Solidarity becomes Sedition
Palestine Action and the Logic of Imperial Repression
Morning Comrades.
How many more signs do we need? How many more organizations banned, homes raided, students arrested, journalists smeared, protestors beaten, and activists disappeared before we understand what we’re really up against? The British state has officially proscribed Palestine Action. That’s not a bureaucratic footnote. That’s not a symbolic slap on the wrist. That is the full legal machinery of imperial power being turned against a grassroots, nonviolent, anti-colonial movement. That is the state declaring plainly, violently, and without shame that siding with the oppressed is now a criminal act. If this doesn’t wake you up, nothing will.
To proscribe an organization is to outlaw it entirely. It means that the British government has used its so-called anti-terror laws to classify Palestine Action as a threat on par with armed paramilitary groups, even though its central tactic has been nonviolent direct action: occupying weapons factories, disrupting the infrastructure of genocide, and exposing Britain’s role in arming apartheid. And now, anyone who even associates with Palestine Action, donates to it, organises with it, promotes its work, or publicly expresses support risks arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. This dispatch may well do so also, but we shall about that. Their bank accounts can be frozen. Their communications surveilled. Their futures destroyed. This is not about “public safety.” This is about protecting profit and punishing solidarity.
But understand this: it’s not just about Palestine Action. This move affects all of us, every organiser, every unionist, every antifascist, every climate activist, every anti-capitalist, every worker who has ever dared to confront the system that is killing us. Because once the state has this weapon, once it normalises this level of repression, it will use it again. If Palestine Action can be banned for disrupting arms shipments to a genocidal regime, what’s to stop them from proscribing climate activists who blockade oil terminals? Or anti-racist groups who shut down detention centres? Or striking workers who occupy their workplaces?
The proscription of Palestine Action is not an isolated event, it is a test case. It is the bourgeoisie laying down a marker, sending a message: interfere with the machinery of profit and you will be erased. They don’t care that Palestine Action is right. They don’t care that genocide is happening in Gaza. They care that someone tried to interrupt it. They care that someone connected the dots between British imperial legacy and contemporary Zionist violence, between capitalism’s blood-soaked infrastructure and the resistance that dares to target it.
This is the state functioning exactly as it was designed to, defending property, defending empire, defending capital. They will call us extremists because they fear the exposure of their own extremism. They will call us terrorists because they cannot call us free. And if you are still waiting for the line to be crossed, you haven’t been paying attention. The line was never for us. The law was never ours. It was always theirs. We are not in a democracy. We are in a managed warzone of perception, a state that criminalises dissent while funding genocide, a system that will crush anything that dares to stand between it and its profits. If you support Palestine, they will come for you. If you support liberation, they will come for you. If you support a world beyond exploitation, they will come for you. And when they do, your only protection is each other.
The only question now is whether we fight back.
They called them terrorists because they couldn’t call them slaves.
They call us terrorists because they can’t call us free.
This is the twisted grammar of empire. A vocabulary designed to dehumanise resistance, invert truth, and smear the oppressed as oppressors. From the Mau Mau to the PFLP, from the ANC to Black Panthers, and now from Samidoun to Palestine Action, the same perverse structure repeats: those who dare to resist are branded “extremists,” and those who enable genocide are called “allies.” It is not because the powerful misunderstand our intentions, it is because they understand them perfectly. We are fighting for liberation. They are fighting for profit. And in the logic of capital, liberation is always a threat.
We must be clear: this repression is not surprising. It is not shocking. It is the logical manoeuvre of a state defending its class interests. To act surprised is to play into their hand, to treat this as a deviation from democracy, rather than its actual function. The bourgeoisie has calculated the cost of Palestinian life and found it acceptable. Our job is to calculate the cost of resistance and continue anyway. Not despite the repression, but because of it.
The Political Economy of Zionist Collaboration
By directly targeting Elbit Systems, a company that builds weapons used to murder Palestinians and profits from “battle-tested” apartheid the group struck a nerve not just of military complicity, but of financial entanglement. Britain is not a bystander. It is a partner. And the suppression of Palestine Action is not about security. It is about protecting that partnership. The UK’s arms industry is deeply embedded in the Zionist war machine. Elbit, BAE Systems, and Thales aren’t abstract corporations, they are the very arteries of militarised capital. They tie British pensions, manufacturing contracts, and geopolitical strategy directly to Israeli violence. Every occupation of an Elbit site is not just a protest. It is an economic disruption. It is a threat to continuity. And that is intolerable to the ruling class.
