The "Liberal" International Order Is Criminalizing Palestine Protests

As Western governments repress Palestine solidarity and enable Israel’s impunity, the “liberal international order” is no longer bothering to manufacture consent.

On Saturday, July 5, in London, 29 people, including an 83-year-old retired Anglican priest, were arrested under the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act of 2000 — not for targeting civilians, or endangering public safety, but merely for holding posters that read, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” The protesters were later released on bail but could face criminal charges, and potentially even incarceration, for breaking a law that had only gone into effect that morning.

Three days earlier, on July 2, the British Parliament had voted to ban Palestine Action and designate it as a terrorist organization, meaning that membership or support for the direct action group now carries a possible prison sentence of 14 years. The vote followed the group’s latest action on June 20, when activists sprayed red paint into the turbine engines of two planes at a British Air Force base connected to hundreds of surveillance flights that have conducted reconnaissance over Gaza — ostensibly to look for hostages, but also sharing that intelligence with Israel.

In a blistering parliamentary speech, MP Zarah Sultana — who subsequently resigned from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and is poised to form a new anti-war Left party alongside former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — denounced the criminalization of an activist network whose “true offense” was exposing “the blood-soaked ties between this government and the genocidal Israeli apartheid state.” Sultana also decried the fact that Palestine Action was banned alongside two far-right, white supremacist organizations explicitly committed to violence against civilians: the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement. In the House of Lords, Labour peer and former anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain condemned how the new ban equated pro-Palestine protesters with ISIS and Al-Qaida — a comparison he called “intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled and morally wrong.”

The British ban on Palestine Action is the latest demonstration of a sustained wave of repression against Palestine solidarity, from detentions and deportation proceedings in the United States to vicious policing of protest in Germany. These zero-tolerance policies against peaceful activism — or mere speech — convey a stark truth of contemporary politics: that in the face of the Gaza genocide, Western governments are treating any dissent as a threat to national security while granting Israel carte blanche, and unending material support, for its countless violations of international law. In the process, they have turned the already threadbare framework of the “rules-based international order” into a grim charade and created a vast gulf between foreign policy and public sentiment.