If Palestine Action is a ‘terror’ organisation, what is the IDF?
A protest in support of Palestine Action, 23 June 2025
Owen Jones writes in The New Arab on 2 July 2025:
If this column were to be published a few days later, I could face a prison sentence of up to 14 years. That’s because Palestine Action – a non-violent direct action group – is being proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government. That places them in the same legal bracket as ISIS, and indeed violent neo-Nazis: as Palestine Action note, two of the latter lumped in the coming legislation to help ensure it passes.
But Palestine Action don’t behead people or seek to exterminate them based on their ethnicity. They are the opposite: driven by a desire to prevent what a consensus of genocide scholars has concluded is indeed a genocide.
The catalyst for the proscription was throwing red paint at a couple of military planes. In Britain, in 2025, this is considered a much graver crime than British politicians arming and facilitating the mass extermination of predominantly women and children in Gaza.
Palestine Action are a courageous direct action movement who stand in a long tradition which helped secure many of the rights and freedoms we take for granted today. Here is a statement which, if declared after the legislation passes, will be punishable by a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
Nobody really believes that Palestine Action is actually a terrorist organisation. The term ‘terrorism’ has been stripped of all meaning, used to describe activities deemed hostile by Western states, that actually perpetrate lethal violence on a mass scale. When anti-terrorism legislation was passed, opponents warned it would be abused to damage the civil liberties of people who clearly are not terrorists, and such laws have already been deployed against entirely peaceful protesters.