To paraphrase Edward Said, to take action in support of Palestine in Britain is to find yourself in political terms an outlaw of sorts. This certainly seems like it’s the aim of the British state. As part of its campaign of repression against pro-Palestine activists, the Government has had a total of 18 people arrested, detained, and – despite being charged with criminal charges unrelated to terrorism – remanded under ‘counter terror’ powers, for disrupting a research and development facility in Filton belonging to Elbit Systems, ‘Israel’’s largest arms firm, back in August 2024. Their trial is scheduled for November 2025. This mass imprisonment has brought the number of political prisoners from Palestine Action up to a total of 21. 19 of these (the ‘Filton 18’ plus another detainee) are being held without trial, and 11 are being held in HMP Bronzefield. Not content with simply charging actionists for things like criminal damage, Kid Starver KC and his cabinet of cronies have turned up the heat, in an attempt to subvert popular opinion on the genocide happening in Gaza, and to ensure the fiscal future of ‘Israel’’s arms trade in Britain.
None of this will come as surprise to Palestinians. Indeed, the quote paraphrased above is from Said’s The Question of Palestine, where he states that originally it was Palestinians who found themselves ‘outlaws’ or ‘outsiders’ in the West. In particular, he drew attention to the way even the word ‘Palestinian’ was automatically associated with ‘terrorists’: “to many of my readers,” he stated, “the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of ‘terrorism’”. This was in part because of Western media and intellectual discourse, which at best took a liberal Zionist character, divorced the violent resistance of Palestinian militants from its context, and refused to say anything about Zionist terror. This portrayal of the Palestinians ran so deep in the West that the Palestinians served “essentially as a synonym for trouble – rootless, mindless, gratuitous trouble.”1 Not so different from today, really, when, for example, 100 of the BBC’s own staff have criticised the institution for “systematically dehumanis[ing] Palestinians”. So what we are witnessing today in the British state’s attempt to repress us is really just an expansion of the West’s longstanding support for ‘Israel’ and its contempt for Palestine.
The words ‘Palestinian’ (and ‘Muslim’) have long been considered by the British state as interchangeable with ‘terrorist’. With the application of counter-terrorism law to our activists, we are witnessing the further expansion of the category of ‘terrorist’. This is in part to delegitimise activists in the public perception. But it is also because calling them terrorists makes them more easier to repress. Speaking of her daughter’s detention, Sukaina Rajwani – the mother of actionist Fatema Zainab – told the BBC, “I believe the counter-terrorism legislation was used to intimidate and scare them and used as an excuse to keep them for longer.” Many of the people targeted in police raids had their homes and property damaged, and some of their families and loved ones were also subjected to police violence.
Inside prison, detainees are subjected to arbitrary and repressive restrictions. According to a report by Declassified UK, these have included actionist Zoe Rogers being “interrogated for seven days without charge, often in the middle of the night in a windowless cell”. Zoe “was not immediately offered a phone call” upon arrest, “and was held in the prison induction wing for six weeks.” Fatema also experienced harsh treatment, which included being “subjected to multiple random drug tests” and having all of her mail withheld. Her mother highlights that this reflects endemic Islamophobia in the prison system, a fact which is supported by a Nejma Collective report on the experience of Muslims in prison. It becomes abundantly clear that the counter terror laws are not being used in order to charge the actionists with a specific political crime they have allegedly committed, but because the category of ‘terrorist’ deprives them of rights that prisoners are supposed to be afforded; because it opens them up to another realm of violence. In essence, they are being pushed outside of the law, all the better to hurt them.
So again we return to this term ‘outlaw’, which is fast becoming the reality for us and other protestors in the country. As people challenge imperialism and colonial capitalism through direct action against the arms trade and climate breakdown, the repression will likely get worse (though as a fair few comradely critiques have put forward, by no means should we treat this as inevitable). Should we therefore flee from the term? I would argue not, for as many other writers have observed, the overlap between revolutionaries and outlaws has a long history. As the Palestinian intellectual and martyr Basel al-Araj explains: “The similarity between the revolutionary and the outlaw consists in their decision to deviate from accepted ‘systems’ and ‘laws’.” This theory he drew from the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s work on ‘social bandits’. Hobsbawm himself made the argument that the history of these bandits (taken from the Italian word bandito, meaning man outside the law) “cannot therefore be understood or properly studied except as part of the history of political power, which, at its highest levels, is the power of empires and states.” Furthermore, he stated that these particular forms of resistance arose because of the way these powers controlled the space within their borders, through the weaknesses therein. In fact, he goes on to say that it “occured only where power was unstable, absent or broken down.”2
Through their reaction to Palestine Action, subsequent governments, both Tory and Labour, have exposed their weakness. Assuming that decades-old narratives about Palestinians and Muslims would do the work for them, the British state didn’t find it necessary to intervene on behalf of the arms trade. It clearly thought that Islamophobia was part and parcel of the 21st century social contract, and that, aside from a few annoying day-long protests, the sites of companies like Elbit and its subsidiaries could carry on as usual, with the permission of both the government and the vast majority of people. The perceived legitimacy of the trade, its supposed ‘legality’, would protect it. At worst, they might have to deal with something like the Raytheon Six in Derry, but these actions were so few and far between that they were nothing to worry about. In the absolute worst case scenario, an arms company might have to shut down a factory, but again, rare was the day when they’d have to go to such lengths. There were, of course, protections for protestors; certain rights that allowed for proportionate responses to human rights violations and war crimes, but this was all offset by the fact that people did not and would not challenge the existing order in a substantial way. Until Palestine Action came along.
