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An activist from Palestine Action sprayed blood-red paint on the exterior walls of the Shenstone, UK, factory owned by UAV Engines, a subsidiary of Israeli Defense company Elbit Systems, on September 18, 2022 (Photo by Martin Pope/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images).
On a warm September night in 2020, in what would become the first of hundreds of acts of sabotage and vandalism, members of the UK-based protest group Palestine Action (PA) occupied the roof of a factory in the town of Shenstone, in Staffordshire, and started hacking at it with sledgehammers. The goal was to destroy the roof, make the site unviable, and stop production for as long as possible. Operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, the Shenstone facility specialized in the fabrication of drones that included so-called “loitering munitions,” otherwise known as suicide units. The purpose of loitering munitions, a hybrid drone-and-cruise missile, is to float for as long as possible behind enemy lines, await target acquisition, then self-destruct when dropped on the target. Loitering munitions have been used to horrific effect in the Gaza genocide.
The actionists had spent weeks scoping out the weaknesses at the Shenstone site. The factory had no guards posted at night, and the rooftop of the two-story building could be accessed simply by slapping a twenty-foot ladder against its side. In the darkness of the early hours of September 13, 2020, with the ladder positioned, they hauled their equipment onto the roof for an occupation planned to last five days. They carried tents, sleeping pads, a supply of food, many gallons of water, banners, spray-paint, and sledgehammers.
Once installed on the roof, the actionists went to work with the hammers. They bashed holes in the tarmac, broke windows, and smashed air conditioning units. They draped Palestinian flags on the façade of the building alongside a banner that said “SHUT ELBIT DOWN.” As day broke and the sun started to beat down, the exposed roof became a furnace and baked them. They held on for three days, negotiating with police who surrounded the facility.
Huda Ammori, the 31-year-old co-founder of Palestine Action and daughter of a Palestinian émigré to the UK, was one of the occupiers at Shenstone. “We barely got any sleep,” she told me. “It’s very surreal when you’re like, ‘We managed to shut down an Israeli weapons factory!’ It’s the best place to be, really—the most liberating as a human being.” Ammori grew up in a small town north of Manchester, hearing stories of her father’s flight into exile in England after the 1967 war that ended in Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. She organized peaceful protests for Palestine starting in her teens. She lobbied parliament, drew up petitions, and participated in boycotts and divestment campaigns at the University of Manchester, where she studied business and finance. But her efforts led to no substantive change.
When she joined with Richard Barnard, a longtime left-wing activist in the UK, to start Palestine Action in 2020, she decided to turn toward property destruction. “Our goal was to end British complicity in colonization and apartheid,” said Ammori. At the same time that the group aimed at ambitious change, however, it was also “focused in order to achieve solid, tangible victories.” Ammori and Barnard settled on Elbit Systems as the solid target whose destruction would entail a tangible victory. “Society has conditioned us that even when we see things happening that are wrong, we are powerless to change that,” Ammori told me. “But it’s not true. We have the power to shut Elbit down and that is what we’re going to do.”
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The company had at least nine subsidiaries in the UK and close ties with UK defense contractors and the UK military. The self-described “backbone” of the Israel Defense Forces’ drone fleet, Elbit supplied 85 percent of the IDF’s land-based equipment, supplying everything from precision-guided rockets and bombs to air-to-surface missiles, state-of-the-art artillery ammunition and remote-controlled weapon stations to guidance systems for fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, and armored ground units. (After the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023, Elbit boasted to customers that its products were being “battle-proven” in real time—the genocide part of its sales pitch.)
There’s no exact count of the incidents of sabotage, vandalism, street protest, and blockade attributable to Palestine Action. According to Ammori, thousands of people over the last five years have engaged in hundreds of acts of disobedience and disruption under the PA banner in the UK. They have repeatedly hit Elbit’s drone factory in Shenstone, with actionists in December 2024, for example, attempting to break through the factory walls using demolition tools. They vandalized and blockaded another Elbit weapons factory in the city of Tamworth a half-dozen times. The group has conducted numerous rooftop raids, including at an Elbit-owned drone plant in Leicester in 2021, when four PA actionists held out for six days as they smashed up the roof.
