On 11 June 1914, a bomb exploded inside Westminster Abbey, damaging the Coronation Chair, a symbol of the British monarchy and state power. No one was hurt.
The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a group of suffragettes campaigning for women’s right to vote, was clear about its motives for planting the bomb. In a note near the crime scene, the group took responsibility for the action: “No person was endangered by this explosion. It is a protest against the Government’s refusal to give women the vote.”
No one was prosecuted specifically for this crime, although WSPU members were targeted in other ways and on other occasions. Between 1905 and 1914, roughly 1,000 women were imprisoned for their involvement in the direct action campaign to give women legal equality with men in the voting booth and beyond.
Around three hundred women were force-fed in these prisons while on hunger strike for their cause. Many of these brave women had their bodies brutalised and were damaged for life by the British state, which committed immense resources to incarcerating women who simply demanded parity with men.
The suffragette struggle is now widely and rightly recognised as just. The platform of equal votes for women on which these activists campaigned has been achieved and even celebrated in the very premises of the Parliament that they once tried to bomb.
'Deeds not words'
One hundred years after the suffragettes adopted the slogan “Deeds not words,” activists are faced with a very different set of priorities. Women have the vote in most countries around the world.
Yet, mothers are being slaughtered in Gaza simply for trying to feed their starving families. Arms companies are profiting from the slaughter as they battle-test their weapons for use in other war zones.
A new and lethal model of humanitarian aid distribution that involves terrorising a population and shooting as a mode of crowd control is being forged. Israel has now openly declared its intention to build a concentration camp in Rafah to cram the entire population of Gaza along the border with Egypt, likely to facilitate their expulsion from their land once and for all.
The UK is heavily complicit in the international arms trade that has made the destruction of Gaza not only possible but profitable. Aside from a few symbolic suspensions of roughly 30 arms export licenses, 21 months of some of the largest protests the UK has ever seen have done little to persuade our elected representatives to end UK complicity in the Gaza genocide.
Amid the passivity and silence of state actors faced with the slaughter of Gaza, and the decision by the governments to ignore millions of people marching regularly against the war in London and across the UK, many activists believe more effective strategies are needed, including honouring and implementing the suffragette principle, “Deeds not words.”
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In 2020, Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard founded Palestine Action. In Ammori’s words, the group aimed to “bypass politicians and go straight to the aggressors.”
By vandalising factories, glueing themselves to roofs, spraying paint on Elbit facilities, and destroying military equipment, they hoped to force Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems, to close its weapons manufacturing factories, which are spread across the UK, from Bristol to Leicester to Shenstone. These actions led to shutting down Elbit UK Headquarters in London and factories of Elbit subsidiaries and associated companies Elite KL, Elbit-Thales JV, and UAV Engines Ltd.
Palestine Action also targeted companies allegedly involved in the operations of Elbit and its weapons manufacturing, including Barclays, property managers Jones Lang LaSalle, real estate giant Fisher German, the web hosting service Naked Creativity, the merger and acquisitions law firm MLL, and Elbit’s weapons transporters Kuehne & Nagel.
In most of these cases, once the companies made simple cost-benefit calculations, they concluded that it was better to cut their ties with a company so steeped in genocide than to become the target of a relentless campaign of direct action.
In November 2024, Elbit Systems lost a £2.1 billion contract with the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Elbit Systems became toxic and expensive to associate with. In the view of supporters of such direct action, lives in Gaza were thus saved as Elbit factories made fewer weapons for Israel.
Growing authoritarianism
In court, Palestine actionists have argued that they were breaking laws against the destruction of property to prevent the greater harm of the loss of lives in Gaza. Judges and juries have been persuaded by these arguments and determined that even actionists who engaged in vandalism were not guilty of a crime.
When they have been allowed to defend themselves in court, many actionists have been unanimously acquitted. This pattern of acquittal shifted in 2025, with the Filton 18, who were detained under terrorism powers after they broke into an Elbit weapon manufacturing hub in Filton.
It is important to recognise that those who engage in direct action for Palestine are willing to serve prison time. As with the suffragettes from a century earlier, this is part of their sacrifice. Palestine Action never argued that their direct action should not carry risks or be free of consequences.
Their path was always going to be a difficult one, and state repression was expected. Yet, even though much of the current state crackdown could have been predicted in advance, the UK proscription of this group on July 2 as a terrorist organisation is a terrifying turn of events that is without precedent in the UK.
No broadly-based grassroots political movement has ever been banned in this way. We need to ask ourselves, and our political representatives, what our supposed leaders are doing to this country when they criminalise the mere act of holding a sign in solidarity with Palestine Action at a London protest. Notably, these same leaders refuse to prosecute British citizens who are actively perpetrating war crimes in Gaza.
Any attempt to conflate direct actions of the sort organised by Palestine Action with terrorism, empties the word of meaning. Such accusations create a legal regime in which infractions become so widespread that they are unenforceable.
Ministers who voted to proscribe the group claim that criminalising nonviolent direct action as terrorism is consistent with free speech, but there are many for whom opposition to genocide has no meaning when it stops with words.
A state cannot claim that dissent from the government’s pro-Israel position is fully protected while actively criminalising speech in solidarity with groups that translate opposition to genocide into actions.
On 5 July 2025, when the government’s proscription came into full effect, Palestine Action ceased to exist as a public organisation. Palestine Action closed their social media accounts and their website in order to not endanger supporters who might inadvertently share a post.
To Kill a War Machine, a documentary about Palestine Action produced by Rainbow Collective, had its British Board of Film Classification rating removed, with the warning attached that screening or distributing the film would likely constitute a terrorism offence.
But whatever the fate of Palestine Action’s court challenges of proscription will be, the concept of direct action is too broad to be entirely encompassed within any legislation.
No state is powerful enough to control every word we utter and every thought we think. Groups can be banned, proscribed, criminalised, and persecuted, but if the cause for which they fought is a just one, such suppression is likely to only strengthen the movement over the long term. Ultimately, however, the greatest damage the proscription will do is erode democratic rights and freedoms.
Many of the same Parliamentarians who recently celebrated the rights won by the suffragettes a century ago also voted in favour of the home secretary’s move to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Could it be that if this government were in charge in 1925, the suffragettes would have been proscribed as terrorists?
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and The Nation and her writing has been translated into eleven languages
Follow Rebecca on Blue Sky @rrgould and subscribe to her Substack.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.