For episode three of the Anti-Imperialist Film Club, Ileana Chan and myself watched Dear You, an emotionally charged film that was massive hit in China. And it was surprisingly anti-imperialist.

Watch the full episode in the video above.

As genocide continues in Gaza, the pro-Israel lobby in the US is stepping up its campaign against Palestinian cultural expression in the West.

Now, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the world’s most influential anti-Palestinian hate groups, is demanding a major publisher drop susan abulhawa, a leading Palestinian novelist.

Earlier in August, one of Simon & Schuster’s subsidiaries announced it would republish two of abulhawa’s novels. Since then the lobby has piled on the pressure to cancel the books, claiming the author has used “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

Being a bestselling novelist has never stopped abulhawa from speaking out against the oppression of her people. She visited Gaza towards the start of the genocide, and has written essays and reports from on the ground for The Electronic Intifada.

Speaking to The Electronic Intifada on Thursday, abulhawa was defiant, angrily rejecting the Israel lobby’s claims.

“Only Zionism comes wrapped in some inherited claim to the world’s care and tenderness,” she said. “I refuse that. I reject it outright.”

“There was a time in my life when I had to be careful … it was this sort of internalized self censorship … that version of me is buried somewhere between [the 1982 Israeli-backed] Sabra and Shatila [massacre in Lebanon] and Nasr Hospital, where they let five infants die of starvation alone in the dark, crying and crying and crying.”

Atrocities

abulhawa was referencing the Israeli army invasion of the northern Gaza Strip’s al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital in November 2023. The invaders expelled the healthcare workers from the hospital, blocking all access.

“The Israeli military left five Palestinian babies to die in their small beds,” The Electronic Intifada’s Nora Barrows-Friedman reported at the time. “The tiny infants died starving, cold and alone. Their bodies decomposed. They were still connected to ventilation and intravenous tubes.”

The ADL – which spied on US citizens for Israel’s Mossad for decades – this week posted to X insisting that abulhawa’s books had “no place on a mainstream publisher’s list” and claiming that it was “unacceptable” for Simon & Schuster to lend its “platform and prestige to someone with a documented history of dehumanizing Jews.”

As examples of what it alleged was “anti-Semitism” in abulhawa’s books, the ADL quoted her novel Mornings in Jenin, in which a character describes Israelis as having no historical connection to Palestine, calling them “lily-skinned foreigners with no attachment to the land” and a “foreign minority.”

The ADL did not contest the factual accuracy of this statement by a fictional character, but merely asserted that it was “anti-Semitic.”

“I reject that wholesale, that I’m an anti-Semite,” abulhawa responded in her interview with The Electronic Intifada. “This is another layer of colonization … it’s colonization of language itself.”

In the same novel, the ADL complains, “one character tells a Jewish person, ‘you are no different from Nazis’ … another passage claims Palestinians ‘paid the price for the Jewish holocaust’ … a grotesque form of anti-Semitism.”

Once again, the ADL cites no evidence for its claims of “anti-Semitism.”

At the publisher, The Electronic Intifada understands from sources, the ADL has been lobbying hard for abulhawa’s books to be canceled. “The executives are discussing it” in closed door sessions, this reporter was told earlier this week.

The lobby’s campaign led chief executive Greg Greeley to send out a company-wide email addressing “concerns” about “this important matter.” The email was obtained by The Electronic Intifada.

Greeley stood by the publication of abulhawa’s “widely acclaimed” books and said the publisher would continue to print them. But he also condemned abulhawa’s “comments on social media and elsewhere that have included harmful, dehumanizing, anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

He wrote that: “Being a publisher committed to a broad range of works and perspectives inevitably means that we will sometimes publish authors whose words or actions outside their books we strongly disagree with or even find offensive or hateful. Publishing a work is not an endorsement of every statement made by its author.”

Campaign

The Israel lobby campaign against abulhawa has been amplified by right-wing media outlets.

The Washington Free Beacon this week smeared her as “a notoriously Jew-hating writer” in a report about the campaign against Simon & Schuster.

And writing for The Free Press this week, Simon & Schuster author Gerald Posner called for writers to boycott his occasional publisher if it did not drop abulhawa.

Simon & Schuster “should not” publish her, he wrote, implying that the publisher was embracing “hate speech.”

He accused abulhawa of having an “inflammatory public record,” of writing for The Electronic Intifada – “a radical pro-Palestinian online publication” – and of praising Palestinian resistance.

