The collective statement that was posted on Verso’s blog on 5 August, condemning Israel’s genocide and opposing the proscription of Palestine Action, was signed by 80 prominent scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines and places. Within forty-eight hours it had attracted an additional 350 signatures, and by 20 August 730 people had added their names. (Anyone who works for a university and who would like to sign it can do so here).
Many other collectively signed statements have also circulated over these last few weeks, written by lawyers, NGOs, diplomats, writers, architects, artists, and so on, both to condemn the “mass killing, starvation and destruction that Israel is wreaking in Gaza” and to denounce Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action as “illegitimate and unethical.” Other open letters have called for “crippling sanctions“ and an “immediate and complete“ boycott of Israel. These calls were preceded by an earlier wave of appeals urging Cooper not to ban Palestine Action, for instance those organised by Fossil Free Books, Artists for Palestine, Netpol and the Haldane Society.
By early August, everyone from Amnesty International and the UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk to Kneecap and Sally Rooney had pressed Yvette Cooper to do the right thing – to lift her ban on Palestine Action and drop all charges levelled against the group’s supporters.
By the time people gathered in London and across the UK on Saturday 9 August for another enormous protest against Israeli crimes, the line between governmental collusion in genocide and popular opposition to it was sharper than ever before. Outraged by our government’s refusal to do anything more than bewail some of the more eye-catching consequences of Israel’s starvation and demolition policies, more than 200,000 people marched along a route negotiated by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign while some 800 people declared their approval of Palestine Action (PA) in another silent demonstration organised by Defend our Juries.
Confronted with the prospect of such mass defiance, Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper responded with one of the largest sets of arrests in the history of UK policing. On 9 August, the Metropolitan police arrested no fewer than 520 people, all simply for holding harmless placards expressing opposition to genocide and support for Palestine Action. To put this in context, noted London’s Evening Standard, “the highest number of arrests previously made by the Met at [a single recent] protest is thought to be 339 at the poll tax riot” of 31 March 1990 – an episode which involved significant damage to shops and other properties and more than 110 injuries.
Many of those arrested on 9 August, including Moazzam Begg, Jeremy Till, Deborah Hinton, Jonathan Porritt and Alice Oswald, have discussed their reasons for defying Cooper’s ban; Anne Alexander, one of the original signatories and organisers of both the academics’ statement and the Protest is Not Terrorism open letter, posted an account of her own arrest in an earlier contribution to this blog.
As of 1 September the Met has further decided to press charges against 114 (up from 67 a week ago) of those arrested on suspicion of showing support for Palestine Action at three earlier and smaller demonstrations organised by Defend our Juries (DoJ), held in London on 5, 12 and 19 July. If the Met adheres to this pattern of arrests and prosecutions, they are presumably planning to charge many hundreds more people over the coming weeks. Even larger numbers of people, meanwhile, have already signed up to participate in the next and largest DoJ protest in London, planned to coincide with another national day of action on Saturday 6 September. On the day this article went to press (Tuesday 2 September), DoJ announced that five of their activists involved in the campaign against PA’s proscription, including their main spokesperson Tim Crosland, had been arrested in dawn raids, a few hours before the group was due to hold a press conference about the action planned for 6 September. Amnesty International quickly condemned this new round of arrests as “a blatant attempt to muzzle freedom of speech”. Amnesty called “for the immediate and unconditional release of these people and yet again implore[d] the Government to redirect its energy from criminalising peaceful demonstrators to focusing on taking immediate and unequivocal action to put a stop to Israel’s genocide and ending any risk of UK complicity in it.”
On the question of UK collusion in Israel’s genocide, neither the people nor their government have yet given any sign that they are prepared to back down. It’s already clear that 6 September is set to be a pivotal day in the history and enforcement of official UK support for Israel.
It’s worth taking a moment, then, in the run up to this day and the further days of action that will follow it, to remember why the proscription of Palestine Action has proved so controversial, before reflecting on how our understanding of the roots of Israel’s genocide might help renew a commitment to “never again” in the future.
I
The immediate origins of this looming stand-off between the British people and their government, of course, go back to Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and by now there is a very broad consensus regarding what is most urgently at stake.
As everyone knows, within hours of 7 October Israeli officials threatened Gaza with genocidal retaliation and collective punishment. They openly vowed to destroy the Strip and to deprive its inhabitants of food and water. Very quickly, Israel’s obvious and ongoing determination to make good on these threats confronted its close ally the UK with a stark choice. It’s this choice that especially concerned many of the initial signatories of our academics’ statement, which they explained to me by email throughout July and August 2025.
As signatory Alex de Waal (director of the World Peace Foundation) insists, “the simple, elementary point is that there is an obligation to prevent genocide.” This obligation is unconditionally binding on all signatories to the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This obligation, de Waal points out, was already “activated when in January 2024 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that immediate action needed to be taken to preserve the rights of the Palestinian people of Gaza against irreparable harms specified in that Convention.”
