Exceptional powers, once temporary, now define the state’s response to dissent

The UK government has turned post-9/11 anti-terrorism legislation on members of Palestine Action, whose campaigns have directly targeted arms manufacturers supplying the Israeli military.

Palestine Action was founded in July 2020 by two British citizens, Huda Ammori, whose father’s family were forcibly displaced during the Six Day war in 1967, and Richard Barnard, a former member of the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion. Since 2018-19, when Israeli snipers armed with British-supplied rifles killed over 230 civilians taking part in the Great March of Return demonstrations, protests in the UK against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians had had little impact. Ammori and Barnard saw that a new approach was needed and formed a direct action group. As they put it in the documentary To Kill a War Machine (Hannan Majid and Richard York, 2025), which has been banned in the UK, ‘Rather than asking any politician to shut weapons factories down, we could go and shut them down ourselves.’

From the start, Palestine Action targeted suppliers of arms to Israel, notably Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which makes surveillance and strike drones that are trialled against Palestinians, then marketed to the rest of the world as ‘combat-proven’.

The organisation grew through the formation of autonomous local groups. These started out by targeting (with some success) several Elbit locations in the UK and APPH, which builds landing gear for Elbit drones in Runcorn, destroying materials necessary for production and forcing the factories to suspend production for several days. Elbit eventually closed its Oldham and Bristol facilities.

With the Israeli government pushing for further repression, a number of activists were arrested. Though some were released for lack of evidence, others were prosecuted for offences ranging from vandalism to theft. But Palestine Action’s operations only continued to grow. In May 2021 members occupied UAV Tactical Systems, an Elbit subsidiary in Leicester, holding out on the factory’s roof for six days with the support of local residents who set up a camp at the gates and blocked (…)

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(5) Maxim Bakiyev made $8m per month on fuel sales to Manas Airbase; Andrew Kramer, “Fuel Sales to U.S. at Issue in Kyrgyzstan”, New York Times, 11 April 2010.