Posner also attacked X posts by abulhawa and accused the publisher of “gross negligence” if it has failed to vet her posts. In one such post, he complained, abulhawa stated that Israel is run by “Jewish supremacist demons.”

Posner works for the so-called “Jordan Peterson Academy,” an unaccredited online video streaming service founded by the eponymous manosphere influencer. The annual fee for the service is $499, Slate reported.

But as well as anti-Palestinian motives, Posner’s calls to boycott Simon & Schuster may also be motivated by the fact that the publisher no longer seems to be interested in his books anyway.

“My words are not the atrocity”

In his op-ed for The Free Press, he admitted that “in recent years” his editor at the publisher had declined two of his book proposals: one which it seems would inveigh against gender-affirming medical treatment and another which looks like it would smear Palestinians as Nazis.

For decades, Posner has also been one of the leading promoters of the official government narrative around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, claiming – despite all the evidence to the contrary, including a second government investigation which admitted that JFK was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” – that CIA-asset Lee Harvey Oswald acted as the lone gunman.

Posner’s 1993 book on the subject has been extensively debunked by independent JFK researchers, including by the well-respected scholar Peter Dale Scott.

abulhawa said in her interview that no colonized people in all of history has ever been required “to mind their manners so they don’t offend the people who are responsible.”

She expressed her frustration with “the idea that Palestine is going to be liberated on manners while Israel is conducting an extermination campaign” as “beyond belief.”

“My words are not the atrocity,” she said. “Genocide is the atrocity and I will continue to speak as I do, regardless of what the cost is, because I want people to be emboldened to not hold back anymore.”

“I have my words. I have language. I am a writer. And that’s all. That’s the only power I can wield, and if it hurts their feelings, then that’s all the better.”

ADL spies

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the ADL employed an undercover agent named Roy Bullock to infiltrate and sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement and other causes in the United States. Bullock compiled files on thousands of progressive, left-wing and Arab groups and individuals.

Bullock even infamously tried to smear the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee by planting the group’s literature on tables at the convention of the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review.

According to the Village Voice’s late investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman, writing in 1993: “Police confiscated ADL files on hundreds of mainstream groups ranging from ACT UP to Peace Now.”

According to Friedman: “Investigations by the FBI and police in San Francisco have revealed that the ADL has shared at least some of its spy-gathering material with Israeli government officials. What’s more, Israel apparently used tips from the ADL to detain Palestinian Americans who traveled there.”

Civil suits against Bullock and the ADL in the 1990s were eventually settled out of court in 2002 for $178,000.

But the ADL never admitted to doing anything wrong, and never had to face any serious penalty.

Palestine solidarity activists may well wonder what the ADL is doing in secret today.

“Gaza has altered our collective DNA,” susan abulhawa wrote in an article for The Electronic Intifada in 2024. “We are united in our love and pain and resolve to resist and escalate until Palestine is liberated and these genocidal Zionists are held to account in the same manner Nazis were.”

In November 2024 she appeared in the UK at the Oxford Union debating society, and gave amuch acclaimed speech.

Addressing Zionists everywhere, abulhawa was defiant: “You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land,” she said, referencing Israel’s first president.

“We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.”

She continued: “The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.”

“Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free.”

The debating society – which upholds itself as some sort of bastion of free speech – censored the video of her talk on their YouTube channel, at first deleting it, and later re-uploading it with over two minutes of her remarks removed, despite having promised to respect her right to free speech.

The censored comments included historically accurate statements about Israeli forces planting South Lebanon with booby-trapped toys, as well as other factual statements about how Israel has been systematicaly raping and sexually assaulting Palestinian men, women and children – including tortured prisoner Dr. Adnan al-Bursh – who may have been literally raped to death.

You can watch her full, uncensored, speech in the video above.

First published by The Electronic Intifada.

For the second episode of Anti-Imperialist Film Club, we decided to watch a classic: The Battle of Algiers.

Spoiler alert for the review: I loved it.

Watch our discussion in the video above.

I have joined Ilena Chan as co-host on a new weekly show, The Anti-Imperialist Film Club. On the show we watch and review films and give them two ratings: how much we enjoyed them as films and how anti-imperialist the politics of the film are.

For our first episode, we watched John Woo’s 1980s Vietnam War film Bullet in the Head.

Watch the whole episode in the video above.

“Someone took action yesterday, so clearly it hasn’t worked” – that was the verdict of former Palestine Action political prisoner Zoë Rogers when I asked her in a recent interview if recent legal repression of her movement was working.

Rogers was referencing a 15 June blockade of the arms company Ultra I&C in Maidenhead, west of London, by a new direct action group called People Against Genocide.