Everyone also knows that Israel then completely ignored the formal warnings and instructions issued by the world’s highest court, and in every possible way – from systematic non-compliance to the expulsion of UNRWA to the deliberate killing of hundreds of medics and aid workers – it has violated its obligations to the UN. Outside the rapidly shrinking circle of Netanyahu loyalists, the genocidal character of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza is no longer a matter of serious dispute. Israel’s “systematic and brutal murder of journalists,” adds Rebecca Comay (Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto), in what has become “by all counts by far the deadliest war on journalists during all the major wars of the past hundred years (including the first and second World Wars, Vietnam, etc.), together with the prevention of foreign correspondents from entering Gaza, may be conspiring to produce a ‘news graveyard’ – but nothing can hide what is everywhere in plain sight, any more than the violent repression of protest and free speech, in universities, workplaces, and in the streets of London and around the world, can conceal the fact that a global intifada is raging or can tamp down the energy of that collective movement.”
The UK government, however, has not only failed to prevent Israel from undertaking genocide in Palestine, it has provided crucial economic, military and material support for this the most grievous crime that any state can commit. Despite the irrefutable and accumulating mass of evidence that attests to Israeli crimes, the UK continues to operate surveillance flights over Gaza and continues to authorise arms transfers to Israel – indeed, in the months since David Lammy suspended a small fraction of UK arms licences to Israel (30 out of 350), on 2 September 2024, UK military exports have substantially increased. Confronted with the obscene consequences of Israeli violence, our government is still to this day prepared only to acknowledge the “risk” that its partner-in-arms might commit crimes against humanity at some indeterminate point in the future.
The UK, in other words, has refused point blank to meet its own obligations under international law. The UK’s refusal to prevent or punish genocide is as deliberate and calculated as Israel’s starvation and demolition campaign itself, and it confronts UK citizens with a stark choice of our own.
That Israel is annihilating Gaza with our support is an absolutely stupefying and epoch-defining fact. If our government isn’t willing to honour its commitments to prevent genocide then we are morally and legally obliged to do this for them, by all the necessary means that we can muster.
This is why the signatories to our statement share the “aim of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel and their belief that all participants in the pro-Palestine movement should be free to make our own decisions about how best to achieve that goal.” Given what is at stake, this has become an urgent matter of conscience, in the most far-reaching sense imaginable.
II
Mass expressions of indignation or outrage in the face of Israeli violence are one thing; direct action that might actually interrupt the flow of weapons enabling this violence is something else entirely.
Yvette Cooper is no doubt sincere when she says that British citizens remain free to engage in conventional protest of Israeli actions, if only because there seems to be nothing insincere about either Netanyahu’s or Starmer’s own undisguised indifference to all such protest. The obvious failure of mere demonstrations and petitions to stop the Israeli war machine is what makes Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action such a charged decision, of course, even for those who might not themselves share the group’s own tactical priorities. Palestine Action was the one UK-based group whose direct interventions were clearly creating serious problems for the Israeli arms industry, an industry whose R&D and manufacturing operations are themselves thoroughly interwoven with those of their British and American counterparts.
Palestine Action’s chief target was Elbit Systems UK, the UK-based extension of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. As Elbit’s own promotional materials make perfectly clear, in addition to producing Israel’s most lethal and most thoroughly “combat proven” drones, the company is also a key supplier of both munitions and training for the British military. It’s no surprise that Starmer’s ministry of defence may now be poised to agree a huge £2 billion training contract with Elbit, just as it’s no surprise that his foreign ministry still insists it cannot suspend its own production of parts to those F-35 fighters that have played such an important role in Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It’s also no surprise, as Francesca Albanese demonstrates in detail in her most recent report for the United Nations, that Israel’s genocide has proved very profitable for Elbit Systems and its many associates in Israel, the US and the UK.
Conveniently for Cooper and Starmer, UK law (following the Terrorism Act of 2000) defines terrorism in notoriously broad terms, to include both violence against persons and “serious damage to property.” The fact that many human rights advocates and organisations have condemned this sweeping definition as inconsistent with international norms remains irrelevant to government prosecutors. Since Palestine Action by its own emphatic admission is clearly guilty of property damage, it’s easy for UK officials to classify them as “terrorist” in their distinctive sense of the term.
Despite their best efforts, however, it seems that many if not most British people still tend to associate terrorism with the more familiar meaning of the word, i.e. with violent acts designed to provoke actual terror. Members of Palestine Action, explains Oxford’s Baptist minister James Grote (who was arrested on 24 August for applauding their “work of disrupting anyone in the UK providing weapons for the war in Gaza”), have “broken into buildings and caused damage to property, not people; this is not terrorism.”
