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LONDON: Eighty-year-old Deborah Hinton, a retired English magistrate, does not look like most people’s idea of a terrorist.

But she is currently on bail awaiting trial under the UK’s Terrorism Act for supporting a proscribed terrorist organization. If convicted, she faces a possible sentence of up to 14 years in jail.

Hinton is just one of hundreds of British people from all walks of life who have taken to the streets in peaceful protest against what they see as their government’s cynical and disproportionate decision to label the activist group Palestine Action as a terror organization.

She is not even the oldest protester scooped up by police. In July, Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired vicar, was arrested in London.

Palestine Action, founded in 2020, is a direct-action organization committed to “non-violent yet disruptive” targeting of British arms companies it accuses of supporting the Israeli military.

On Aug. 9, during a protest in support of the organization, 532 people were arrested in central London. Of those, 65 percent were over the age of 50, including 147 between the ages of 60 and 69, almost 100 between 70 and 79, and 15 between 80 and 89.

That evening, TV news channels broadcast extraordinary footage of embarrassed-looking Metropolitan Police officers handcuffing dozens of old age pensioners and taking them into custody. Their alleged crime was protesting peacefully while carrying signs proclaiming: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Anyone in the UK who even posts a message on social media in support of the group now risks arrest. On Aug. 17, Irish novelist Sally Rooney joined the clamor of voices raised in protest against the “alarming attack on free speech.” She pledged to “go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide,” and to provide funding for the group through royalties from her book.

She might now face arrest, a situation that highlights the moral and legal quagmire into which the British government has stumbled over Gaza.

The protesters arrested so far “have tended to be people in the later stages of their life,” said Katie McFadden, a senior associate with the law firm Hodge Jones and Allen, which is representing many of those arrested.

“They are retired. They don’t have to worry about things like losing their jobs, or whether a bank will approve them for a mortgage if they’ve been deemed a terrorist. And they see the danger of society moving in this direction and they really want to stand up to protect freedom of speech.”

What they are doing, she added, “is incredibly brave. What they are going through is terrifying, and yet they are willing to take this action because they believe it’s the right thing to do, to protect the rights of all of us.”

Alongside other members of the specialist protests team from her law firm, McFadden has been on hand to observe the arrests and processing of several clients. The police officers, she said, “look mortified, and frankly they should be because this isn’t why they went into this job, to arrest someone who looks like their grandmother.”

Members of Palestine Action, she said, could have been prosecuted for their actions under normal criminal law.

“But to designate them as terrorists is a step way too far and that has resulted in the extraordinary scenes that we’ve seen of people being arrested and carried and dragged away by the police simply for holding a sign,” she added.

Palestine Action, responsible for a series of direct action activities intended to highlight Britain’s role in the war in Gaza, was banned in July after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and sprayed red paint on two transport aircraft. The designation of the group as a terrorist organization also means that anyone who expresses support for it in public can be charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act.

The ban drew widespread criticism, even from the UN. On July 25, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said the action taken by the UK government “misuses the gravity and impact of terrorism to expand it beyond those clear boundaries, to encompass further conduct that is already criminal under the law.”

The decision, he added, “appears disproportionate and unnecessary” and is “an impermissible restriction (on) freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association … at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.”

The British government justified the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization primarily on the grounds that the group had orchestrated and carried out aggressive and intimidatory attacks against businesses, institutions and members of the public which, according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, crossed the legal thresholds set out in the Terrorism Act 2000.

“Anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive, or to criticize the actions of any and every government, including our own, has the freedom to do so,” Cooper said in an op-ed for The Observer newspaper on Aug. 17.

“The recent proscription of the group Palestine Action does not prevent those protests, and to claim otherwise is nonsense.

“That proscription concerns one specific organization alone — a group that has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries to individuals.”

Cooper said she was unable to provide specific details of this so as to avoid prejudicing forthcoming criminal trials.

According to Declassified UK, an investigative media organization that focuses on the effects of Britain’s military activities on human rights, there is evidence to suggest that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization might have been the result of lobbying by Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company whose facilities in the UK have been targeted by the group.

