Remember that we are living, writing, waking up, sleeping, lamenting, breathing, resisting, and working amid an acceleration of Israel’s 75-year settler colonial project (underwritten by the US and Europe), or what we have come to call a genocide. Settler colonialism is not an event but a structure, and ‘genocide’ is an intensification of the necropolitical logics of that structure.
It is tricky to write this piece, however, for another reason.
Mainly because, if I’m not careful, it could land me in prison.
This would not have been the case had I written this a few days earlier. Writing this now, however, could be read as support or calling for the support of an organisation the state understands as ‘concerned with terrorism’.
What a difference a few days makes (a maximum of 14 years, to be exact).
The following is a stream of consciousness. Therefore, though at times it may appear incoherent, it is, like durée, all interconnected. Hopefully, somewhere in its depths are some critical reflections on the proscription of Palestine Action (PA).
On the 30th June, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, a recipient of funding from Pro-Israeli lobbying groups and a member of Labour Friends of Israel, laid down a proscription order to ban Palestine Action (along with an obscure neo-Nazi organisation and an irredentist Russian ultra-nationalist group). To proscribe an organisation, the Home Secretary must reasonably believe that said group is ‘concerned with terrorism’. Readers of this blog will understand that the designation of PA doesn’t require an intimate knowledge of the refrain of critical terrorism studies to appreciate that this is politics by another (legal) means, or the fact that the Home Secretary has collapsed the distinction of violence against the person with the more nebulous ‘violence against property’. One must remember that PA’s modus operandi was to decommission property used in genocide and ethnic cleansing. While the caprice of the legal definition of ‘terrorism’ does include ‘serious property damage…designed to influence the government…for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause’, the methods of PA were arguably different. It sought not to call on the good graces of the British government, who is actively participating in genocide, nor to ‘influence’ them, but to disrupt the very supply lines of genocide. The Terrorism Act, therefore, implies that there are otherwise effective lines of communication between the demos and their representatives. Direct action, however, is the sublation of that mediation, foregrounding the conceit of liberal democracy. Direct action is a kind of raw agency.
For the order to come into effect, it has to be affirmed by a simple majority in the Commons and the Lords. The discussion and vote in the Commons took place on July 2nd. Outside were protestors, held and battered at arms-length by the repressive state apparatus. Earlier that day, the British Parliament was already discussing one of its dwindling global infrastructures of accumulation, the Chagos Archipelago, where it expelled thousands of Chagossians to house its military base (ironically called ‘Camp Justice’) to enable ‘rapid deployment of operations and forces across the Middle East, east Africa and south Asia’.
Though the Order was not set to come into effect until a few days later, its disciplining power appeared[1] to stretch back in time.[2]
Zarah Sultana: I oppose the blood-soaked hands of this Government trying to silence us. So I say this loudly and proudly on Wednesday 2 July 2025: we are—
Madame Deputy Speaker: Order.
Zarah Sultana: We are all Palestine—
Madame Deputy Speaker: Order. I call Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
The following day, despite some opposition to the order (including from the anti-apartheid activist Lord Hain), and a failed amendment by Baroness Moulsecoomb[3] the Lords voted it through. The Order was made on the 4th July and was to come into force the following day.
On that same day, however, a political and juridical struggle against the order (and more broadly, against the socialorder) began. Epistolic outrage was followed by legal intervention. An interim relief hearing was set at the Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ), which, if successful, would suspend the proscription order. The court was asked to determine whether interim relief should be granted to prevent or delay the legal effect of the proscription order until the judicial review claim challenging it could be heard (set for July 21st).
From the morning, people gathered in significant numbers outside the High Victorian Royal Courts. Outside the labyrinthine building, the dual strategy of people politics and legal politics was brought into acute, spatial focus. The former were hemmed in with the imposing architectures of the state on one side, and the deployment of police vans and personnel on the other. State atmotechnics intended to manufacture a febrile atmosphere, but this was punctuated by the rousing speeches, rhythmic chanting, and occasional feedback from the speakers. From time to time, the police would charge into the gathering, but the people held firm. Throughout the day, they were joined by interested onlookers and well-wishers. If one focussed their attention on the open-top tour buses that passed back and forth down the Strand, you would often note how on each bus, several people would smile or (appear) to approvingly take photos of those gathering outside; a nice anecdote when someone, years down the line, might write the history of this moment.
The day of the hearing, in many ways, had the intense affect of a soap opera, concentrated by the compression of time as the Order was to come into effect at midnight that day. Added to that was the constant deferral of those outside the court’s collective uncertainty; informed that the ruling would be handed down at 3.00pm, then at 5.30 pm.