As you might expect, then, over the past few weeks Cooper and her colleagues, faced with increasingly defiant protests against their proscription of Palestine Action, have done everything they can to characterise the group not merely as “terrorist” but more specifically as “violent.”
In other words, in order to ensure that arms companies created and employed by a genocidal regime might remain free to continue producing their munitions without being disturbed by popular protest, the UK government has instead done everything in its power to portray the most determined of these protestors as themselves guilty of violence.
III
When Cooper first introduced her plans to ban Palestine Action to Parliament on 23 June, she already stressed – vigorously though rather vaguely – the group’s apparent “willingness to use violence.” Perhaps her most damning allegation on the day was an equally vague allusion to “the impact on innocent members of the public fleeing for safety and subjected to violence.” To illustrate what she means by such subjection, Cooper has referred to the fact that during a few of their operations, presumably with a view to their televisual impact, PA activists have lit the sort of flares regularly used on public demonstrations. Both Cooper and her deputy, the security minister Dan Jarvis, have seized on a line from the sentencing sheriff in Glasgow who, with reference to a PA action against a local factory, said that “throwing pyrotechnics into areas where people are being evacuated could hardly be described as non-violent.”
When in Cooper’s absence Dan Jarvis introduced the actual order to ban Palestine Action to the House of Commons on 2 July, he built on the foundations that Cooper had laid on 23 June. He explained that his government had taken the unexpected decision to proscribe this British group alongside the US-based Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement simply in order to “reaffirm the UK’s zero-tolerance approach to terrorism, regardless of its form or underlying ideology” or place of operation. After reminding his colleagues that members of the Maniacs Murder Cult have indeed been accused of committing “acts of murder, arson, bombing and mass poisoning in New York,” Jarvis explained why his ministry had reached the conclusion that Palestine Action also deserves to be proscribed as a terrorist group in exactly the same legal sense of the word:
It has orchestrated a nationwide campaign of attacks that have resulted in serious damage to property and crossed the threshold between direct criminal action and terrorism. [...] Palestine Action members have used violence against people responding at the scene of attacks. For their role in co-ordinated attacks, members of the organisation have been charged with serious offences, including violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent and aggravated burglary, which is an offence involving a weapon.
This certainly sounds like an impressive list of charges. “We must be under no illusion,” Jarvis concluded, “Palestine Action is not a legitimate protest group. People engaged in lawful protest do not need weapons. People engaged in lawful protest do not throw smoke bombs and fire pyrotechnics around innocent members of the public.” (It may be instructive to compare Cooper and Jarvis’ worries about PA smoke bombs with their determination to enable Elbit itself to continue producing rather more explosive kinds of bombs for use elsewhere, just as it’s instructive to compare, as Sally Rooney does in a recent article for the Irish Times, the way the UK has cracked down on expressions of pro-Palestine support with its response to rather more provocative public celebrations of actually-violent domestic terror groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force).
In order to limit the bad press that soon swirled around the mass arrests she ordered to be made on 9 August, Yvette Cooper has repeatedly doubled down on her characterisation of Palestine Action as a violent group. PA’s supporters are deluded, she suggests, since they don’t understand the full extent of their reliance on violence against persons. “Those who seek to support this group may yet not know the true nature of the organisation,” she said, “but people should be under no illusion – this is not a peaceful or non-violent protest group.” On 11 August, a Downing Street spokesperson again insisted the mass arrests were justified because Palestine Action is “a violent organisation that has committed violence, significant injury, extensive criminal damage.”
As of late August 2025, no small part of Yvette Cooper’s reputation now rests on her adamant determination to describe Palestine Action as an essentially violent group. On 17 August Cooper committed herself wholeheartedly to this line of argument in an article she published in the Observer, which remains her most detailed public statement about PA to date. To justify their proscription, she again stressed PA’s alleged association with
intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries to individuals. The clear advice and intelligence given to me earlier this year from the UK’s world-leading counter-terrorism system, based on a robust assessment process, was that Palestine Action satisfies the relevant tests in the Terrorism Act 2000 and should be proscribed. [...] Palestine Action has claimed responsibility for – and promoted on its website – attacks that have seen those allegedly involved subsequently charged with violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and aggravated burglary. Charges that include, in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, a terrorism connection. [...] For a home secretary to ignore all those security assessments, advice and recommendations would be irresponsible. Protecting public safety and national security are at the very heart of the job I do.
In case this might not already be alarming enough, Cooper also mentions “disturbing information given to me that covered ideas and planning for future attacks.”
On the face of it this all sounds like another impressive list of accusations, even if references to “a terrorism connection” or “ideas and planning” may again come across as a little vague.
