Israel’s Allies Are Using Anti-Terror Laws to Lock Up Anti-Genocide Activists
Nuvpreet Kalra
On August 15th 2024, six police officers waited with handcuffs for a plane to land at Heathrow Airport in London, England. As soon as the plane landed, they entered and arrested the journalist Richard Medhurst under the Terrorism Act, taking him to a cell where they held him for almost 24 hours. Two weeks later, an academic was detained at Chicago O’Hare Airport by the FBI and DHS. Professor Danny Shaw was returning from a Palestine Film Festival in London. Both Richard and Danny’s personal belongings were seized and they faced interrogations.
Early in the morning on August 29th, 16 mostly plain-clothed balaclava-clad counter-terrorism police officers turned up at the home of Sarah Wilkinson, journalist and anti-war activist who was due to sail on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla earlier this year. They ransacked her home, destroyed items including her mother’s ashes in an urn, and arrested her under the Terrorism Act for her posts on Twitter. On that same day, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, a group taking action against Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, was charged under the Terrorism Act and another Palestine Action activist’s home was raided for a second time.
The British state used Section 12 of the Terrorism Act to arrest Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson, and to charge Richard Barnard. This law has been used to silence support for the Palestinian resistance, as virtually all Palestinian resistance groups have been proscribed- banned-by the British government. The particular crime that Richard and Sarah were alleged to have committed is “expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization”. Richard Medhurst appears to be the first journalist arrested under this law. We cannot understate the dangers of this heightened censorship of journalists and activists.
A police officer asked: “why do you think Palestinians are better than white people?”
Richard and Sarah both faced shockingly poor treatment by the police. In a video he posted on his social media, Richard explained how he was placed in solitary confinement and had to repeatedly ask for water and his other basic rights in custody. The police ransacked his suitcase and seized all of his journalistic equipment and his shoelaces. Richard was told he had the right to inform someone, but when he asked to contact his family, the police told him he could not. Richard said he “felt the whole process was intended to humiliate, intimidate and dehumanize me, and treat me like a criminal.”
In an interview, Sarah revealed the shocking brutality of her arrest. Her home was ransacked by masked police officers who refused to show her their warrant, did not allow her to get dressed nor take her medicine for Crohn’s disease. They put Sarah in a van, and ransacked her home. She said they took all of the electronic equipment in her home, including phones she could not identify, £200 ($262) from her wallet and her passport which they did not declare. Shockingly cruelly, the police poured out some of her mother’s ashes from their urn. Sarah called this “extraordinarily malicious looting”. During her interview at the police station, they demanded Sarah give them all of the details of her Palestinian contacts in Gaza. She revealed in her police interview, a police officer asked: “why do you think Palestinians are better than white people?”
Richard has been released pending investigation. Sarah has been released on bail, but she is not allowed to touch any electronic device, use social media, or travel. Sarah has called it a house arrest in all but name. Sarah said, the British government “doesn’t want people to know what’s happening to the people of Gaza, how many deaths a day, how many children are being massacred and piled up into plastic bags. It doesn’t want people to know this. And so the only way they can do this is by silencing the journalists and the people that broadcast the news. They are facilitating the genocide to the point that they can’t allow people to know the facts and details”
Richard Barnard’s group Palestine Action have successfully shut down one Elbit Systems factory in Oldham and their headquarters in London. The actions of the group have resulted in Elbit being dropped by their sole recruiters too. The success of Palestine Action has made them a direct target of Israel and Britain. In response to their successful actions, which have cost the weapons manufacturer, which supplies 85% of Israel’s weapons, tens of millions of dollars in damage, politicians have sought to repress their actions. It was revealed that the Israeli embassy in Britain asked the British Attorney General to intervene to prosecute protestors, and a member of Parliament, Lord Walney, has advised proscribing Palestine Action as a “extreme protest group.”
Britain and the US have a long tradition of branding those resisting imperialism and colonialism as “terrorists”.
These arrests are attempts to use public figures as examples to repress solidarity with Palestine. It is in Britain’s interests, as an active participant in the genocide in Gaza, to silence accurate reporting. Britain’s role in the genocide has been more subtle than its allies, but it is playing an integral role in facilitating massacares, destruction and colonization. They have conducted surveillance flights over Gaza for Israel (which permitted Israel and the US to commit the Nuseirat massacre), they have secretly shipped arms to Israel through British airspace, and have sent at least 60 military planes to Israel since October. Britain and the US have a long tradition of branding those resisting imperialism and colonialism as “terrorists”.
The United States placed Nelson Mandela on their Terrorist Watch List until 2008, a full 18 years after the anti-apartheid activist had been released from jail and became President of South Africa. The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, likewise called the African National Congress a “terrorist” organization.
The description and definition of a terrorist has been applied overwhelmingly to Muslim and other racialized communities, who have been disproportionately surveilled, targeted and criminalized. Through the PATRIOT Act in the US and similar Prevent policy in Britain, Islamophobia and racism is policy and practice, justified through national security concerns. We have seen these practices enforced through ‘No fly lists’, deportations, surveillance programmes, over policing, and border control to name but a few examples. Similar policy is enforced for organizations resisting state violence, and journalists and whistleblowers. Journalists exposing the truths about American, British and Israeli crimes have been consistently faced punitive treatment. Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, and Chelsea Manning are all too familiar names in the fight to protest the criminalization of journalism.
The latest attacks on journalists and activists in Britain come as police and universities in the US are trying to suppress action for Palestine as students return to campuses. NYU has made the political ideology of Zionism a “protected characteristic” and the University of Michigan called police to brutalize students holding a die-in for Palestine while people holding Israeli and US flags watched on and laughed. In Germany, along with the banning of the Palestinian flag and protests for Palestine, it seems like almost every day a new video is released showing German police brutally attacking young anti-genocide activists.
Let’s be clear here. If any of these journalists had been reporting in support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, if any of them had travelled to Israel and returned to the United States, if any of them had been targeting Palestinian businesses, they would not be facing up to 14 years in prison. These are political arrests to silence those exposing the truth of a genocide that both Britain and the United States are actively participating in.
We are at an inflection point in our movement. Crackdowns on our movement are only increasing and becoming more violent. But these are the actions of states trying to cover up a genocide they are directly facilitating. From the bellies of the beast in Britain, Germany and the United States, we will continue to speak out against the genocide in Palestine and for those in our movement who are being criminalized for doing so. We must always remember, it is not a crime to expose the truth or to stand in solidarity with the oppressed – it is a crime to commit genocide.
Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s Digital Content Producer.
Nuvpreet completed a Bachelor’s in Politics & Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Internet Equalities at the University of the Arts London. As a student, she was part of movements to divest and decolonize, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups. Nuvpreet joined CODEPINK as an intern in 2023, and now produces digital and social media content. In England, she organizes with groups for Palestinian liberation, abolition and anti-imperialism.