Through Freedom of Information applications, Declassified UK discovered that three senior representatives of the company met Home Office officials in December 2024, but no details of their discussions have been made public.

The meeting followed an attack on an Elbit Systems facility in Filton, near Bristol, on Aug. 6 last year when, even before Palestine Action was proscribed, 24 members of the group were arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act.

The group claimed the company was supplying the Israeli military with drones and other equipment being used against civilians in Gaza, an allegation the firm denied.

On Aug. 11, Bezhalel Machlis, the president and CEO of Elbit Systems in Israel, announced the company had won two new contracts, worth $260 million, for the supply of unspecified “advanced airborne munitions” to Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Machlis, a former artillery officer with the Israel Defense Forces, is also a director of the company’s UK operation.

Meanwhile, the Filton 24, as the arrested protesters became known, have been in custody for an entire year, denied bail and held without trial.

Zoe Rogers, who was 20 when she was arrested, was interrogated by counterterrorism police for days and still does not have a trial date, having pleaded not guilty to charges of violent disorder, criminal damage and aggravated burglary.

During her time in a high-security prison in Surrey she wrote a poem, which her mother, a devout Christian, shared with the media last week.

“When they ask why,” part of it read, “I tell them about the children … I tell them about the boy found carrying his brother’s body inside his bloody backpack.

“I tell them about the girl whose hanging corpse ended at the knees. I tell them about the father holding up his headless toddler.

“It was love, not hate, that called me.”

It seems likely that Zoe, and more than 700 other Britons arrested so far for supporting Palestine Action, will soon be joined by more. Another protest is planned for Sept. 6, at which organizers hope at least 1,000 people will defy the law.

There is no doubt that many British companies are supporting Israel’s military operations in Gaza. In July 2024, the British government suspended about 30 licenses for the export of arms to Israel because of a “clear risk” that the weaponry “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

But the Campaign Against Arms Trade later discovered that licenses for the export of parts for F-35 fighter jets, “currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza,” were exempt from the ban.

Through Freedom of Information requests, it found that the 15 percent of F-35 components made in Britain had earned UK companies at least £360 million ($485 million) since 2016, and that scores of UK-based companies were profiting from the sale of the parts and other military exports to Israel.

Since April 2015, about 1,331 licenses have been issued to 174 British companies for military exports to Israel worth more than £630 million, along with 73 unspecified “open” licenses, the value of which is unknown.

“There’s a huge lack of transparency and the government’s basically lying about what’s going on,” said Emily Apple, the media coordinator for CAAT.

Elbit Systems UK Ltd., one of the companies most targeted by Palestine Action, tops the list of British arms exporters to Israel. The company, and UAV Tactical Systems Ltd., a joint drone-manufacturing operation with a French arms company, were awarded 28 military export licenses for Israel between 2021 and the end of last year.

In May, the UK government issued a joint statement with France and Canada condemning Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, as “wholly disproportionate” and bemoaning the “intolerable … level of human suffering in Gaza.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently said the UK would officially recognize a Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel acts to end the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza.

Now, the British government is in the awkward position of condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza while continuing to supply it with hardware used to inflict the suffering there, and locking up its own citizens who protest against this perceived hypocrisy.

As one poster on social media platform X remarked after the mass arrests in London on Aug. 9: “Who knew that cardboard and marker pens were key instruments of terrorism? I thought it was Elbit drones and F-35s.”

Human rights groups and lawyers have condemned the mass arrests as a betrayal of fundamental British values, including the right to free speech.

“Peaceful protest is a fundamental right,” said Sacha Deshmukh, the CEO of Amnesty International UK, on the day of the latest arrests.

“People are understandably outraged by the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza and are entitled under international human rights law to express their horror.

“The protesters in Parliament Square were not inciting violence and it is entirely disproportionate to the point of absurdity to be treating them as terrorists.”

In a statement to Arab News, Peter Leary, deputy director of the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said: “Shamefully, instead of taking any meaningful action to end its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the British government seems determined to silence those speaking out for Palestinian rights.

“Rather than wasting public resources and attacking fundamental democratic freedoms, the government should immediately end all arms sales to Israel and impose wide-ranging sanctions to pressure Israel to end the genocide.”
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