Campaigners say that Ultra I&C is a key supplier to the Israeli drone maker Elbit Systems’ factory in Leicester, which is in the north.

Rogers highlighted that the blockade was a message of defiance to the Court of Appeal’s ruling that same day that the Labour government’s “terrorism” ban on Palestinian Action was lawful.

She explained that the court is “trying to dissuade people from taking direct action, despite the fact that it’s the only effective way to stop the supply of weapons to Israel … because this country is so intent on putting the profits of an Israeli weapons company and its own relationship with Israel above the rights of its own citizens.”

She said that the Maidenhead blockade and other recent actions show that “that people are not afraid and in fact, people are escalating.”

Also in the interview, Rogers talked about her experiences inside the British prison system, why she and her friends took action against Elbit’s factory in Filton, and how much damage they really did.

Rogers is one of the Filton 25, a group of imprisoned activists who have been persecuted by Britain’s “anti-terror” police for their alleged roles in direct action against Elbit’s Filton arms factory in August 2024.

You can watch the whole interview in the video below. It first aired on The Electronic intifada livestream last week.

Since we filmed that interview, the British state and legal system has ramped up its persecution of Palestine Action and solidarity campaigners in general.

Jeremy Johnson – the judge who this month convicted four of the Filton prisoners with extraordinary sentences ranging from almost six years up to eight years – is also now renewing his previous efforts to prosecute one of the Filton 25’s legal team.

Trial lawyer Rajiv Menon is facing new contempt of court hearings, despite the Court of Appeal in May rebuffing Johnson’s previous attempt to go after Menon as unlawful.

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Menon’s law firm Garden Court Chambers said that Johnson’s move was “unprecedented” and that the move had “sent shock waves through the legal profession.”

Menon is being punished for his closing defense speech in the original trial of a smaller group known as the Filton 6. That speech helped to ensure the initial acquittal of all serious charges against all six.

Johnson has refused to recuse himself from the case, despite having strong links to British spy agencies.

As I explained on the livestream, Palestine Action’s co-founder Huda Ammori’sreactionto the Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold the government’s “terror” ban was defiant. She said her legal team would continue their appeal against the ban to the UK Supreme Court – and even all the way to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

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But such a legal process could take months or even years. All the while, the ban on Palestine Action will remain in place.

With the emergence of new direct action groups such as People Against Genocide, it seems likely that former Palestine Action activists will now turn their focus away from the legal fight and onto a renewed campaign of direct action against Elbit targets in the UK.

Either way, The Electronic Intifada will closely follow developments.

First published by The Electronic Intifada.

Switzerland has authorized federal prosecutors to carry out a criminal investigation of former top police official Nicoletta della Valle for her role in the 2025 detention and expulsion of Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada’s executive director.

The decision came as Abunimah returned to Switzerland this week for legal hearings relating to complaints he filed against other individuals,

The Electronic Intifada can reveal today that the hearings were for two defamation cases regarding statements about Abunimah in Switzerland.

Separate from those cases, Abunimah filed a criminal complaint against della Valle for abuse of public office.

On Tuesday, Abunimah’s lawyer was informed by the federal department of justice that the case will proceed to a criminal investigation. The ministry said that the allegations against della Valle cannot be dismissed as manifestly unfounded, nor is it obvious that a criminal offense was not committed or that the matter can be treated as a minor case.

Della Valle was director of Fedpol, the national police force, in January 2025 when she overrode the assessment of internal specialists to impose a retroactive entry ban and an expulsion order on Abunimah after he had already entered the country lawfully on 24 January 2025.

As The Electronic Intifada reported soon after, official documents prove that Swiss federal authorities initially rejected a request to ban Abunimah from entering the country.

Fedpol, immigration authorities and the national intelligence service all concluded that Abunimah was not a threat to Swiss security, that his views were protected by freedom of speech and that there were consequently no grounds for a ban.

It was only after the request to ban Abunimah was sent to authorities for a second time – based on no new evidence – that della Valle overrode the professionals’ assessments and imposed the ban retrospectively.

This led to Abunimah effectively being kidnapped off the streets, without warning, by plainclothes police officers who did not identify themselves until after they had grabbed him.

Abunimah was then held without charge, locked in a cell for 24 hours per day, prohibited from contacting his family and forcibly deported three days later.

Israeli investment firm job

The journalist had come to Switzerland to hold public speaking events about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court ruled earlier this year that Abunimah’s procedural rights were grossly violated and Fedpol ultimately ruled that the decisions against him were unlawful.

