17.07.2025

Exposing the arms trade with genocidal Israel

Beyond the stench of hypocrisy

Yvette Cooper presides over a Palestine Action ban, yet celebrates WSPU suffragettes. Meanwhile, the Labour government facilitates Israeli genocide in Gaza. Anne McShane points the finger at the real criminals

As part of the government’s ruthless crackdown on protests against the banning of Palestine Action, dozens of activists have been arrested across Britain on allegations of supporting a terror group. The government has made it illegal to fundraise for PA, to wear or display something deemed be in support of it, or express “an opinion or belief” which might encourage support for it. Membership of or support for PA is now a criminal offence under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

In central London 42 people were arrested at a peaceful protest at the Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela statues in Parliament Square. Participants carried placards condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but also the banning of PA. Among them was Graham Bash, a Jewish anti-Zionist and socialist. In an online interview on July 13 his partner, Jackie Walker, described how the police appeared embarrassed to be arresting a group of mostly elderly protestors - many of them peace activists. The police were doubtless acting on orders coming from the government.

The 2000 Terrorism Act defines ‘terrorism’ as a threat or act of “serious violence against persons and property”, a serious “risk to public health and safety” and “damage to electronic systems”. There are 71 groups on the banned list - mainly Islamic jihadi and white supremacist organisations.

Glorification

The reasons for the bans are listed variously as carrying out suicide bombings, armed attacks on communities, promotion of violence against migrants, and glorification of mass shootings. But PA is proscribed because it “is a pro-Palestinian group with the stated aim to support Palestinian sovereignty by using direct criminal action tactics to halt the sale and export of military equipment to Israel”.¹ The targets listed are various arms manufacturers with immediate connections to Israel. PA activists have also sprayed red paint into the engines of two RAF Voyager aircraft to highlight their use for air-to-air refuelling of Israeli fighter jets.

Home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced in the Commons: “Such acts do not represent legitimate acts of protest and the level of seriousness of Palestine Action’s activity has met the test for proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000.” She made clear that spray-painting factories which produce weapons for use in the ongoing genocide is now “terrorism”. Any defence of the group which carried out these anti-war actions is acting in support of such ‘terror’. As PA recently said in a post on X, “The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these warplanes, but the war crimes that have been enabled with those planes because of the UK government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.”

In an interview with The Guardian just before the ban came into effect, PA co-founder Huda Ammori said she thought the government was frustrated by the fact that, despite being charged with serious offences, “activists have regularly been acquitted and, where convicted, jail time has been rare, although … dozens have spent time in prison while awaiting trial.” She continued: “They’ve tried to do a few different things to try and deter us, from making it harder to rely on legal defences or increasing use of remand, or they raid you a lot more and then put more severe charges on you.” However, that has not deterred Palestine Action, “so now they’re hugely overreaching because they don’t like us or agree with our cause”.²

It is clear that the government is using these extraordinarily harsh measures to deter. A lengthy prison sentence is a big price to pay for attending a demonstration carrying the wrong placard. Those who defied the ban last weekend need to be commended for their courage. They need to be supported by the entire workers’ and solidarity movement. We do not want them to be picked off and isolated. Therefore it is encouraging that trades councils and unions are speaking out about repression of PA and that there seems to be a determination to defy the ban.

Pankhursts

On the same day that Yvette Cooper announced the proscription of PA, she posed in a photo call with another 200 female MPs, each wearing a handcrafted purple, white and green sash. These were in the colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the suffragettes, who, between 1912 and 1914 fought for female suffrage using methods which included burning down the homes of politicians who opposed votes for women, bombing government buildings and churches, including Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral, booby-trapping post boxes, posting letter bombs, and making assassination attempts.

The campaign of the WSPU was relentless and audacious. Its most famous leaders, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, described their actions as legitimate forms of protest. On July 19 1912 the Theatre Royal in Dublin was set on fire. Liberal prime minister, Henry Herbert Asquith, was due to speak. Just a few days earlier he narrowly escaped a hatchet thrown towards him by suffragette Mary Leigh (she attached a suffragette message to it). Another well-known government figure, the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, was targeted for reneging on his promises to support women’s voting rights. He and Asquith were sent letter bombs and constantly harangued on the street, with Emily Davison whipping a man on the street in Aberdeen in November 1912 who she believed to be Lloyd George in disguise. Lloyd George’s home was bombed by Davison in February 1913. As well as attacks on politicians and judges, the WPSU planted bombs on trains and in churches, and smashed thousands of windows.

