CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

UK High Court Blocks Starmer’s Effort to Label Palestine Action a Terrorist Group

Police arresting a protester against the proscription in London, 6 September 2025. Photograph Source: indigonolan – CC BY 4.0

Last year, I was living in the UK when activists from the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian direct action group Palestine Action hugely. embarrassed the Royal Air Force and the British government by cutting their way through a security fence surrounding  an RAF Airfield in Oxfordshire and spraying red paint on the jet engines of two aircraft known to have assisted Israel’s aerial slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

While the action was only “damaging“ to the planes if one considers having to apply paint remover to the vandals’ handiwork to remove it, the Labor government of Prime Minister Keir of Starmer responded  by claiming the “repairs” would cost £7 million (about US$10 million) and as such justified labeling the avowedly non-violent protest group guilty of  “terrorism” under a rarely used  Anti-Terrorism Law  enacted in 2000, had targeted  the likes of  Al Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army that actually sought to kill people. Although it did list property damage, the law one the quarter of q century of its being on the books has never before been against an action or an organization involved in just property damage and not seeking to harm people.

Labeling Palestine Action a  terrorist group, as ludicrous as it was, in fact was  and remains a serious matter for the protest organization which has been trying to force the government to stop supporting Israel’s US and UK-backed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank which was at the time slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many children,  with bombs, planes and weapons supplied by the UK and US. The action also targeted those many British citizens who were protesting over the same issue and specifically the effort to silence and destroy Palestine Action. This is because not only does the Antiterrorism Act cary a penalty for being  part of a designated terror organization of up to 14 years in jail. It also makes simply protesting for or speaking or writing favorably about or even just holding a sign supporting a designated terror organization.

I was dismayed to see Britain’s long history of supporting freedom of speech and protest (a tradition dating back to the Magna Carta and that inspired the addition of the First Amendment  protecting freedom of speech, press, religion, association and protest........

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