What might seem less impressive is the fact that, as confirmed by another article in this same 17 August issue of the Observer, only a single member of Palestine Action, on a single occasion, has ever actually been so much as accused of committing an act of serious violence against a person – namely Samuel Corner, who has been charged by police with grievous bodily harm, following the attack against Elbit’s Filton factory in Bristol on 6 August 2024. As the Observer’s John Simpson notes, the still unproven charges against Corner “are the only significant acts of violence against a person in the group’s 356 actions since it was established in 2020.” The few details that have been published regarding these charges suggest that they relate neither to the purpose nor to the execution of PA’s Filton operation itself, but to the specific circumstances of Corner’s arrest (or, to be more precise, to Corner’s alleged “intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detention of another”). In any case Corner himself denies the charges, and the issue has not yet been decided in court. Corner and most of the other Filton defendants will have spent more than a year in prison before their case is even heard, in November 2025; presumably their lawyers will then have an opportunity to discuss how far Cooper and her colleagues, by apparently grounding so many of their public assertions on one as-yet-unproven allegation, might themselves be considered guilty of contempt of court.
What makes Jarvis and Cooper’s charges even less impressive, if not (as PA’s Huda Ammori was quick to suggest) simply defamatory and mendacious, is the fact that the most important of the allegedly “robust” intelligence and security reports they draw on – an assessment of the Joint Intelligence Assessment Centre (JTAC), dated 7 March 2025 – is no longer hidden behind that veil of secrecy which the Home Office can normally throw over any group it deems a threat to national security.
This JTAC report was discussed during a hearing at the High Court on 30 July and subsequently published online, and it seems to be the most likely source for Jarvis and Cooper’s references to the three specific PA operations mentioned in their recent statements. These were actions undertaken against Thales in Glasgow in July 2022, against Elbit’s Instro Precision site in Kent in June 2024 and against the aforementioned Filton factory in Bristol in August 2024: these are also the only three operations that JTAC discusses in any detail. Based on what Cooper and Jarvis have publicly said to date, it’s quite possible that this JTAC report remains the main source for all the allegations they have made against PA.
Anyone who reads this JTAC report can see that if it indeed characterises a small fraction (i.e. perhaps only these three out of more than 350) of PA operations as technically “terrorist” this is simply because, in keeping with the controversial terms of the Terrorism Act of 2000, the report again presumes that serious damage to property should be classified as “terrorism.” The JTAC report does not itself seem to corroborate, even by allusion or innuendo, Cooper’s own recent attempts to associate PA with violence per se. As the former UK diplomat and ambassador Craig Murray (who shared the document via his blog) points out, “in fact there is nothing whatsoever in the JTAC assessment which backs up any of the claims being put out in a panic by government ministers. The JTAC report makes absolutely clear that its assessment of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is based only on the definition in the Terrorism Act, of a group that commits serious damage to property in order to influence government policy.”
As Huda Ammori has repeatedly stressed, and as the public record seems to confirm, Palestine Action has never on any occasion planned or intended to undertake violence against persons. It has never celebrated or recommended violence as a tactic. As a vast array of lawyers and rights experts have repeatedly said, it’s an authoritarian abuse of power to proscribe Palestine Action by the same means and reasons used to ban actually-violent groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Maniacs Murder Cult, Islamic State, and so on.
On 29 August, a source involved with Huda Ammori’s ongoing petition for judicial review at the High Court confirmed to me that there is indeed “only a single unproven allegation of injury caused by a Palestine Action activist,” and apart from the single charge made at Filton on 6 August 2024 “no other accusations of serious violence” have been levelled at any member of Palestine Action, in any of its various branches across the country. The government’s intelligence “assessments are clear that Palestine Action was only proscribed because of serious property damage.” As for Cooper’s reference to “disturbing information” regarding “ideas and planning for future attacks,” the source notes that “this isn't mentioned at all in the evidence so far provided [by government prosecutors], even in reference. The first time it was heard of was when Cooper said it on TV. Palestine Action was assessed for proscription in March 2025 simply on the basis of serious property damage. If there was any basis to these ‘disturbing’ plans, why did Cooper wait four months to proscribe the group? No disturbing plans were actually formulated during that time, unless she finds protests at weapons factories disturbing.”
Also on 29 August, the Guardian published extracts of a letter from Birnberg Peirce, the legal firm representing Huda Ammori in the High Court, to their Home Office counterparts, complaining about Yvette Cooper’s recent attempts
to persuade the public that Palestine Action was proscribed for reasons which she is unable to reveal publicly and which are centred on violence and injuries against people. These claims about the reason for Proscription Review Group’s recommendation for the proscription of Palestine Action are misleading in light of open (public) disclosure. It is clear from the open disclosure that the basis for the recommendation was serious damage to property caused by Palestine Action and not violence against people.
