Proscribing Palestine Action: A blunt tool for a complex challenge
1 July
On 19 June 2025, members of Palestine Action vandalised military planes at RAF Brize Norton, citing the UK government’s alleged support for Israeli attacks against Palestinians in Gaza. Shortly after the incident was reported, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced that she would move to proscribe the group as a terrorist organisation, alongside the nihilistic violent group Maniacs Murder Cult and the neo-Nazi Russian Imperial Movement. The designation would place Palestine Action on a par with terrorist organisations including the Islamic State (IS) group, al-Qaeda (AQ), Hamas and National Action.
Proscription would make it an offence to be a member of the Palestine Action, to support them or to finance them, and would permit enhanced state surveillance and intelligence sharing. The announcement was met with protests and pushback from public figures who have announced support for the group. Legal proceedings brought by the group have resulted in a High Court hearing on Friday, 4 July, attempting to prevent the order coming into effect.
The proposed designation raises major questions around the appropriateness (and potential counter-productiveness) of using terrorism proscription powers to respond to actions such as those undertaken by Palestine Action. Alongside the potentially harmful precedent of proscribing a group based on serious property damage alone (according to experts, likely the first time the Terrorism Act has been interpreted in this way to justify proscription), failing to sufficiently justify the proportionality of deploying the extraordinary powers associated with terrorism legislation comes with major risks of relativising the severity of terrorism.
Palestine Action have a track record of acts of criminal damage against properties tied to Israeli defence companies, attacks on Jewish businesses and charities it claims are tied to Israeli defence companies, and symbolic vandalism, including:
- Breaking into facilities belonging to Israeli defence contractor Elbit Systems and causing significant damage, including in London, Bristol, Leicester and Kent
- Vandalising and spray-painting a business in Stamford Hill (home to one of the biggest Hasidic Jewish communities in Europe). Palestine Action claims it targeted the landlord of Elbit Systems, a charge the business denied,
- Vandalising the offices of the pro-Israel advocacy organisation Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and the Jewish National Fund (which is accused by human rights groups of financing illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank),
- Attacking artwork at the University of Cambridge,
- Stealing and beheading a bust of Chaim Weizmann (the first President of Israel) which had been housed in the University of Manchester.
Much of this activity is likely illegal under other legislation, including criminal damage and breaching the public order act (with some incidents investigated as potentially being racially motivated). Members of Palestine Action have been charged and sentenced for a number of these offences (though in other cases, they were acquitted).
However, there is a qualitative difference between the scale and nature of their criminal activity and the egregious violence associated with other proscribed organisations. Notably, the activities of Palestine Action bear considerable similarities to direct action used by pacifist activists in the past. For example, in 2017 a Quaker activist and a Methodist minister broke into an air base in Lancashire with the intention of vandalising military jets, ultimately aiming to prevent Saudi bombing in Yemen. Ultimately, in this case, the judge found them not guilty, citing that they had the right to damage property if they had a genuinely held belief that they were preventing harms to others.
Whilst there are provisions laid out in counter-terror legislation to take action against groups who engage in ‘serious damage to property’, the action taken by Palestine Action very likely stretches this definition beyond its original intention. When the legislation was originally debated in Parliament, parliamentarians specifically queried whether this would encompass activists targeting military infrastructure to prevent their use in what protesters viewed as war crimes. This prompted then Home Office minister Charles Clarke to specifically state the clause on damaging property was not intended to capture “direct action” or any “domestic, industrial or environmental action.”
Given this context, there is a real need for the government to clearly articulate the necessity and legal basis around deploying the extraordinary powers associated with terrorism legislation. This has been less necessary over the past 25 years of proscription due to the overtly violent and supremacist nature of groups designated to date, where public support is largely assumed. Failing to sufficiently justify such extraordinary counter-measures risks relativising the deserved exceptionalism with which terrorism is treated due to its extreme harm, potentially even risking the mainstream public consensus around terrorism and responses to it. Proscribing a group on tenuous grounds also risks setting a concerning precedent: future governments could use the extraordinary powers associated with counterterrorism legislation to crack down on protest groups which use direct action as a tactic.
This episode comes in the context of an increasingly strained proscription regime: policies that are two decades old, built to tackle the group-based threat from AQ, are being used to address an ever more complex threat landscape. In recent years, terrorism proscriptions have been stretched to address Iranian hybrid operations, post-organisational online far-right movements and the non-violent Islamist extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT). Meanwhile, increasingly post-organisational and ideologically amorphous threats such as extreme misogyny and nihilistic violence are slipping through the cracks, amid a set of powers ill-suited for challenges increasingly in the mainstream rather than the fringes.
This speaks to the urgent need for a more joined-up human-rights based policy approach to the kaleidoscopic spectrum of harms facing society. The limitations of counter-terrorism as a lens for addressing a much broader set of harms than extreme violence were highlighted in a 2020 paper from the Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE): the paper pointed to the need for targeted policy interventions to address a much broader set of harm areas beyond terrorism. These included “social division and intolerance; crime, violence and harassment […] the censorship and restriction of rights and freedom; and the undermining of democracy.”
Addressing these challenges will require fine-grained responses rather than a one size fits all approach. There has been a broad consensus that extraordinary measures are justified to protect the public from terrorist violence. However, responses to the broader harms associated with groups such as Palestine Action must be grounded in a liberal democratic approach—one convincingly rooted in the principles of human rights, transparency, proportionality, and accountability.