The Zurich Administrative Court also ruled in December that Abunimah’s arrest and detention were unconstitutional and violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

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As this writer reported in November, della Valle left her senior police office not long after the incident and took on a lucrative role with Champel Capital, an Israeli investment firm whose founder Amir Weitmann has openly called for the Israeli military to use genocidal methods against “the entire Gaza Strip.”

Criticism in the Swiss press in October 2025 led to della Valle’s name being removed from the company’s website soon after.

During his current trip to Switzerland, Abunimah took part in a packed teach-in hosted by Watermelon University on Tuesday, an event originally planned for January 2025.

His pursuit of accountability and defense of free speech is being made possible by crowdfunded public support.

Abunimah said that he was “deeply grateful to each and every person who has contributed and spoken out.”

First published by The Electronic Intifada.

Last month a supposedly “groundbreaking new report” about the alleged campaign of mass rape by Hamas on October 7th 2023 came out from the Israelis.

But, of course, it turned out to be just a collection of reheated old false accusations — the same ones we have repeatedly debunked at The Electronic Intifada, time and time again.

On The Electronic Intifada livestream, Ali Abunimah broke down in detail why the report was a total nonsense, recycling long-debunked lies about “Hamas rape.”

Not at all coincidentally, the report came out at the exact same time that the extremely well documents facts about Israel’s systemic campaign of mass rape and sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (including children) were starting to break through to the mainstream media, with an article even in The New York Times.

Ali got into the all details, while myself and the rest of the EI team contributed to the discussion afterwards.

Watch the full segment in the video above.

Yesterday I went on the excellent Palestine Deep Dive’s new weekly chat show, with hosts Ahmed Alnaouq and Hala Hanina.

We discussed the demonstrations in London this past weekend, Palestine Action, the genocide in Gaza and much more.

Watch the whole thing in the video above.

Recently on The Electronic Intifada Livestream I gave an update on the Filton 24 prisoners, the first six of whom were subjected to a retrial earlier that week.

The Filton 6 were accused of criminal damage, after proudly (in their own words) acting to smash up Israeli quadcopter drones at an Elbit factory in Filton near Bristol in the west of England.

Of those six, Palestine Action campaigners Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Samuel Corner and Fatema Zainab Rajwani were found guilty of criminal damage. But Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin were acquitted.

All six had in February already been acquitted of aggravated burglary – the most serious charge, which could have led to life sentences.

During my livestream update last week, I alluded to court restrictions on the press which prohibited me and other British journalists from reporting on certain details. (Watch the full segment from last week in the video below.)

Since then, those restrictions have been lifted by the court.

I can now report that judge Jeremy Johnson secretly ruled that, despite not being charged with “terrorism,” there was a “terrorist connection” with the six, due to the activists attempting to “influence” the Israeli government.

Campaigning for the restriction of weapons sales to Israel is therefore being treated as “terrorism” by a senior British judge.

This supposed “terror connection” is highly likely to lead to punitive jail terms when it comes to sentencing on 12 June.

Yet it was illegal for the British press to report this highly salient fact until Tuesday last week. While US independent outlet The Grayzone did report the matter, it is highly likely that none of the jury knew they were convicting the four as “terrorists.”

Treating direct action campaigners as “terrorists” in this way will also have long-term repercussions which will stretch far into the future even after their release from jail.

Rather than serving 40 percent of their sentences in jail, as is the standard practice, as “terrorists” they would have to serve at least two thirds in jail, and likely even the whole sentence.

Early release would require parole board approval. They would be expected to rescind their political views – in other words, to recant on their opposition to genocide.

Even after release, the Filton prisoners would be listed as terrorists for life.

For 10 or 15 years after release, they would be subjected to conditions such as registering any new device, email address or even personal relationship with the police.

Any failure to do so would risk reimprisonment.

Yet if they were being merely sentenced for criminal damage – as the jury was strongly led to believe – they would have been released already on time served.

The four have already spent 18 months in prison on remand.

The Filton 24 defense committee is calling on its supporters to mobilize on 12 June outside Woolwich Crown Court.

Filton lawyer’s contempt victory

Another update worth mentioning since my livestream segment is that Rajiv Menon, one of the Filton 6 lawyers, has won a significant legal victory against contempt proceedings that had been initiated against him. Again, these were initially held in secret behind the view of press-reporting restrictions.

On Monday last week the Court of Appeal ruled that judge Johnson had wrongly initiated proceedings against Menon, and that he had no jurisdiction to make a direct reference of the lawyer to the High Court.

