We Have the Power to Destroy The Ban on Palestine Action and the State’s Conflation of Protest With Terrorism

 Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign Have Refused to Mobilise Behind the Defend Our Juries campaign. Why?

October 4 Defend Our Juries Demonstration Against the Proscription of Palestine Action

Both Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign are doing their utmost to build the 31^st (?) national demonstration this Saturday against Genocide in Gaza. These demonstrations are important morale boosters for activists yet in terms of their impact on the British Government they have been a failure. They also attract very little media attention.

Defend Our Juries protests by way of contrast have attracted massive media publicity and have put the Establishment on the backfoot. People like former Supreme Court Judge Jonathan Sumption have come out and said in the Independent of 12 August 2025:

The Terrorism Act creates an offence of supporting a proscribed organisation. It precisely defines what acts amount to support. One of them is wearing, carrying or displaying an article giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that the person supports the proscribed organisation. This is far too wide.

Merely indicating your support for a terrorist organisation without doing anything to assist or further its acts should not be a criminal offence and is consistent with basic rights to free speech. It looks as if Palestine Action has deliberately courted trouble by encouraging people to carry placards with messages specially designed to commit the offence. Martyrdom sometimes has a political value.

Even Murdoch’s Times opposed the proscription of Palestine Action in a leading article. Not from any sympathy for PA's 'squalid agenda' but because it might create the impression that pro-Palestinian sentiment was being censored, perish the thought!

As Paul Harris SC, the founding Chair of the Bar’s Human Rights Committee wrote:

there can be no doubt that a decision to proscribe a non-violent organisation articulating widely shared concerns is a dangerous attack on free speech and freedom to protest, which is likely to cause sustained injustice to peaceful supporters of that organisation or its aims, who will as a consequence be designated terrorist supporters. 

Different police forces have reacted differently. Some like Devon and Cornwall have not arrested people with placards supporting Palestine Action.  There has been widespread consternation, reaching into the higher echelons of the State about the overreach of the Terrorism Act and its effect on the right to protest. The intelligence document on which the government based its decision concluded that 99% of PA’s actions were not terrorist.

Professor Robert Barrington of Sussex University’s Centre for the Study of Corruption argued that what was happening was a clear example of government abuse of power:

What we are seeing on display is the extent of government power and the ways in which it can be deployed against protestors.  If PA are terrorists in any conventional sense, then evidence should be put in the public domain.  If the problem is trespass or criminal damage, other laws are available to prosecute them.  If they continue to be branded as terrorists, what is PA today may tomorrow be any other civil society group that irritates the government of the day and can be labelled a threat to national security.

The campaign against PA’s proscription has rocked the Metropolitan Police in a way that nothing that PSC or StWC has done.

Paula Dodds, chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, was quoted as saying that officers were “physically exhausted” but continue to be called on “to facilitate these relentless protests” and that “we are coming under attack for doing so. How can this be right?”

 “There aren’t enough of us. Hard-working police officers are continually having days off cancelled, working longer shifts and being moved from other areas to facilitate these protests.

“Our concentration should be on keeping people safe at a time when the country is on heightened alert from a terrorist attack. We are emotionally and physically exhausted.”

A Met Police officer told Novara Media that enforcing the ban on Palestine Action made them feel “sick” and “ashamed”, while a Police Federation spokesperson highlighted the risk of burnout for officers, saying that the demand is “relentless” and unsustainable.

Middle East Eye quoted one arrestee who overheard police officers complaining about having to work long hours, their leave being cancelled, not being allowed to go home, and having to do mandatory overtime in order to process the hundreds of arrests at various police stations in and around London.

"I knew that my arresting officer was very unhappy about having to go to Bromley to process my arrest," Ceinwen Hilton, another protester who was arrested at 6.20pm in Westminster, then waited till 8pm to be processed. Hilton was not released until after 1am.

Over 2,000 people have been arrested on the demonstrations and probably another thousand at least have defied the law. I am proud to say that my friend Elizabeth Morley, an 80 year old Jewish daughter of a holocaust survivor, is amongst them having been arrested on Saturday. Her local Cambrian News asked whether she was the new face of terrorism!

You might think that in this situation PSC and StWC would put their resources behind the Defend Our Juries campaign. DOJ is a relatively small, pacifistic liberal organisation. StWC is by contrast a much larger and long established organisation. It is run by self-proclaimed Marxists of the Counterfire persuasion. People like Chris Nineham, Lindsey German and John Rees together with ex-Stalinists like Andrew Murray. It is an unashamedly left-wing organisation.

Rees, who was heavily involved in the Free Julian Assange campaign, has spoken eloquently about the traditions of direct action and protest in Britain. It would seem that to some on the left, direct action is more of a theoretical concept than something to actually be carried out. StWC has done nothing to support the DOJ campaign. 

We face a government which is proposing to continue what the Tories started by granting even more powers to the police to harass and control demonstrations to prevent that wicked phenomenon of repeat demonstrations.

Stop the War Coalition March, February 2003

The reality is that StWC which began with the largest ever demonstration in Britain on 15 February 2003 against the Iraq War, believed to be between one and two million strong, failed to capitalise on the demonstration and prevent Britain’s participation in the war. That would have involved mass civil disobedience and bringing Britain to a halt. StWC was not prepared to do so.