Birnberg Peirce again reiterate that whatever Cooper might mean by “disturbing information” about ideas and plans, this information has not yet been shared or raised in open court. “If your client has evidence to support her assertions, this ought to have been disclosed. As she has not, she must cease her misleading [media] campaign immediately.”
If in reality Palestine Action has never posed any threat to the British public, over the course of 2023-25 their actions and publicity stunts certainly did begin to threaten the reputation of Elbit Systems and their associates in the UK-Israeli weapons industry. This is reason enough to explain why Cooper, as Craig Murray puts it, “has continually lied about Palestine Action in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription of a direct action protest group which is opposing a genocide in which Cooper’s government is deeply complicit.”
What is the best way to stop a genocide? On a matter of such enormous moral and historical significance everyone should be free to answer to their own conscience, without also having to face life-changing prosecution under anti-terrorism legislation.
IV
Many of the academic statement’s signatories had a good deal to say about this point in particular. “To proscribe Palestine Action,” notes the Birzeit-based philosopher Abdaljawad Omar:
is to codify, once again, the criminalisation of conscience. It is to place under legal erasure not only an organization but the very possibility of a politics that names and confronts the infrastructures of genocide. This act does not arrive from nowhere; it belongs to a long genealogy of colonial governance in which the demand for justice is recast as a security threat, and where solidarity is reframed as criminal conspiracy. The proscription is thus neither a technical measure nor an isolated instance – it is an attempt to legislate amnesia, to choke the avenues through which the unbearable truths of Palestine might enter British public life. To target Palestine Action is to confirm the accuracy of its claim: that the state’s covenant with the arms dealers of settler-colonialism is not aberrant but constitutive, not a deviation from democratic norms but their concealed condition. It is for us in Palestine particularly offensive given UK historic and ongoing complicity with theft of land, and destruction of our homes, lives and future.
UC Santa Barbara sociologist William Robinson approaches the issue along similar lines. “What kind of a world are we living in,” he asks, “when those who oppose genocide are criminalized into silence by a supposedly democratic government while the génocidaires are shielded from justice? The Israeli slaughter of the people of Gaza has set off alarm bells in every corner of the world. It shows us the absolute savagery and barbarism that has taken hold of a global capitalist system that is in deep crisis and spinning out of control. Defence of Palestinian life is defence of all of humanity. Palestine Action and its organizers are the moral compass of our time.”
These priorities are indeed clearly shared by pro-Palestine activists the world over. Australian signatory Paul Patton (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales) took part in the huge “March for Humanity” organised by the Sydney Palestine Action Group on 3 August, and saw how police interference failed to discourage mass participation. “People across the social and multicultural spectrum are concerned by what they see unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank,” Patton told me. “Politicians can no longer dismiss their concerns as ‘divisive’ or ‘anti-Semitic’. Our humanity is at stake.”
Over the past eighteen months, meanwhile, signatory Bruce Robbins (Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University) has been a direct witness of some of the most highly publicised acts of anti-Palestinian repression in the US. “At Columbia University,” he writes:
[M]any of us long-time faculty members thought we had seen everything. Twenty years ago, we had seen the university reject any discussion of divestment, when Israel was committing violence against Palestinians in Gaza on a slightly smaller scale. We had seen the administration fight tooth and nail, paying a union-busting law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars from the endowment, to stop the formation of a graduate union. More recently, we saw them go completely silent when ICE agents arrested a Columbia student [Mahmoud Khalil] active in the Gaza protests and kept him for 104 days in a ‘facility’ in Louisiana, threatened with deportation. But what we have seen lately shows us that the shamelessness of the powerful is still capable of surprising us. After a certain point, you can’t call it compliance. It’s collusion.
Among other things, last month Columbia administrators took the dramatically draconian step of expelling or suspendingmore than 70 students simply for participating in a peaceful library sit-in earlier in the year.
After Columbia accepted a further series of conditions imposed on it by the Trump administration, on 1 August Robbins’ colleague and co-signatory Rashid Khalidi declared that he no longer felt able to teach his usual large lecture course on the history of the modern Middle East. In particular, Khalidi points out that it is impossible to teach any such course “in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism,” a definition which “deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.”
As things stand, observes SOAS-based signatory Gilbert Achcar, in the US as much as in the UK, “the arsenal of repressive laws is now so well stocked that a far-right government wouldn’t need to add much to it in order to implement a comprehensive crackdown on political freedoms.”
Here in the UK, more than 110 students and staff have faced disciplinary action for participation in pro-Palestine protest over the past year and a half, and as Liberty Investigates reported a few months ago, “at least 28 universities are now known to have launched disciplinary investigations against students and staff in connection with their Palestine activism since October 2023.” The recent expulsion from SOAS of the president of its Palestine Society, Haya Adam, is an especially egregious case in point, and as pointed out in our statement the University of Cambridge has already referenced Cooper’s ban in arguments made to the High Court to justify surveillance of student activism and the further criminalisation of protest.
