Is the UK imprisoning pro-Palestine activists on Israel’s behalf?
Protestors block Whitehall outside Downing Street in support of the Palestine Action hunger strikers on 11 December 2025
Beauty Dhlamini reports in The New Arab on 22 December 2025:
Whilst Western governments continue to provide protection and support for Israel, including by supplying arms which the Israeli Offense Forces (IOF) use in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a brutal persecution is being waged against those in support of Palestinian liberation.
The criminalisation of solidarity with Palestinian liberation, has come under sustained attack since 7 October 2023. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) revealed how the UK, the US, France and Germany, continue to misuse their immigration, counter-terrorism legislation as well as antisemitism hate crime laws to suppress support for Palestinian rights in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Despite the laws of all the mentioned countries differing, it is clear they represent a persistent trend of global repression.
Prisoners of war
As Western governments continue to pretend to call for an end to Israel’s punitive governance and policy of ethnic cleansing, and displacement, they have adopted the relentless legislative pursuit of those actively trying to prevent it. This is not new, and only proves what has been true since the 1917 Balfour Declaration: Israel exists as a proxy state for Western imperialism and settler-colonialism.
In the face of this repression, however, coverage in the mainstream media is still limited. This is representative of a wider failure to interrogate how governments and prison systems inflict terror, whilst conflating the identities and beliefs of minorities being illegally detaining, with terrorism.