On All Fronts: The Multi-Sited Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Britain
Israel and the arms trade
Two immensely strong lobby groups are woven deep in the fabric of the Westminster political classes – the arms trade, and Israel. As a result, despite more than two years of tragic death and destruction in Gaza, successive governments have continued to arm Israel (more than ever) on the basis of weaselly words from the then Foreign Secretary Lammy that the “UK has ‘not concluded’ that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza”.
They would have us believe that the “war” in Gaza is a military struggle with a heavily-armed nation bent on the destruction of Israel, and not the final stages of a decades-long illegal expansion process by the Israeli state focussed on dispossessing Palestinians from their homelands at any cost.
Over those decades, Israel and Western powers have continually whitewashed and rewritten history, but their need to obfuscate truth has been never greater than now. And it’s precisely because individuals and networks working in solidarity with Palestine have a moral authority and an ability to quickly build power across coalitions of movements, that the need to overtly repress them even in ‘liberal democracies’ has become so strong.
The lobbyists have worked hard to completely weaponise their two most useful tools – allegations of ‘antisemitism’ and of ‘support for terrorism’ – and a decentralised network of state, institutional and other actors use these tools to attack individuals, groups, and organisations who show solidarity for Palestinian liberation. Legal threats, disciplinary actions, smear campaigns and arrest and imprisonment are all manifestations of this battle, and a new report published this morning indexes nearly a thousand examples in data collected across Britain from 2019 onwards.
Index Of Repression
The Index Of Repression is written by the Research & Monitoring Department at the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC). As well as laying bare the processes of repression, the researchers are keen to offer hope and identify proven routes to resistance, quoting Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer that “telling stories is resistance”.
The report uncovers how repression is aimed strategically. Intellectuals and public voices are accused of antisemitism and smeared by Zionist social media influencers, and then fierce lawfare groups such as the UK Lawyers For Israel will scare institutions into taking action such as suspension and investigation. These tactics are widely see in institutional bodies and public sector organisations, from universities to health authorities. Meanwhile activists and organisers are more likely to face state repression including surveillance, investigation, arrest and even remand. Those raising their voices in art and culture risk smears and cancellations. The overarching effect is also to affect public perception and dampen willingness to express solidarity.
Around a quarter of the recorded incidents are characterised as censorship, disinformation or smearing. By simply removing expressions of Palestinian solidarity, along with disinformation, censorship helps rewrite history, while smearing attacks the speaker rather than just the speech, using antisemitism and extremism labelling to discredit. The sources of this kind of attack are often the same particular organisations and supportive media outlets. The UK Lawyers For Israel and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, aided by The Jewish Chronicle, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail, are implicated in more than 100 documented incidents in the report. The three tactics together help undermine solidarity by delegitimising it, and then they set up the conditions for more direct repression to follow. An example presented is the story of an NHS doctor, whose social media posts were framed in media reports as antisemitic, leading to an anonymous formal complaint with their employer, an NHS Trust, triggering an internal investigation and a referral to the counter-extremist Prevent programme, and a report to the professional regulator.
By indexing many dozens of similar stories, the researchers reveal a pattern in which protected political speech is demonised as transgressive, requiring action.
One manifestation of action is the pre-emptive banning of demonstrations or events – even extending into the digital space by blocking fund-raising, organising tools, and event pages. Institutions reference ‘concerns over safety’, ‘breaches of conditions’ or ‘antisemitism’ as justifications for cancelling. Examples cited even include academic events and humanitarian appeals.
Political compliance is enforced by the use of sanctions at places of learning or work. Over 100 incidents are cited where codes of conduct are weaponised to police institutions like hospitals, universities and schools and prevent open discourse. Many dozens of examples are disclosed where sanctions have escalated into personal legal, financial or professional repercussions – loss of jobs, immigration status or even imprisonment. Groups and organisations have also suffered loss of banking or fund-raising platforms, often as a result of targeting by lawfare Zionists.
More than 200 incidents are uncovered of actual threats to funding or employment – real world consequences for expressing solidarity with Palestinians. These threats suck energy and resources from movements and individuals who find themselves having to draft responses and seek legal advice. While every target must defend themselves, the accusers have far less pressure on them to win – it’s an unfair battlefield in favour of Zionist advocacy groups like UKLFI, or other institutions including colleges, universities, government or police.
More sinister still, and with more than a hundred documented cases, Palestinian activists have been subject to public harassment and even violent attacks, backed up with doxing and surveillance. Two Zionist blogs are mentioned in the report for doxing academics, students and professionals, along with online harassment, and ‘investigation’ from media, especially The Jewish Chronicle and The Times.
At the apex of repression is of course the State itself, and the index catalogues more than a hundred examples of arrest, home raids, restrictive bail conditions and imprisonment. Tomorrow, leaders of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, not usually associated with civil disobedience, will appear in court for a second time this week, charged with Public Order Offences from 18th January. That day, a peaceful national march was disrupted by a violent police kettle resulting in 77 arrests. Two days later police published the names and street addresses of people arrested.
The overarching picture from all this research is that there is an effective and systematic ongoing attack on every effective aspect of Palestinian solidarity in the UK, hitting the very infrastructure that movements need to survive. There is no suggestion of an organised command structure – rather a shared project of groups and individuals informally working to reinforce political power, through elite access, revolving doors and aligned interests.
