Oppose the Palestine Action ban!

The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced the government’s intention to proscribe Palestine Action, placing it on the list of banned terrorist groups and making it illegal to be a member.

This is in response to supporters of Palestine Action breaking into the air base RAF Brize Norton near Oxford and spraying red paint into the engines of two military aircraft. The extent of the British military’s support for Israel’s war of destruction on Gaza is unclear, but according to Declassified UK the RAF conducted over 500 surveillance flights over Gaza between December 2023 and March 2025 (the RAF has also been used to airdrop aid into Gaza). When open war between Israel and Iran began last week, additional fighter jets and refuelling aircraft (it was two refuelling aircraft which were targeted at RAF Brize Norton) were transferred to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.

Keir Starmer called the paint-throwing “disgraceful”, and counter-terrorism police have been investigating the incident. This proposed ban comes at a time when there are almost daily massacres of civilians in Gaza trying to access the limited aid that has been allowed in, and when Israel has started a destructive and bloody war with Iran.

The strategy that Palestine Action have pursued is of limited symbolic value at best, and we reject many of the assumptions that underlie their work: for instance, they explicitly reject the idea of talking to workers in arms factories such as Elbit, arguing that “if they haven’t left their jobs this long into the genocide then frankly there isn’t much hope of winning them over”. Beyond that, we are strongly critical of much of their broader politics on Israel and Palestine.

However, these disagreements should do nothing to temper our solidarity with Palestine Action activists who have already faced state repression and harassment. This proposed ban comes in a context of growing clampdowns on protest, such as police raids on Youth Demand and Just Stop Oil meetings, and wildly disproportionate sentences for activists carrying out civil disobedience.

Solidarity with Palestine Action against state repression! Scrap the proposed ban!