The group hit other weapons firms, too, along with institutional investors that back Elbit, UK military sites, and at least one property in the Trump portfolio. In Southhampton in 2023, they “scaled the Leonardo UK weapons factory [and] occupied the rooftop, shutting down production at the site [as they began] dismantling the building,” according to a Palestine Action communiqué. In Shipley last January, they crashed a van weighted with concrete into the gates of a factory run by Teledyne Defence and Space, which provides missile parts to Israel. That same month, in a coordinated series of attacks across Europe, they vandalized 15 properties of the German financial services giant Allianz SE, which has invested in Elbit and provided insurance for its facilities. In February, actionists struck the BBC in London, spraying blood-red paint and breaking windows in its headquarters in “protest against the BBC’s…entrenched pro-Israel bias.” In March, they descended on the Trump Turnberry golf course, painting “GAZA IS NOT FOR SALE” on the lawn, vandalizing the club house and tearing up the golf green, “including the course’s most prestigious holes.” In what the UK Daily Mail described as a “huge security breach,” two actionists last June broke into Britain’s largest Royal Air Force base, riding electric scooters to swiftly maneuver toward parked military planes, which they spray-painted and smashed with crowbars. Both perpetrators escaped, evading arrest.
One of the more dramatic actions took place on the night of August 6, 2024, in the industrial suburbs of Bristol, when seven individuals in a repurposed prison van drove fast through the security gates of an Elbit drone factory. After ramming open the gates, they turned the vehicle toward the garage door of the facility and crashed through it to the production floor. The seven actionists leapt from the vehicle with sledgehammers and axes and started swinging. According to various reports, they destroyed drone parts on the assembly line, along with an array of manufacturing equipment, causing over a million dollars in damage and forcing the facility to shut down for several months. They also allegedly injured two police officers and a security guard. The perpetrators, aged between 20 and 51, were arrested at the scene and charged with criminal damage, violent disorder, and aggravated burglary, and, if convicted, could serve ten years in prison.
The relentless raiding has been effective. In September, Elbit suddenly shut down another facility in Bristol that the group had targeted dozens of times. In 2022, after 18 straight months of PA actions— including break-ins, blockades, vandalism, and rooftop occupations—Elbit sold its drone-parts subsidiary Ferranti Technologies’ Power and Control in Waterhead. Hit so many times by PA, the Elbit factory in Tamworth permanently closed in March 2024 due to “falling profits and increased security costs,” according to a statement from the company. “The new owners,” reported the Guardian, “said they would not have any association with Elbit and cancel its defence contracts.” In 2022, Elbit lost out on a series of contracts with the UK government worth some $340 million, a loss which PA claimed credit for. Due to their constant disruptions, the group said, Elbit was now an “unreliable supplier.”
In some instances, the British public sided with actionists when they were brought to trial. In 2024, jurors refused to convict four PA members who caused $920,000 of damage to Teledyne, while two others were acquitted of criminal damage of Elbit’s Leicester factory. The public had figured out, Huda Ammori told me, that Palestine Action was “about valuing the lives of Palestinians more than the property and tools used to massacre them.” Sabotage and property destruction was okay if these were construed as acts against the machinery of genocide.
Elbit vs. the People
By 2022, these assaults had caused such consternation in the ranks of Elbit’s executives that they initiated high-level meetings with the administration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. According to FOIA’d records, Conservative Party Home Secretary Priti Patel met with Elbit CEO Martin Fausset in 2022 to “reassure [Fausset] that the criminal protest acts against Elbit Systems UK are taken seriously by Government” and to “thank Martin for the work Elbit does in support of the British Armed Forces.” (The thanks was because Elbit supplied the Watchkeeper unmanned aerial vehicle and the MORPHEUS battle management system for the British Army, along with technical support for a fleet of 38 aircraft.) A heavily redacted record of a meeting with Fausset and a representative of the Home Office in 2023 reiterated the need to “[r]eassure Elbit Systems UK and the wider sector affected by Palestine Action that the Government cares about the harm the group are causing the private sector.”
UK government officials also noted their concern that juries across the country were expressing too much sympathy for Palestine Action. “Although there have been successful prosecutions of Palestine Action members,” said one memo, “there have been multiple instances of charges being dropped and defendants acquitted by juries.”