Drawing on his own experience of Israel’s assault in Gaza, the Palestinian literary critic Haidar Eid (who was forced to flee to South Africa in late 2023) helps to put UK government priorities in perspective. “I am an academic from what used to be Al-Aqsa University,” he wrote in late July, “which like all other universities in Gaza has been destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces. I have lost more than 45 of my relatives, 39 of my colleagues, 28 of our administrators and 282 of our students, the last of whom, Aya Siyam, was killed together with her entire family a few days ago in the Nuseirat refugee camp. We demand justice for them.”
Such demands have only become more urgent in the weeks since our statement was published. Even Netanyahu’s most blinkered allies can see that the army he commands is clearly prepared to stop at nothing to eliminate what remains of the population of Gaza. The remorseless starvation campaign, the demolition of Rafah and so much of southern and central Gaza, the invasion now underway of Gaza City, the unrelenting and utterly brazen murders of journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mariam Abu Dagga and so many others, all with total impunity and with total contempt for international condemnation – it’s more and more difficult for anyone to pretend that such atrocities can be described as anything but crimes against humanity in the most emphatic sense of the term.
V
Israel’s genocide clearly defines our political present. Questions that concern the future and the past remain more controversial. What must we do to prevent the continuation and prolongation of Israel’s crimes, and how should we understand their more entrenched motivations? That genocide is currently underway may be obvious to most people in most parts of the world, but as things stand there’s less of a consensus about what should be done to end it, or about why and how it started. These two questions are starting to come more and more to the fore, as the UK’s pro-Palestine movement prepares for the next major confrontation with Starmer’s government and its complicity with genocide, on Saturday 6 September.
Both questions deserve simple answers, based on equally simple and inter-connected principles:
(A) There is only one reasonable way to respond to a genocidal state, and that is to deprive it of the opportunities and the means that it needs to kill or displace people. As has so often been said, in one grim variation after another, to commit to the principle of never again is to take all the steps actually required to make sure that this insistence in fact means what it says. To demand that the UK and US stop arming Israel is a step in the right direction, but it’s clearly not enough: a genocidal state should be deprived of weapons altogether. Everyone everywhere has a clear right to live in safety and security, but as a matter of course no genocidal state should be allowed to retain the arms that have enabled it to carry out its crimes.
It’s absurd that Israel can call for the demilitarisation of Palestine and the disarming of any future Palestinian agency while it relies on its own military supremacy and monopoly on violence to destroy Gaza, to conquer the West Bank, and to bomb its adversaries in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Israel is the genocidal aggressor in this conflict, and it’s first and foremost Israel that should be disarmed.
As Gideon Levy suggested in Haaretz following Germany’s announcement in early August that it was suspending arms sales to Israel, calls for a full arms embargo should be understood as an expression of friendship and solidarity with the people of Israel, no less than with the people of Palestine. “To arm Israel now,” argues Levy, “demonstrates neither friendship toward the state nor concern for its fate. Supplying weapons to the aggressor in an illegitimate war that should have ended long ago, and whose aims are now futile and criminal, is to be complicit in a crime.” Properly understood, to continue “supplying arms to Israel is an act of hostility toward it.”
On this point historical precedents should speak for themselves. When Rwanda’s Hutu Power were overcome by Tutsi rebels in 1994, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in 1979, when the Soviets and their allies defeated Hitler’s regime in Germany in 1945, the perpetrators of genocide were not left in power with their armed forces intact. Their regimes were overthrown, their armies were disbanded, and as far as possible their murderous leaders were put on trial. Why shouldn’t Israel’s current leadership be brought to justice in the same sort of way? The ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister some nine months ago, and there has never been any legitimate excuse for failing to act on them.
After killing tens of thousands of people in Gaza and the West Bank, after the mass assassinations of so many more in Lebanon, in Iran, and in Yemen, why should Israel’s so-called defence forces receive one more bomb or one more bullet?
(B) To disarm Israel is also and simultaneously, of course, to draw a line under the old Zionist project of a Jewish state established on stolen Palestinian land. As documented in compelling detail by historians like Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappé, from the moment of its adoption as imperial policy in 1917 (by the UK) and 1922 (by the League of Nations) through to its unilateral implementation in 1948, it’s always been obvious that the creation of a Jewish state at other people’s expense could only proceed through violent conquest and colonisation. “There inevitably comes a time,” observes the philosopher Frédéric Lordon in a powerfully argued recent article, “when political projects of domination reveal their true nature.”