The test for interim relief is set out in American Cyanamid Co. v Ethicon Ltd [1975] AC 396 and allows the court to suspend a ministerial order even after it has been approved by both chambers of Parliament. The test is 1) whether there is a serious question to be tried? 2) are damages an adequate remedy? and 3) where does the ‘balance of convenience’ lie? On the first limb, the judge had determined that only one of the grounds (of which they were eight) submitted by the claimant was serious (disproportionate and therefore unlawful interference with Article 10 and 11 rights); though 5 other grounds ‘may also raise serious issues to be tried, but these grounds are not obviously well-founded and their ultimate prospects are at this stage difficult to assess’. On the third limb of the test, the court had to weigh the harm to the private interests of PA against the public interest (a fraught concept), were the order to be suspended or not. In such circumstances, extra weight is accorded to the public interest if it’s ‘to protect the public from risks associated with terrorism.’ However, Chamberlain J concluded ‘the harm which would ensue if interim relief is refused but the claim later succeeds is insufficient to outweigh the strong public interest in maintaining the order in force.’ News had reached those gathering outside the court. It was over. An organisation that sought to disrupt the supply lines of a genocide was to be banned at midnight that day. Britain would continue its reconnaissance flights from its colonial military base off of the southern tip of Cyprus and supply F35 parts to its Israeli genocidaires.
However, much like a soap opera, up until now had been but a false crescendo. Lo and behold, in Court 4 of the Court of Appeal (and livestreamed on their YouTube channel), there had been an emergency hearing for permission to appeal the High Court’s decision, only a few hours before the banning order would come into effect. To give one a sense of the compression of time; the High Court ruled at 5.30 pm, the emergency application for leave to appeal arrived at the Court of Appeal at 6.00 pm, they received 5 written grounds at 7.35 pm, and heard oral submissions at 8.05 pm, with judgment delivered at 10.05 pm; two hours before the banning order was to come into effect. However, the court ruled there had been no error of law in the High Court’s judgment and refused permission to appeal. In a final curveball, the appellants asked to appeal once again to the UK Supreme Court but were invited to do so the following Monday. The day after the order came into effect, 29 people were arrested for opposing the genocide in Gaza and supporting Palestine Action, including an 83-year-old priest.
There are several disconcerting things about the High Court judgment, of course, not least that at para. 80, there is reference to the fact that the ‘Secretary of State took into account irrelevant considerations, namely the views of the Israeli Government, Elbit Systems and pro Israel lobby groups…’ which they had previously met; or the fact the halting of a genocide which the British government is actively participating in, is not a ‘serious question to be tried’ for interim relief. There is a popular quote that readers of this blog are likely familiar with by Mari Matsuda. It goes:
“There are times to stand outside the courtroom door and say ‘this procedure is a farce, the legal system is corrupt, justice will never prevail in this land as long as privilege rules in the courtroom.’ There are [also] times to stand in the courtroom and say, ‘this is a nation of laws, laws recognizing fundamental values of rights, equality and personhood.’”
There is something about the cruel optimism of legalism. Contained in the High Court judgement was that liberal conceit that there might be a disproportionate (and therefore unlawful) interference with Article 10 and 11 rights. But the public interest does not represent the demos against ‘private interests’, nor is it ‘the pretended mediator of the class struggle.’ It is, in fact, the interest of a socially embedded capitalist state, actively engaged in preserving global capital (and disciplining those that disrupt it); and PA are not mere ‘private interests’ (though one cannot say much more that that at this moment). And though capitalist public law interpellates antagonisms between competing social forces, it does so through a form that erases their social differentiation and the very background conditions that give rise to it, presenting it as a balancing of rights claims. But as we know, between equal rights, force wins.
And so, one must stand everywhere, outside the courtroom door.[4]
[1] In what appears to be an alarming example of revisionism, it is clear here that Zarah Sultana MP does in fact say ‘We are all Palestine Action’
[2] The Filton 18, members of PA were also arrested under anti-terror legislation in November 2024
[3] As an interesting aside, Moulsecoomb was also home to a weapons factory EDO MBM that supplied parts to Israel and was the target of the Smash EDO campaign in which several activists decommissioned £200000 worth of equipment. They were all acquitted using the defence of lawful excuse. See also here.
[4] A permission hearing for judicial review is planned for the 21st July. At the time of writing, there is some suggestion that the lawyers for PA might appeal the denial of granting interim relief again to the UK Supreme Court. Failing this, PA could apply for deproscription