“The juries hear the evidence and go, ‘We like it,’” said Tim Crosland, a human rights lawyer in London who directs the non-profit prosecutorial watchdog Defend Our Juries. “That’s really disconcerting if you’re Elbit Systems. They’re saying to themselves, Shit, the public are against us on this. The public are happy to see our factories smashed in, our windows broken. This is getting serious.”
Crosland advocates for the right of Palestine Action to engage in property-targeting direct action as a form of un-civil disobedience. The internal documents that Defend Our Juries and other civil liberties groups unearthed show that legal briefings to Home Office ministers, ahead of meetings with Elbit CEO Martin Fausset, came about specifically in response to jury acquittals of Palestine Action. “You have meetings between Elbit, the home secretary, the Israeli government, and the British attorney general expressing grave concern about the acquittals,” Crosland told me.
Starmer sought guidance from a fossil fuel and arms industry lobbyist named John Z. Woodcock, called Lord Walney, who made a name for himself following his appointment in 2019 as the government’s “independent advisor on political violence and disruption.” Walney’s special report, issued in May of 2024, focused on two protest groups: Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil (JSO). Like Palestine Action, Just Stop Oil had organized disruptive acts of civil disobedience. Its stated goal was to end all new fossil fuel projects operated under the aegis of the UK government and UK corporations.
Both Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil were hostile to the industries that had paid Lord Walney millions of dollars in lobbying fees over the years. It was no surprise, then, when Walney advised the UK to designate both groups as terrorists and issue orders of proscription against them—a ban on their existence and the declaration of their members, supporters, and advocates as terrorist criminals.
Bowing to Walney’s counsel, Starmer ordered the proscription into effect on July 5 and Palestine Action was designated under English law a terrorist group, joining Al-Qaeda and the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. The group’s website was taken down, its Instagram and other social media accounts suspended. All UK citizens who expressed public support of Palestine Action in any way would also be considered terrorists.
Supporters of PA, including Crosland, sprang into action to organize a response. On the morning of July 5, as the hour of the proscription struck, 29 volunteers with Defend Our Juries gathered under the statue of Gandhi in Parliament Square to hold signs that said, “I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION.” Their implicit demand was that the ban be lifted. All 29 were arrested and charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000. A week later, 86 people who held the same signs in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Kendal—including four vicars, numerous civil servants, and the daughter of a Polish resistance fighter in World War II—were arrested on the same charges.
On July 5, Crosland, who is 55 years old, was among the holders of the placards. He was filmed as he went limp upon arrest, hauled by the Metropolitan Police from his seat under the statue of Gandhi.
“Anything to say?” the anonymous shooter of the footage asked him.
Crosland smiled as four cops carried him to the waiting paddy wagon. “Well, this is what happens in modern-day Britain for opposing genocide,” he said. “It’s quite something, isn’t it? I mean, this is why the laws came in after 1945. The European Convention on Human Rights was to stop a genocide happening, and now it’s happening again. People have got short memories. The mother of all democracies, people.” Then he was stuffed into the van, surrounded by officers, and the video cut off.
Overreach and Backfire
Scholars of civil disobedience have remarked on the “paradox of repression,” when governments attempt to crush peaceful revolt but overreach their authority and get slammed with the backfire of public revulsion and widening support for the movement. This, in turn, emboldens more people to risk the ire of the state and join the revolt. The 1930 Salt March in India, the Sharpville Massacre of 1960 in South Africa, Bull Connor in 1963 unleashing dogs and firehoses on marchers in Birmingham: these are classic historical examples of the backfire effect. The banning of Palestine Action has proven also to be a textbook illustration of this dynamic.
After July 5, the movement to de-proscribe Palestine Action acquired a name—Lift the Ban—and drew ever-increasing numbers of people into the streets of cities across the UK… They gathered every weekend over the course of the summer, holding the same placards, expecting to be rounded up and piled into paddy wagons and whisked to jail. On Saturday, August 9, London’s Met Police set a record for the most arrests ever during a single political protest in the municipality, taking into custody at least 522 people holding signs that said “I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION.” The number eclipsed the previous record in 1990, during the poll tax demonstrations, when Met constables rounded up 339 people in Trafalgar Square for opposing Margaret Thatcher’s attempt at disenfranchisement of the poor.