In the case of Zionism, the truth of its reliance on military domination has been clear from the start. For instance, when in 1919 US president Woodrow Wilson instructed the King-Crane Commission to investigate the political wishes of the inhabitants of Palestine, its authors concluded that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.” A few years later, in an oft-cited text of 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky recognised that “Zionist colonisation [...] can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” The need for such a settler state to shelter behind an iron wall or dome is not hard to grasp. “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” added Jabotinsky in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. [...] Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” For more hard-line Zionists, notes Rashid Khalidi, the stakes have always been zero-sum, and this us-or-them logic informs anticipations of the political future as much as interpretations of the historical past: “if Palestine existed, Israel could not.”
In practice, every successive stage of this colonizing venture has been entirely dependent on the bald fact of overwhelming military supremacy. Prior to the unilateral creation of the state of Israel in 1948, this dependence was most emphatic when no less than 100,000 British troops had to be deployed to suppress the massive Arab Revolt against Zionist encroachment that erupted in the late 1930s, but needless to say the balance of military force is again what decided the outcome of those full-scale wars dated 1948, 1967 and 1973 (to say nothing of the more recent and ever more one-sided wars that can be dated as starting in 2023, 2014, 2008...). Every aspect of Israel’s current policies towards the Palestinians – the expulsions, the occupation, the annexations, the siege, the famine, the bombardments, the demolitions, the assassinations, the snipers, the detentions, the prisons, the blockades, the surveillance, the drones, the settlements, the fences, the checkpoints, the apartheid wall, the impunity... – are all equally and wholly dependent on armed domination pure and simple.
Only armed domination can sustain an apartheid state based on conquest, occupation and colonisation. This principle applies today in Palestine in the same way and for the same reasons that it once applied in British-occupied Ireland or French-occupied Algeria or white-supremacist South Africa. To deprive the state of Israel of weapons would also eliminate the material basis for its occupation of Palestinian territories and for its apartheid configuration more generally.
VI
Disarmament is likewise the necessary material condition for the only feasible path towards peace and justice in Palestine, namely the enormously challenging but fundamentally hopeful creation of a single shared state for all of its inhabitants. Of course, it should be up to these inhabitants themselves to work out how exactly they might want to share such a state, but if it’s to be equitable and legitimate it’s also obvious that it should be guided by the simplest and clearest of all political principles: universal equality without exception. As Frédéric Lordon puts it, “the anti-Zionist demand is disarmingly, biblically simple: equality. Equality for all inhabitants, equality in dignity and in rights, equality in the right of return for refugees, equality in everything.”
Every significant variation on that so-called “two-state solution” which continues to distract so much international attention still relies on the presumed persistence of Israel’s military supremacy. As I have argued elsewhere, however, there are good reasons why many former adherents of a two-state approach, including (to mention only a few people on one side of the historic dividing line) influential and widely respected figures like Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy and Shlomo Sand, have come to the conclusion that in reality any such “two-state solution” promises only the continuation of Israeli domination under another name.
In arguing for an inclusive and egalitarian one-state or shared-state approach, they have moved closer to the positions long defended by scholars and activists like Omar Barghouti, Ali Abunimah (cofounder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, 2006), Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, Noura Erakat, Haidar Eid (editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba: One State for All, 2017) and Ghada Karmi (author of One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, 2023). Although this clearly isn’t the place to address the question in any detail, some of the main arguments in favour of such a shared state approach were clearly and concisely laid out in the brief ‘One State Declaration’ that Abunimah, Barghouti, Pappé and many others signed back in 2007.
There is only one consistently principled position to adopt regarding a democratic state in Palestine or Israel or anywhere else, and it follows from the definition of any democratic state as such. A legitimate democratic state is one that treats its every inhabitant as a full and equal participant in its law-making power, without criteria of privilege or exclusion, in keeping with the basic criterion of “one person one vote.”
Principles aside, in practice it’s been obvious all along (to cite Gideon Levy) that no Israeli leaders have ever accepted the most rudimentary premise of a genuinely two-state solution, namely the idea that “the two states would be equal.” It’s equally obvious (to cite Avi Shlaim) that successive Israeli governments have deliberately and “systematically destroyed the basis for a viable Palestinian state,” not least by besieging Gaza, by annexing Jerusalem and by settling large parts of the West Bank. Any more talk of two states is not only a distracting waste of time, it’s also a deflection from the real question confronting the international community – whether an illegitimate apartheid state should be allowed to operate in its present configuration.
