The United Kingdom criminalized support for the direct action network, Palestine Action, at a minute after midnight, Saturday July 5, 2025. Hours later, Pink Floyd star Roger Waters shared a video clip to his Facebook page of him writing on a piece of cardboard, the words: “I support Palestine Action… ”Waters then declared “I am Spartacus,” – invoking George Monbiot’s take on the ban from a week before.
The day after, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) reported him to British Counter-Terrorism Police for “expressing support for the newly proscribed Palestine Action.” Around the same time the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) threatened to file a private prosecution if the authorities did not take action.
But since that day, nothing has happened to Waters. No charge. No case against him. Over a year has gone by now, and still – no charge filed.
The Filton Four are appealing their sentences.
On 5 May, 2026 a jury at Woolwich Crown Court convicted them of criminal damage, arising from their 6 August 2024 break-in at Elbit Systems’ Filton factory, which supplies drones to the IDF. But remarkably, at sentencing on 12 June, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson decided he would attach a terrorist connection to those convictions – marking the first time in British legal history that such a finding had been applied to property damage. The defendants’ combined sentences went on to exceed twenty-six years, and on 3 September, solicitor Simon Natas filed an appeal, calling the grounds “strong”.
Five other Palestine Action activists were convicted of criminal damage at Preston Crown Court in June 2026, after smashing a Barclays branch in Burnley with hammers and red paint on 5 August 2024, causing £212,805 in damage. It was after Johnson’s Filton ruling circulated that Judge Parry raised the same question of a “terrorist connection”. That issue was subsequently decided by Justice Robert Altham, however, who ruled on 21 August that the connection did not apply, since although the damage was “significant”, he found that it did not meet the Terrorism Act’s higher threshold of being “serious”; significantly, in rejecting the threshold Altham has retained the actual principle – thus keeping the door open for any future case in which the damage meets the threshold. So the Five will instead be sentenced only for criminal damage, with their sentencing hearing set for 30 October.
In Parliament Square, beside Gandhi’s statue, sat the Reverend Sue Parfitt, 83, a retired Anglican priest from Bristol. Her placard read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” The police arrested her anyway. As they took her away, she called the ban “total nonsense”. The next day, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley was asked why police time was being spent arresting an 83-year-old. He replied: “The law doesn’t have an age limit, whether you’re 18 or 80.”
The police have been very busy indeed since the ban took effect, arresting over three thousand five hundred people. Eight hundred and ninety detained at Parliament Square alone on August 9, 2025. Seven protesters were arrested for sitting outside Preston Crown Court on 21 August as they waited for the Altham ruling. They were holding placards, one reading: “Saving Lives is not Terrorism – I support Palestine Action.”
One hundred and ninety-three charges of terrorism have been filed in Scotland since the Terrorism Act 2000 took effect. More than half stem from Palestine Action, which in seven months accounted for more terrorism charges than every other proscribed organisation combined had accumulated in the previous twenty-six years.
The Oxford Union debated and passed the motion “This House believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”, in November 2024, by a vote of 278 to 59. In June 2026, Ilan Pappé argued for a second motion at the Oxford Union, this time proposing that “Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine”. The house voted 208 to 129. A Zionist activist was ejected from the house in the 2024 debate. The Cambridge Union also voted on Palestine and the motion, “the international community has failed Palestine” was passed by a huge majority in November 2025.
On British media personality Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel in March 2026, Norman Finkelstein (and not for the first time) told Morgan’s audience what he thought of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza. “For two and a half years Israel waged what’s called ‘the Crime of Crimes’. Israel waged a genocide in Gaza, and then, before even the blink of an eye – Israel launched what was called at Nuremberg the ‘Supreme International Crime’, the Crime of Aggression…”
In April 2024 Baroness Hale, former President of the UK Supreme Court, and over six hundred (eventually growing to over a thousand) members of the legal profession, including retired judges, other former Supreme Court justices, senior barristers, and legal academics signed a letter to the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. This was a warning which amounted to a legal opinion on genocide complicity since selling arms to Israel places the UK in breach of international law, and risks complicity in violations of the Genocide Convention. And in February of this year the “risk of genocide in Gaza” was openly debated in parliament.
Baroness Hale warned of complicity in it and parliament debated the risk of it. Sue Parfitt wrote the word and was arrested for it. The word itself is spoken freely in debating chambers and broadcast studios across the country; the crime is supporting the organization that acted on it.
“The majority of direct action by Palestine Action would not be classified as terrorism,” was the assessment from MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. Yvette Cooper went ahead and banned them anyway. It was based on just three out of three hundred and eighty-five incidents, and the Proscription Review Group called it “novel and unprecedented”. On June 22, 2025, We Believe in Israel, the pro-Israel lobby group, publicly claimed credit for the proscription, posting on X: “Our report laid bare the group’s affinity for the emblems of terrorism… We named the danger. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has now named it too.”
Justice Johnson blocked the jury from hearing about the context of Gaza or the political motivations of the defendants. In Camus’ novel a man goes on trial for a killing, but the prosecutor is not really interested in the death. “I accuse this man of burying a mother with a criminal’s heart,” he says. For the Filton Four, the charges were almost incidental.
Tony Greenstein – 72 years old Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist – had faced fourteen years under the Terrorism Act for three social media posts opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Greenstein had seen what had happened to Rajiv Menon KC at the Filton trial, and was concerned the same was about to happen again to his own barrister, and so when the closing speech came he decided to dismiss his barrister and address the jury himself. He spoke for thirty minutes, examining the case for the prosecution and the context in which his posts had been written. Greenstein’s concerns were proven right and the trial judge – Judge Sarah Plaschkes KC – did her best to stymie his speech with its historical context of Palestine and Israel, and his opposition to Hamas.
After Greenstein had finished speaking, Plaschkes – echoing Johnson – addressed the court to say that she had considered referring Greenstein for contempt and then condemned his speech as that of a “rambling old man”. Despite all this – just two hours after retiring – the jurors returned with a unanimous verdict of not guilty.
Starmer was replaced as Prime Minister by Andy Burnham at the end of July 2026. Burnham described the catastrophe in Gaza as “a scar on our collective conscience”. The question of genocide he deferred to the international courts, refusing to make the determination himself. For Zarah Sultana MP, that was cowardice: “You can’t even call it a genocide, you coward.”
More than two hundred and fifty lawyers and academics have written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood urging her to de-proscribe Palestine Action, but the ban remains in place. This autumn, Huda Ammori, one of the co-founders of Palestine Action, takes her legal challenge against the proscription to the Supreme Court.
The word is debated in Parliament and judges try to censor it in the courts, but written on a placard, it becomes a crime.
The arrests continue.
Richard Edain is based in the UK. His work appears on Substack as the Ulysses Files. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.
