Being branded as ‘extremist’ won’t deter Palestine Action
Palestine Action activists spray paint over the London offices of the Arms Company Leonardo which supplies fighter jets to the Israeli military, 2 November 2023
Lisa Minerva Luxx writes in Al Jazeera on 28 March 2024:
The United Kingdom is plummeting into a paranoid deluge of authoritarianism. Since October, our government’s steadfast support for Israel has ushered in a new age of state coercion, exposing in its wake the artifice of democracy in Britain.
In response to weekly pro-Palestine protests calling for an end to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza attended by hundreds of thousands in London and other major British cities, the Conservative Party government expanded police powers and moved to weaponise concerns over so-called “extremism”. Its leading figures referred to peaceful protesters exercising their democratic rights as “mobs” and “hate marchers”, classifying any and all opposition to Israel’s war and occupation as hate and racism.
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Our group, Palestine Action, is also facing the threat of being labelled as “extremist” due to the principled actions our front-line members have taken to put an end to Britain’s complicity in Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories.
The main target of Palestine Action’s campaign has been the UK subsidiary factories and offices of Elbit Systems – Israel’s largest arms manufacturer that supply some 85 percent of the land and air munitions used by its military.
Since its formation in 2020, Palestine Action has forced the permanent closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory and pushed the company to abandon its London headquarters. In 2022, the group’s protest action led to the dissolution of contracts worth 280 million pounds ($353.6m) between the UK Ministry of Defence and Elbit Systems. Our campaign has also successfully impelled several leading British and European companies to cut ties with Elbit permanently.
We have long known that the success of our campaign against Elbit Systems, and Israeli interests in general, has upset the government. This is why it came as no surprise that in the draft plan of Gove’s new definition, Palestine Action was named as a group that could be captured in the new, extended “extremism” bracket.