By August 1914, when the WSPU decided to end the campaign in the patriotic interest of pursuing World War I, the costs of the damage was approximately £700,000 - equivalent to almost £85 million today. This does not tell the whole story - there were the serious physical injuries caused, particularly to postmen, and at least five deaths, including the famous trampling of Emily Davison by the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. She was trying to attach a WSPU sash to the beast.

The UK parliamentary website presents a short summary of the WSPU, including how the lack of government action spurred the group towards bolder actions, which “attracted a great deal of attention to the campaign for votes for women”.³ On February 6 2018, to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave women graduates and property owners over the age of 30 the vote for the first time, women MPs in Westminster wore symbols in commemoration of the suffragettes’ struggle. Stella Creasy sported a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Daughter of Pankhurst’. Others wore sashes or rosettes in the colours of the WSPU, including Yvette Cooper. She herself had written in 2013, to mark the anniversary of the death of one activist, how “the centenary of the death of Emily Wilding Davison should be a moment to mark. A hundred years on from the shocking death of a suffragette, we should remember not just the trials of those who fought for the right to vote, but the generations of women who have campaigned against discrimination and injustice.”⁴

Cooper and her fellow female MPs trace their privileged status as elected politicians back to the militant struggle of the WSPU. The bombings, arson attacks, hunger strikes, chainings to the railings of Downing Street, booby-trapping of train services a hundred years ago, or thereabouts - all are considered legitimate actions in the face of the continued refusal of parliament to concede the vote. They are proud and appreciative of the actions of their forebears, who sacrificed so much to win the vote for upper and middle class women.

For our part, we are proud and appreciate the other Pankhurst, Sylvia, who broke with her mother and sister with the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Men were allowed to join and the ELFS demanded universal suffrage, including all working-class men and women, a goal only obtained with the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 which extended the vote to all women over 21, giving them equal voting rights with men. In 1914 the ELFS became the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, and in 1918 the Workers’ Socialist Federation. Needless to say Sylvia Pankhurst opposed World War I and observed no patriotic truce with the government.

Genocide

While Cooper and the parliamentary feminists look back at the WSPU with admiration, albeit through sepia-tinted glasses, they actually play a contemporary role nearer in spirit to Asquith and Lloyd George. Palestine Action activists have been putting their personal freedom on the line as part of a desperate attempt to expose and stop a genocide - a genocide which has razed Gaza to the ground and cost the lives of more than 60,000. Gaza is the hungriest place on earth, it has the highest number of child amputees, its entire population of just over two million faces the prospect of imminent death due to deliberate Israeli starvation. Yet still the bombs rain down on them, they are shot in their hundreds when seeking food and water, and are now to be pushed into a giant concentration camp.

PA has taken direct action against Elbit Systems, a major developer of weaponry for the Israeli army. As the BDS movement reported in May 2025, Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms company. It is privately owned, and provides 80% of the weapons and equipment for Israel’s land forces and 85% of the combat drones used by the airforce. Elbit claims a double-digit growth across all sectors and it has been busy buying up competing businesses over the last eight years. The company is flooded with orders from the IDF as it fights its wars in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and, of course, Gaza.

That Palestine Action is subjected to a state ban for alleged terrorism when its aim is to stop a genocide is extraordinary in and of itself. And when you take into account the fact that the minister who presided over the ban, Yvette Cooper, celebrates the WSPU, what we have goes way beyond the normal level of hypocrisy you would expect of Labour ministers.

She and the whole Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer are covering-up for, facilitating, Israeli genocide in Gaza. In the eyes of global public opinion that is an unforgivable crime. It is not the activists of PA, and the defenders of the right to protest, who should be in the dock facing trial. It is the Labour cabinet, Labour ministers and each and every one of the 385 MPs who voted for the ban.