Antisemitism and terrorism
“To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches”. – Home Secretary Suella Braverman (30 October 2023)
Returning to the tools of repression, the report exposes the history and use of conflation, whereby criticism of the Israeli state or of Zionism has been institutionalised through the IHRA definition to be aligned with antisemitism, justifying many of the repressions described above. Media, Zionist social media influencers and even politicians have freely labelled Palestinian solidarity as violent, hate-filled, sympathising with terrorism and so on. The IHRA definition of antisemitism opened the doors (albeit in a legally non-binding document) to equating anti-Zionism with hate speech. It makes possible an allegation of antisemitism against almost any criticism of the State of Israel, including the fact-based description of Nakba, apartheid, unlawful settler occupation etc. or even support for the Boycott, Sanction, Divestment movement (BDS).
A research paper published in 2025 documented the use of the word ‘antisemitism’ in The Jewish Chronicle over a hundred years, and showed that during the hysterical attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, the word appeared almost twice as often as it had done in 1938, when Nazi Germany was introducing anti-Jewish policies almost daily.
The Index records many examples of groups such as UKLFI and CAA drawing on the Equality Act 2010, armed with the IHRA definition, to escalate their attacks on Palestinians and their allies, depicting anti-Zionism as unlawful harassment of Jews. Famous examples explored include the manufactured scandal around Corbyn, the withdrawal of funding from the NUS, the attempts to sack Dr David Miller and the campaign to deplatform Dr Abu Sitta.
The report looks at the history of using lawfare against counter-insurgency, with reference to the introduction of Terrorism legislation after British troops were mobilised in Northern Ireland in 1969. It points to a change in public acceptance of government overreach (e.g. “emergency” powers, which were never rescinded) to protect us from a ‘perceived’ threat. Debates at the United Nations to define terrorism and include ‘state terrorism’ were consistently blocked by ‘Western’ powers, including of course the uber-terrorist itself, Israel.
This has led to the framing of Palestinians in general, whether trying to protect their generational olive farms from settler occupation, or documenting human rights abuses, let alone taking up weapons of resistance, as terrorists.
In 2000, the Terrorism Act codified years of repeated extensions to temporary emergency powers into a permanent fixture of state repression, followed by a suite of enhanced Acts in the following decades.
The ‘Prevent’ programme (backed by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015) demands that a wide range of public authorities including schools, universities, NHS trusts and local authorities must “‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. This created a network of surveillance against ill-defined ‘radicalisation’, and in the context of the current demonisation of Palestinian solidarity, makes it hard to even teach or study the actual history of Palestinian colonisation, occupation and subjugation, which might indicate a right to armed resistance.
Pointing particularly to Sections 12 and 13 of the Act, concerned with displays of support for ‘terrorism’, today’s report documents numerous cases of systematic criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity expression, sometimes also through doxing and pressure from the usual media and social media sources. In 2021 the government proscribed Hamas – that is, not just the military wing which had been proscribed 20 years earlier, but the political and social movement in its entirety. Last year of course, the Home Secretary proscribed (unlawfully) the direct action movement Palestine Action.
The result of that has been incendiary – while on the one hand there has undoubtedly been a further expansion of the ‘chilling effect’ that is characterised within much of today’s index, there has also been a kickback, exposing public defiance in the most spectacular way with nearly 3000 arrests to date, the majority of them of completely peaceful ordinary citizens overtly demonstrating support for the organisation.
The Fightback
The report published today tries to offer hope towards the end of rather bleak reading, with examples of victories against increasing repression. The authors describe Dr David Miller’s win against the University of Bristol. After pressure from The Board of Deputies, and the Community Security Trust, he was dismissed on grounds of antisemitism, but his Tribunal found that criticism of Zionism is protected under the Equality Act 2000. Although this ruling is under appeal, for the moment it has set an important precedent in freedom of speech.
A win on appeal for two activists accused of harassing their MP affirmed the right that constituents can question their elected representatives directly.
The Jewish Chronicle has come under fire from the normally toothless Independent Press Standards Organisation for its repeated breach of ethical standards.
The authors, ELSC jointly complained, with the Public Interest Law Centre, against UK Lawyers For Israel, accusing them of working as an unregulated law firm, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority are investigating, and UKLFI’s ‘charity’ wing is also under investigation after a joint complaint by CAGE and Led By Donkeys.
Comedian Reginald D Hunter risked his career, finances and reputation after a smear campaign by the odious Twitter Zionist Heidi Bachram led to a private prosecution by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, but in December, District Judge Snow dismissed the case as ‘abusive’ and ‘improper’.
Most recently, the various acquittals and failures to convict in the case of the Filton 6 have been a huge victory for Palestinian Solidarity, along with the High Court ruling that Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful.
The European Legal Support Centre’s report makes for grim overall reading, but the various victories cited towards the end show that “the very frameworks weaponised against solidarity – equality law, criminal procedure, professional regulation – can, under sustained challenge, be turned back on those who misuse them”.
The document ends with a set of recommendations based on the research, with suggestions of how to continue building in the face of repression, how to use legal and complaints processes back at accusers, demanding accountability, working with existing structures like unions, keeping focussed and extending networks of solidarity.
Download and read the full report HERE.