This is why Palestine Action, despite being nonviolent, has faced more intense repression than many explicitly militant movements. They dared to act without permission. They understood that legality is not justice, that to ask the state to regulate its own crimes is to ask the hangman to cut the rope. Instead, they targeted the material bases of colonial warfare. And for that, they are punished.
Importantly, “Terrorism” is not a neutral word. It is a political weapon. One honed over decades to delegitimise any struggle that dares to resist the imperial order. Noam Chomsky made this plain when he wrote, “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: stop participating in it.”¹ But Western states don’t want to stop terrorism, they want to monopolise its definition.
Throughout the 20th century, liberation movements were almost universally labeled as terrorists. The FLN in Algeria, the ANC in South Africa, and the PLO in Palestine were all condemned for daring to fight back. The term was never about violence. It was about disobedience. It was about the challenge to colonial property, settler ideology, and capitalist accumulation.
As Arun Kundnani explains, terrorism became racially coded: “Violence by the powerful is policy. Violence by the powerless is terrorism.”³ The same logic now guides Germany’s banning of Samidoun and the UK’s repression of Palestine Action. The crime is not action. The crime is clarity. To speak plainly against genocide, to name apartheid, to connect imperialism and capital, this is what cannot be tolerated.
And the legal tools are already in place. The UK’s Terrorism Act, like the US PATRIOT Act and Germany’s Vereinsgesetz, is designed to be vague enough to apply to anyone who disturbs the peace of empire. The repression of these groups isn’t a break from law, it’s law doing exactly what it was written to do.
From the Global South to the Global North: Criminalising Solidarity Itself
Once the full force of criminalisation was reserved for guerrillas in the mountains of Colombia or anti-colonial fighters in Kenya. Today, it’s for the university student in London holding a banner, or the activist in Manchester locking onto an arms factory. This is the globalization of repression. What they tested in the South, they now deploy in the North.
Samidoun’s “crime” was to organise around the human rights of Palestinian prisoners. Palestine Action’s “crime” is direct action against a weapons manufacturer. Yet both are treated as national security threats. This isn’t a misapplication of the law, it is its full and intended use. And it reveals something vital: that solidarity itself has become sedition.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, “The state is not disappearing; it is being redesigned to protect capital.”⁸ And capital is what binds the British state to Zionist apartheid. The more we threaten those bonds, the more intense the repression becomes.
Feigned outrage at this moment is a luxury we cannot afford. It diverts energy into moral protest, when what we need is strategic preparation. Of course the state represses those who act. It always has. That is its role. To defend the property relations, to defend accumulation, to defend the status quo. Shock is for liberals. Revolutionaries must expect it.
To those wringing their hands, we say: stop pretending this is new. The ruling class has always criminalised those who challenge it. The cost of resistance is not a glitch. It’s the entry fee. As Anuradha Ghandy warned, “The state cannot tolerate people who dream beyond their sanctioned boundaries.”⁷ And Palestine Action has dared not only to dream, but to act.
So let us shrug off the shock. Let us laugh at the performative outrage. Let us understand this moment as the confirmation of everything we already knew: that we are right, and that we are winning ground, however slowly, through every occupied rooftop, every disabled conveyor belt, every shaken boardroom.
And let us prepare. Build legal infrastructure. Organise in cells. Protect each other. Share skills. Spread our tactics. Globalise our networks. Calculate the cost of repression and keep moving forward anyway.
As Walter Rodney reminds us, “The more radical the people’s politics, the more they will be criminalized by those in power.”⁹ So let us be radical. Let us be criminal in the eyes of empire. Because to stand with Palestine, to fight against genocide, capitalism, and colonialism and is certainly not terrorism. It is freedom. And we will fight for it until the last factory falls.
You know what to do.
Yours, warmly,
V.
Footnotes
Noam Chomsky, 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 85.
“Mandela Off US Terrorism Watch List,” BBC News, July 2, 2008.
Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2014), 13.
“Germany Bans Samidoun Network,” Deutsche Welle, November 3, 2023.
Rachel Charlton-Dailey, “Palestine Action: Why Are They Being Treated Like Terrorists?” The Guardian, January 2024.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 14.
Anuradha Ghandy, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement (Mumbai: LeftWord Books, 2004), 72.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.
Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969), 47.
Proud enemy of the state 🕊🐙🌷