The State Wants to Label Me a Terrorist

On 6 August 2024, six Palestine Action activists used a repurposed prison van to crash through the fence of a research facility owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons firm.

I watched the footage of them destroying weaponry while coming under attack from Elbit’s security guards. I remember the striking moment when 19-year-old Fatema Zainab Rajwani, having just been handcuffed by police officers, says ‘You’ve been Pal Actioned!’

The court was later told they had destroyed forty units of Israeli military equipment. Among these were quadcopter drones, which have been used extensively by the Israeli army during the Gaza genocide — playing sound recordings of crying infants to lure Palestinians onto the streets before shooting and killing them.

A day before the Filton action, I joined other activists in a direct action against a Barclays outlet in Burnley, protesting the bank’s investment in Elbit. At around 2am, we smashed the windows, sprayed red paint on the facade and left behind a message that read ‘Nada Salem, 4. Slaughtered by an Elbit drone as she tried to hide in her sister’s arms’. The action lasted 50 seconds. We caused £212,000 pounds in damage. 

Our action followed dozens of similar ones against Barclays. The aim was to cost it more than it would gain from its partnership with Elbit. Two months later, it was reported that Barclays had pulled all of its shares, worth more than 3.4 million, out of the company.

All this came after months of terror in Gaza. A study published in The Lancet estimated that the real death toll by the end of June 2024 was approximately 64,260, a figure roughly 40 percent higher than official reports on account of the bodies trapped under the rubble of decimated buildings. Now it is climbing towards 80,000.

Even when the ICJ ruled that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, the massacres continued unabated. Five-year-old Hind Rajab was shot 335 times by the IDF, with six members of her family and two emergency rescue paramedics killed alongside her. Seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna’s mutilated body was photographed dangling from a destroyed building in Rafah. Mass graves were uncovered full of naked bodies with their hands tied. When our case went to trial and my co-defendant took the stand, his barrister asked him why he had felt compelled to take action. His answer was simple: ‘Murder on a scale I haven’t seen in my lifetime’.

We traced the flow of blood back to our own country, to the factories that manufacture the parts embedded in the bodies of Palestinian children, and to the banks that finance them. For us, direct action was a way of obstructing the supply chain of genocide, damaging the machinery of death. We wanted, said my co-defendant, to ‘isolate and strip Elbit of its resources’.

Elbit’s role in Palestine was not disputed during our trial. The prosecution lawyers admitted that it was a ‘primary supplier’ of military equipment to the Israeli army, including ‘drones, bombs and munitions’. They agreed that equipment manufactured by Elbit had been used by the Israeli military during operations in Gaza, and they acknowledged that ‘Barclays PLC provided investments, loans and other corporate financial services’ to Elbit.

The fact that we took action in opposition to Israel’s campaign of terror could not have been clearer. But now the state is trying to sentence us as terrorists.

Both the Filton action and ours took place more than a year before Palestine Action was proscribed. Over the following months, we saw the state take extraordinary measures to punish people whose only intention was to save lives. But through it all I remained optimistic about our case. The reality of the situation was plain to see.

Then the news broke about the Filton 4. For the first time in British legal history, activists who had been convicted of property damage were sentenced as terrorists, with the jury kept in the dark about the possibility this sentence might be applied. Two weeks later, after a jury of ten had returned a guilty verdict for us, we were told we faced the same prospect. Judge Philip Parry was considering applying a ‘terrorist connection’ to our offence, using the Filton 4 ruling as a basis.

When the CPS fell in line, it felt like the impossible had happened. We had just come out of a short trial for criminal damage before being told that we had actually been on trial for terrorism — unbeknown to the defendants, the lawyers and the jury.

In 2023, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion staged a similar protest against Barclays, breaking windows at the bank’s Canary Wharf headquarters and causing £500k worth of damage. They were not treated as terrorists and they were even spared jail. In 2024, 62-year-old Alan Murphy was convicted of possessing explosives that he intended to use to blow up HSBC bank in Blackpool. He did not face a terror link at sentencing. Why is our case being handled so differently? It seems that in today’s Britain, terrorism is invoked the moment someone decides to turn their outrage at senseless killing into concrete action.

Ellie Kamio is one of the Filton 4 and a former nursery teacher. In her closing speech before sentencing, she said every child she looked after was ‘the centre of someone’s world — their mum, their dad, their grandparents — and to imagine what it would be like for any of them with what was happening in Palestine it literally broke me.’ Kamio has now been branded a terrorist. Soon there will be hundreds more of us: teachers, students, support workers, artists, retirees, people from every sector of society carrying this label for life, all because of the state’s war on empathy with Palestinians.

A day before we were convicted, I heard Fatema Zainab’s mother say that ‘If terrorism is saving lives, then so be it!’ Her words continue to resonate, and they reveal a truth the state cannot seem to grasp: that as long as there are people who believe Palestinian lives are worth saving, direct action against the Israeli weapons trade will continue.