Fundamentally, as Gideon Levy explained in a January 2024 interview, all contemporary arguments in favour of a two-state solution are based on older assumptions of Israeli military supremacy. They rely in particular on the fact that Israel’s military was strong enough to engineer the Nakba or catastrophe of 1948, i.e. they rely on mass Palestinian expulsion as the unavoidable price to pay for founding a settler colony on other people’s land. They require Palestinians, as a preliminary condition for asking for some sort of fragmentary statehood at some point in the future, to renounce their already-recognised rights of return. Rather than the wars of 1967 or 1973, continues Levy, rather than Oslo 1993 or Camp David 2000, “the decisive moment is 1948. A people came to a populated land and took it over. That’s the core of everything.” A shared-state one-person-one-vote approach might still be unpopular in today’s Israel, Levy concedes, but;
[A]t least it’s a solution which might solve all the problems, including the right of return. We are very far away from it, but at least there is a vision. While with the two-state solution, there is no vision whatsoever because [Palestine] will not be a viable state. So, I think that continuing to talk about the two-state solution like 90 per cent of the world is doing – from the Palestinian Authority to the EU, the United States to some [in the] Israeli government – knowing that it’s not possible, is just playing into the hands of the occupation. [… We] shouldn’t judge the one-state solution according to reality today. Sure, according to reality today, it is impossible that Jews and Palestinians will live together. But the idea is to change this reality. The alternative to a one-state solution is continuing the apartheid state. There is no third solution. We have to decide, or we give up.
VII
The answers to these questions might be simple in principle but of course it’s equally obvious that, given the forces arrayed against them, their implementation will be immensely difficult in practice. A similar combination of principled simplicity and material difficulty characterised the campaigns to abolish slavery in the US in the 1840s and 50s or to abolish apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, and in each case we need to remember the real if not sole source of the difficulty in question: the armed resistance of those privileged few who profit from the situation as it stands. Whether it’s by international pressure and economic isolation or a concerted campaign of direct intervention, there will be no meaningful steps towards peace with justice in the Middle East unless Israel’s resistance to Palestinian emancipation is overcome.
By the same token, if Israel is to persist in its project of conquest and colonisation it must at all costs guarantee its present and future military supremacy. Short of naked celebrations of domination for its own sake, the only way it can do this is by trying to justify such supremacy through endlessly repeated incantations of its “right to self-defence.” Luckily for Israel, these justifications resonate nicely with the entrenched militarist priorities of their main allies and enablers, and in the immediate wake of the Hamas attacks on 7 October they resonated especially well in those countries that have made a perpetual “war on terror” the guiding principle of imperial policy. Just as Yvette Cooper draws on her responsibility to protect the British public from Palestine Action’s alleged “willingness to use violence,” the only way Netanyahu can justify the genocidal depopulation of Gaza is by appealing to Israel’s inviolable right to do whatever it deems necessary to protect itself. Back in early May 2025, as Netanyahu became more candid about his genocidal plans for Gaza, he even promised that the “population will be moved, for its own protection.”
As I have tried to explain in an earlier discussion of this point, the international legitimacy of Netanyahu’s government and of their war on Palestine, such as it is, has always depended on them winning this all-important argument about Israel’s sacrosanct right to self-defence. On multiple counts, this is another argument that Israel deserves to lose. Even the most expansive conception of self-defence cannot possibly begin to justify the starvation and expulsion of an entire community, the destruction of their hospitals and universities, the demolition of their homes and institutions, the deliberate killing of hundreds of journalists, medics, aid-workers, and so on. As far as international law is concerned, no right of self-defence can be invoked to justify the persistence of an illegal military occupation and the oppression of those compelled to live under foreign rule, no more than it can be used to coerce Palestinian recognition of a state’s supposed (and equally spurious) “right to exist”. It’s essential that Israel’s current recourse to armed force be fully exposed for what it so emphatically is: an exercise in aggression, oriented by a hundred-year old project of conquest and colonisation.
Based on what has been done in the past, the demands that should guide pro-Palestine solidarity in the future are perfectly clear: disarm Israel, dismantle the apartheid state, insist on a full and equal right of return.
VIII
The obligation to prevent and to punish genocide, and to pursue justice for the victims, is categorically binding on us all. If mere expressions of indignation or outrage fail to change government policy then we need to consider more consequential forms of intervention. Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action is a perverse deflection of justice, it is a desperate stratagem devised on misleading pretences; rather than “protecting the British public” its real purpose is clearly to allow the UK to continue trading and colluding with Elbit Systems and other suppliers of the Israeli war machine. Unlike the British government, most people in Britain understand that the real criminals are the Israeli politicians and generals who are carrying out genocide in plain sight, along with the arms manufacturers who are providing them with the means to do it.
This is why, on Saturday 6 September, organised via their trade unions, a group of signatories to the academics’ statement and to the Protest is not Terrorism letter will be participating in a larger solidarity delegation alongside many hundreds of activists mobilised by Defend our Juries, activists who will again be risking arrest in Parliament Square.
If you would like to add your signature to the abbreviated version of the academics’ statement published on this blog on 5 August there is a sign-up form posted here [link: https://protestisnotterrorism.wordpress.com/scholarsletter/]. Signatures are welcomed from anyone who self-defines as a scholar whether in higher education or not, and from workers in post-16 education more broadly.
