for the murderous actions of Gazan militias that were distressing enough on their own, but for the chilling realisation that the worst civilian atrocities were being carried out by Israeli forces against their own people using helicopter gunships and tanks to blow up and incinerate cars on the road and houses in kibbutzes. I remember watching Netanyahu’s first press briefing after the start of the fighting, and his sickening look of satisfaction that at last he was creating his dreamed-of pretext to eliminate the Palestinians once and for all.)
Palestine Action is a tiny independent grouping within the huge Palestinian human rights movement of over one million people in UK, all actively helping Palestinians regain their human rights through non-violent actions, great or small, public or private, effective or ineffective. Despite being so disparate and spread to the four winds, most in the movement care about each other and most, by dint of sheer friendship and collective endeavour, will know someone who is part of or related to Palestine Action whether aligned to Palestine’s modus operandi or not. And the gamut of pro-Palestinian human rights activists in UK stretches from the King (anointed with Palestinian olive oil) to rough sleepers (fed at soup kitchens with Palestinian olive oil) via archbishops, KCs, peers, forces personnel, civil servants, all the great and the good of society and, happily, us normal people and dregs as well.
A good example of pervasive solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians in UK can be found in one region. Go anywhere in Scotland, to any well-heeled castle or estate shop and you’ll find Palestinian products for sale. Go to any village or council estate and you’ll see the Palestinian flag flying from bedroom windows. Scotland is very clear which side of the debate, and war, it is on. It is on the side of the oppressed, of those being slaughtered in droves, whose homes and way of life are being decimated, just as Scotland was on the side of the holocaust survivors who restarted their shattered lives in this part of UK after the war. It is unsurprising, then, that Scottish campaigners for Palestine are top of UK government’s list for being clamped down on, whether or not they are members of Palestine Action.
As far as I can tell, much of Palestine Action’s membership consists of very public and open pacifists and human rights campaigners who have been active in non-violent Palestinian human rights campaigning for decades. All that has happened is that witnessing Israel’s continued impunity despite contravening most international and humanitarian law on a daily basis, and UK’s formalised role within that genocidal lawlessness, a tiny number of pacifist activists have formally stepped up the visibility and specificity of their civil disobedience, largely with the liberal use of red paint sprayed over arms manufacturers and military installations. They have at times also taken sledge hammers and crow bars to equipment used in the commissioning of criminal acts of war and genocide against the Palestinians, but that is not terrorism. That is war-time resistance sabotage. Personally, I favour a model of non-violence that was taught to me by Jerry and Sis Levin, that involves reducing the use of violent terminology in speech and not using physical violence even in self-defence. I dislike damaging to the property of others, even arms manufacturers. But those that are choosing their civil disobedience to involve sabotage and vandalism are acting out of desperation to stop the extermination of the sovereign Palestinian people and their erasure from their lands and homes.
The question the Home Secretary and MPs in Parliament have to ask themselves is: are they the baddies? Are they actually the ones in the wrong, on the wrong side of history, on the wrong side of international and humanitarian law; chaotic defendants at the International Criminal Court, not calm claimants?
With their political machinations, applying Zionist racism and hate and enabling Israel’s reign of terror in UK, British politicians in government have forced over a million of us to ask: are we really the terrorists now? I don’t think so.
But I know who is: the Israeli government, and anyone who supports or engages in its terrorising political ideology, Zionism.