As al-Araj wrote:
The beginning of every revolution is an exit, an exit from the social order that power has enshrined in the name of law, stability, public interest, and the greater good. Every social and economic authority necessarily intersects with and is an extension of political authority.
In truth, we’ve not made any ‘exit’ per se. It’s not as if we’ve grown more extreme – we’ve simply kept on doing damage to the death dealers and the arms makers. If anything, it has been the law which exited or voided itself. Bit by bit, protections have been eroded. Suddenly, the justification and proportionality of the action could not be argued in court. More and more, it seemed like the law and social order would do anything to secure more convictions, all in the pursuit of maintaining its century-long ties with the Zionist entity and its arms manufacturing. With the manufacturers losing sites and profits, the rights protecting protestors came to be seen as a barrier to the continued operation of the war machine. Rather than risk its links with the settler colony, British law decided it would just tear itself apart. We have not exited the social order as much as the law has attempted to push us outside of it. Like many outlaws of old, all we have done is assert our rights against arbitrary laws, which are changed and enacted on the basis of the political and economic interests of those in power.
And not to repeat ourselves, but none of this treatment would surprise Palestinians. Being detained before (or without) trial is the reality for many Palestinians – as of February 5th, 3,369 people were being held in so-called ‘Administrative Detention’. There are 10,300 Palestinian prisoners in the entity’s prisons, many of whom will have been arrested since Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct 7th 2023. The laws which allow ‘Israel’ to do this are a holdover from the British Mandate, which set up emergency powers for this purpose.
Outside of Administrative Detention, Palestinian prisoners face horrific abuse within these sites of carceral war which B’Tselem calls torture camps. And this is without getting into the brutal genocidal war being waged in the open air prison that is Gaza. All of which is made possible through Elbit Systems, ‘Israel’’s biggest arms manufacturer, which supplies the ‘Israeli’ military with 85% of their drones and 85% of their land-based equipment. The company’s surveillance equipment monitors Palestinians through drone operations, at border points, and across ‘Israel’’s apartheid wall. Through its subsidiary IMI Systems, Elbit supplies the IOF with all of its small calibre munitions. Its drones are used to kill Palestinians en masse, and have also been used to target aid workers as part of the Zionist entity’s many Geneva Convention violations. In the pursuit of genocide, everyone is fair game, and we are now seeing the colonial boomerang coming back to us. Repression applied at home to ensure supply lines to the frontier aren’t disrupted.
It is important to take note here of the fact that the overlap between revolutionaries and outlaws goes both ways. It is important that, in trying to free our comrades who are political prisoners, we do not forget, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, those “unfortunate victims of the infamous social order against which the revolution was directed”; those who “have been incarcerated for years behind the walls of the gaols and penitentiaries in expiation for petty offences.” Basel al-Araj holds up Malcolm X, the fierce anti-racist and anti-Zionist revolutionary, as one of many examples of those who became revolutionaries upon passing through prison. Palestine Action prisoner Stuart Bretherton writes of how “past struggles have taught us that battles against capitalism, imperialism, apartheid or genocide aren’t confined to existing outside the prison walls. Struggles have been fundamentally altered from inside prison.” As reports such as that of Nejma Collective make clear, the violence of the prison extends beyond political prisoners, and, as such, it cannot be resisted piecemeal. Bretherton calls for the provision of more substantial and consistent support to political prisoners for the purpose of building resistance.
In his book Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm quotes an old Chinese saying: “It is better to break the law than starve to death.”3 What is it then, when people are being starved to death as part of a genocidal strategy? What is it, when they are being bombed and shot in Gaza, and beaten and raped in Zionist prisons? When unspeakable violence is being committed, and our country is complicit? Is it right to break the law then? Perhaps an answer can be found in what the US outlaw and early prison reformer Jack Black said of prison conditions:
everything bad, by its very nature, tends to grow worse. Hatred makes hatred, violence makes violence, and brutality causes brutality. But any tendency in human life can only go so far. Then it swings back.4
We are – as we have always been – the swinging back against Zionist brutality and hatred. All we have ever struggled for is a world in which Palestinians can live out their lives with freedom, dignity, and self-determination. Is better to break the law for that? Whilst the system and laws allowing their repression continue to exist, yes. And if the social order facilitating genocide pushes us outside the law, it won’t stop us. We’ll keep fighting anyway.