On almost every Saturday between July 5 and today, thousands of people have held those signs as part of the Lift the Ban movement, and during that time more than 2,000 protesters have been charged under various sections of the Terrorism Act. Two sections of the law are most pertinent. Section 12 targets those who are alleged to have directly supported a terrorist organization through “material” efforts. Section 13 is less egregious, intended for those who wear or display items or share literature—a t-shirt, a hat, a cardboard sign, a pamphlet, an online post—that may be construed as supportive of a terrorist organization.
The enforcement of Section 13 has descended into absurdities, the circle of targets widening to include those whose only apparent crime was that they supported the right to assemble and be heard. A lay minister named Martin Clay in Southborough, a London neighborhood, was charged under Section 13 simply for holding up a placard that said: “I don’t support Palestine Action, but I support the right to support them.” A man in Glasgow was arrested because he held a sign that said “Genocide in Palestine, time to take action.” His crime was that “Palestine” and “action” had been printed in larger font than the other words on the sign.
Ginny Kingsmill, a genial 52-year-old dentist from the South Downs, has been arrested and charged four times under Section 13. Under the law, she is now a terrorist sympathizer for holding her hand-written placard expressing opposition to genocide and support for Palestine Action. I got to know Kingsmill when she let me crash at her home during a visit to the UK this year. “I like to think most people are peaceful, most people don’t want wars,” Kingsmill told me. “But if you see wars happening, get fucking angry and hold on to that emotion.”
Hers was among the names registered in the record number of arrests from August 9. It was oppressively hot and humid in London that day. “People were giving out bottled water, fruit, sun cream. There was a woman giving out roses to those sitting with signs,” Kingsmill told me. “Many people were there just to say thank you. I saw a blind man in a wheelchair being bundled into a police van. A beautiful old smiling woman who said she would be eighty soon spoke to me as she was being arrested. She travelled from a remote part of Wales to be there and had been standing silently with her eyes shut in the heat, the picture of serenity and gentleness.”
Another rebel who Kingsmill spoke with that day was 83-year-old Rev. Sue Parfitt, an ordained Anglican priest who also was charged as a terrorist sympathizer under Section 13. Parfitt was among the first generation of women to be sanctified in 1994, when the Church of England allowed the institution of priesthood to be extended to females. Parfitt got her start in civil disobedience with the climate protest movement in the late 2010s. She had been arrested a total of thirty times over the past decade, twenty-seven times for climate protest, three times as a supporter of Palestine Action. In her capacity as a terrorist, she had been twice at Parliament Square under the statue of Gandhi and once at Trafalgar Square. In 2024, she and a fellow protester bashed with a hammer and pick at the glass case in London’s British Library that holds one of the original copies of the Magna Carta, the founding document of civil liberties in the Anglo-American tradition. “We dented the outer casing, and of course the Magna Carta itself was never in any kind of danger,” Parfitt told me. “A few weeks earlier our government had been taken to the high court and was found guilty of breaking its own climate laws that required emissions reductions. And this got no publicity at all.” The symbolism of attacking the Magna Carta, said Parfitt, was to “unearth it,” bring it into the light of public view.
On November 12, the day I interviewed Parfitt, it was revealed that four UN special rapporteurs on human rights had sent a letter to the UK government exactly two months earlier, on September 12, warning that the proscription of Palestine Action violated human rights. “[M]ere property damage is not sufficient to constitute terrorism according to international standards,” said the letter. The UN officials condemned the proscription as “unnecessary” and said it gave rise to “disproportionate restrictions” on the rights of freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association… They observed that “abuse of laws to proscribe organizations as terrorist that are not genuinely so has more commonly occurred in States that are authoritarian.”
I asked Parfitt what she thought of her government’s actions. “I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t see it as legitimate to try to stop the weapons being made or the airplanes that are being used to drop the weapons,” she replied. “That’s why I oppose the very idea that Palestine Action should be deemed to be a terrorist organization. And the fact that I’m now called a terrorist is ridiculous.”
The rebels are undeterred. Lift the Ban this week announced a series of terroristic sign-waving protests planned for later this month that the group said would constitute the “most widespread civil disobedience in UK history.”
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