Britain is undergoing a profound political transformation, one that is both alarming and historically consequential. Under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the United Kingdom is accelerating down a path that increasingly resembles a police state—one in which dissent is criminalized, protest is treated as terrorism, and moral opposition to state violence abroad is met with repression at home. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the government’s response to protests against Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and Britain’s complicity in it.

The most disturbing symbol of this authoritarian turn is the largest prison hunger strike Britain has witnessed since 1981. Since early November, eight activists held in pretrial detention have refused food in protest against Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Britain’s active support for that campaign, and their own degrading treatment within the UK’s legal and prison systems. Their protest is not only against a foreign genocide but against the domestic machinery of repression that seeks to silence opposition to it.

These activists are associated with Palestine Action, a group now proscribed as a “terrorist organization” under Britain’s expansive counterterrorism framework. Their demands include transparency regarding the influence of the Israel lobby on British policy, humane treatment for detainees, and an end to the absurd classification of nonviolent direct action as terrorism. The hunger strikers are risking their lives not to sow fear, but to expose it—specifically, the fear of a government that can no longer tolerate dissent.

The charges against them relate to two acts of sabotage: a break-in at a British site operated by Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, and an incursion into a Royal Air Force base where aircraft were damaged with red paint and tools. These actions were symbolic, disruptive, and illegal—but they were not terrorism by any reasonable definition of the term. They targeted military infrastructure and arms suppliers, not civilians. No one was injured. Yet the British state has responded as though these activists were equivalent to mass-casualty extremists.

Elbit Systems is deeply embedded in Israel’s military apparatus and, as documented by UN Special Rapporteur........

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