Today we have a liberal organisation taking the lead against government protest laws, whilst the ex-SWP Marxists of Counterfire prefer a demonstration through the streets of London that will achieve nothing rather than throwing their weight behind a campaign of defiance that stands every chance of success.

It is possible to prevent Starmer, Britain’s most unpopular Prime Minister ever, from taking the axe to our remaining democratic rights. Yet StWC is more interested in respectability and confining protest to established channels than defying a tyrannical law. 

Even MI5 is said to harbour considerable doubts over the proscription of Palestine Action yet StWC has done nothing.

PSC & Ben Jamal run a mile from anything that would bring them into conflict with the law and the British state

Palestine Solidarity Campaign is even worse. On the eve of the ban coming into their effect the leadership of PSC under Ben Jamal took fright that PSC might be caught out being seen to defy the ban on PA.  At the end of June it sent out an instruction to its membership that:

"It is very important that members of the PSC and supporters of our branch do not take any protest action in the name of the PSC, as this could seriously jeopardise PSC's work and the movement – thank you."

In other words PSC should be allowed to go its own sweet way, building an NGO on the backs of the Palestinians without taking any risks itself. PSC’s whole strategy over the past decade and more has been to ‘mainstream’ the Palestinian cause.  It has been a demonstrable failure.

What PSC has failed to get into its head is the fact that the British Government is hostile to the Palestinians because an alliance with Israel lies at the heart of British, American and European imperialism's strategy for the Middle East. Human rights and international law count for nothing which is why Starmer refuses to accept that Israel's actions amount to genocide when every human rights organisation has long since classified it as genocide.

The British State is the enemy of the Palestinians and should be treated as such. It has no interest in opposing Zionism. A Palestinian solidarity organisation worth its salt would recognise that simple fact. Instead PSC is committed to 'mainstreaming' the Palestinian cause.

PSC failed to confront the false anti-Semitism smear in the Labour Party or support Jeremy Corbyn and ended up with Keir Starmer, the Zionist without qualification. It platformed open Zionists like Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry in the hope that they could be won over.

It refused to criticise the two state solution and at no stage has it ever said it is opposed to a Jewish settler colonial state in Palestine. In 2022 it even removed opposition to Zionism from its Constitution prompting my own resignation from the organisation I helped found.  Although Ben Jamal now claims that PSC is anti-Zionist they are mere words.  It is difficult to understand how PSC can claim to be anti-Zionist when it refuses to oppose the existence of the Israeli state as a Jewish Supremacist State.

PSC nationally has made timidity into an art form. When Manchester PSC supported October 7 as a legitimate act of resistance their officers were suspended, resulting in the whole group disaffiliating from PSC. PSC has refused to criticise the Palestinian Authority even though it cooperates with the Israeli occupation authority, arresting and torturing militants on Israel’s behalf. Its ‘President’ Mahmoud Abbas describes its cooperation with the IDF as ‘sacred’.

PSC has reduced the struggle of the Palestinians to a human rights question. It has completely depoliticised that struggle. The one thing that PSC has done is to accumulate a large amount of money, well over a million pounds, since October 7 enabling it to employ yet more staff to no good effect.  Politically its impact has been minimal. It is more of an NGO than a campaigning organisation.

PSC has consistently failed to take up the use of anti-terrorism legislation to proscribe Palestinian organisations and deter protest. It is not necessary to support Hamas politically in order to oppose its proscription. The proscription of Hamas’ political wing in November 2021 by Priti Patel, a corrupt and racist politician, went unopposed by PSC. There was no campaign and I cannot even recall them mentioning it.

It is no surprise that PSC’s opposition to the proscription of Palestine Action ended on July 5.  If PSC had thrown its weight behind the campaign of DOJ then the Police would have been unable to enforce the law and it would be as good as dead. The same goes for StWC.

That is what lay behind the appeal of the Met’s Assistant Commissioner, Ade Adelekan, to DoJ to postpone the protests using the pathetically transparent lie that opposing genocide was being disrespectful to the victims of the attack on the synagogue last week. This appeal also demonstrated the weakness of the Police position.

Can you remember the last time the Police appealed to the organisers of a criminal activity to postpone their activities to the following week! Perhaps we will now have letters to budding bank robbers or burglars appealing to them not to go ahead with their activities because police resources are stretched. Adelekan’s letter is itself an admission that DOJ’s activities are political not criminal.

If PSC had any strategy or political nous it would recognise that the British state is not going to stop supporting Israel unless it is forced to do so. Appealing to its better nature is pointless because it doesn’t have one.

It is noteworthy that the Police offered to ‘meet virtually or otherwise’ with DOJ to discuss their letter. When the Met banned PSC from marching on January 18 near the BBC, because there was a synagogue nearby, which meant accepting the canard that support for Palestine was anti-Semitic and threatening to Jews, they refused to meet with PSC.

It is to be hoped that PSC and its members will begin to realise that only by confronting the British state’s support for genocide and Zionism will it be forced to change its support for Zionism. That means being prepared to defy laws which are anti-democratic.

Tony Greenstein