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Palestine Action: banned by the morally bankrupt House of Commons

MPs in the House of Commons have voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Home secretary Yvette Cooper drafted the order after the direct action group broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed some paint. Palestine Action have opposed Zionist Israel for many years now, and since Israel’s genocide in Palestine have stepped up their non-violent direct action.

The vote passed 385-26 in favour of banning the group. This result is nothing short of an absolute disgrace. These morally depraved MPs have now made it so that supporting Palestine Action can get you up to 14 years in prison. But, supporting the war crime-committing genocidal Zionist entity of Israel is just fine. As the Canary reported previously:

Proscription means that it is a criminal offence to belong to, invite support for, or wear clothing depicting a proscribed organisation.

However, the group are far from done. On Friday 4th July they’ve been granted an urgent order by a judge for a hearing to stop the ban from taking effect.

Palestine Action forever

As is becoming customary, if the disability welfare cuts are anything to go by, MPs ignored the advice of human rights experts. After the vote, Amnesty International called the decision a “disturbing legal overreach.” Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International’s chief executive of the UK branch, said:

The UK has a deeply flawed and overly broad definition of terrorism which human rights monitors including Amnesty International have been warning about for years. This latest disturbing move only serves to highlight that those warnings were justified.

Of course, if Amnesty were warning about a country in the Global South having “disturbing legal overreach” we can all imagine the headlines from Western media. However, given it’s the UK being the shithole country, mainstream media in the UK is unmoved.

Deshmukh continued:

Whatever MPs may think about whether Palestine Action’s tactics are appropriate or not, existing criminal laws, accompanied by human rights protections, were more than capable of responding to them.

Instead of taking draconian measures to shut down direct action protesters and criminalise anyone who expresses support for their actions, the Government should be taking immediate and unequivocal action to put a stop to Israel’s genocide and end any risk of UK complicity in it.

Labour’s hand in genocide

But, that risk is evidently a reality. Just yesterday, Drop Site News and Declassified’s Matt Kennard uncovered that Labour has secretly been allowing Israeli military planes to land in Britain. Drop Site’s Abdullah Farooq and Kennard found:

All the planes landed at RAF Brize Norton, the largest airbase in Britain, located in Oxfordshire. One of these Israeli planes was in the sky over Gaza around the time of two apparent war crimes, including in October 2024, when the IAF bombed a residential complex in the northern city of Beit Lahiya, killing 73 people.

It’s almost as though Palestine Action have understood how key RAF Brize Norton is to Israel’s genocide, and acted when their government wouldn’t. In their report, Farooq and Kennard wrote:

The planes were blocked on commercial flight tracking databases but Drop Site was able to identify them through unfiltered flight transponder data.

This is simply further proof, were it needed, that Palestine Action’s targets are well-chosen and directly culpable in the genocide of Palestinians.

Shameful

With Palestine Action’s hearing still to come, the government undoubtedly have yet another mess of their own making on their hands. MPs have continued to allow Israel to exert their influence over British politics. And, if nothing else, it’s only increased public goodwill and support for the direct action group. Meanwhile, the feeling for politicians is quite different:

This obscene double standard says a lot about the state of our politics:

Unionist Ben Sellers called the result of the vote “morally repugnant”:

Comedian Tez Ilyas summed up the absurdity of this past week:

MP Zarah Sultana, who voted against the order, called the ban an attempt to “chill dissent”:

Journalist Richard Sanders pointed out the irony of supporting the suffragettes but not Palestine:

Of course, there’s nothing more this country loves than casting a nostalgic eye on imperialist racists.

And, in so obscenely targeting Palestine Action the government have ensured that more people than ever know about why the direct action group exists, and how effective they are. Such is the group’s popularity that, even if the ban is upheld, there’s no possible way that the state can criminalise everyone who supports them. What are they going to do? Arrest us all?

British Israeli historian professor Avi Shlaim said:

Palestine Action has never hurt people. They only hurt machinery which produces the instruments of war. So the worst you can say about what they did is vandalism. But you can’t say that they are terrorists.

Labour have done the work of Palestine Action in showing that this government cares more about shutting down dissent, and stifling support for Palestine who face an interminable genocide, than….actually stopping that genocide. Everyone who voted to ban Palestine Action has no moral backbone. They should be haunted by their despicable actions.

And if they’re not? The rest of us will make sure they never forget it.

Featured image via the Canary

By Maryam Jameela

This post was originally published on Canary.