Menon’s law firm said it was “delighted” at the ruling and that it hoped this would be the end of the matter.

Garden Court Chambers called the proceedings “unprecedented” saying they were “extremely concerned about the chilling effect” it could have by “seeking to criminalize barristers for their representation of their clients. This should never be repeated.”

It seems quite clear that the intention of judge Johnson was to make it harder for Menon to defend his clients – at exactly the most crucial time they needed legal defense.

First published by The Electronic Intifada.

Last week I was invited onto the Dr Shola Speaks livestream to talk about the aftermath of the local elections in the UK. I was one of a panel and it was a good discussion.

Watch the whole thing in the video above.

Last month I was honoured to chair the book launch for Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt’s new book Killing Corbynism: Zionism’s War on Socialism. You can — and should — buy that book by clicking on this link to the publisher’s website.

Watch highlights from the launch in the video above.

As well as participating in the launch, I was one of the endorsers of the book. Here’s what I had to say about it:

(And of course you can buy my book over at the OR Books website.)

Rebecca and myself co-authored in 2023 an investigative piece about the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism and its close financial ties to the Jewish National Fund — the state of Israel’s colonial land theft agency.

Last Friday I returned to the Empire Watch livestream to talk geopolitics with Ileana and Sara.

We started with the latest developments in the Iran war and the strange, liminal situation of a temporary ceasefire with the US — which is not really a full ceasefire in any case — which has been unilaterally extended by Trump, despite Iran refusing to agree to US-imposed surrender terms.

We also discussed the latest development in the case against the UK government for its ban on Palestine Action and the general atmosphere of repression in the UK.

Watch the whole segment in the video above.

The High Court has ruled Britain’s ban on Palestine Action unlawful.

A panel of judges found on Friday that the ban resulted in “very significant interference with the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of assembly.”

Activists were jubilant.

“Elbit Systems: pack up your bags. Palestine Action is back,” lisa minerva luxx said at a press conference outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Elbit Systems is Israel’s biggest arms firm. It has at least six remaining sites in the UK but Palestine Action’s assertive campaigns have shut down four others.

Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori called the ruling a “monumental victory” and said the ban will be remembered as “one of the most extreme attacks on free speech in recent British history.”

Ammori led the successful legal challenge, supported by a team of lawyers.

The ruling keeps the ban in place temporarily, however.

Details of how the group will be removed from the “terrorist” proscription list are still to be settled by the court, with further proceedings in a week.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she was “disappointed by the court’s decision” and that the government would appeal.

Her predecessor Yvette Cooper banned the direct action protest group last summer under Britain’s draconian “anti-terror” law.

This made expressing support for the group a criminal offense punishable by as many as 14 years in prison.

Palestine Action’s direct action campaigns have been on hold for the last seven months while it pushed to reverse the ban.

But since then, thousands of supporters have defied the ban, organizing civil disobedience campaigns holding up signs reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Campaign group Defend Our Juries said on Friday that the almost 3,000 arrests made during these protests “are now unlawful.”

Dozens of protesters held similar signs outside the High Court in London on Friday morning. Despite police presence, there were no reports of arrests by early afternoon.

After the ruling, London’s Metropolitan Police announced its officers would no longer arrest people expressing support for Palestine Action but would gather evidence for potential prosecutions later – calling this “the most proportionate approach we can take” while legal proceedings continued.

Today’s victory for Palestine Action is the latest blow to the government’s attempts to eliminate the group – a policy pursued in collusion with Israel.

Successive British governments have conspired with the Israeli embassy to attack, smear and repress the group.

Recently, the Labour government has even fabricated insinuations of Iranian funding for Palestine Action – which employs few resources beyond a small budget for sledgehammers and paint raised by volunteers.

But the government’s own terrorism advisor Jonathan Hall told Channel 4’s Dispatchesprogram this week that the government’s insinuations about a supposed Iran link were “wrong” and that he regretted hints about supposedly secret intelligence.

Also last week, a jury freed five Palestine Action political prisoners, finding that all six were not guilty of the most serious charges.

The “Filton 6” carried out direct action against an Israeli-owned arms factory near Bristol in 2024.

As this writer explained on The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 12 February, government prosecutors have announced that they will seek a retrial on the lesser charges where the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Read the details of that case or watch the full segment from the livestream in the video above.

Originally published by The Electronic Intifada, 13 February 2026.

Last night on The Electronic Intifada livestream, I explained the “Filton 6” court victory, as five of the Palestine Action political prisoners were liberated from jail by a jury.

I wrote about that last week. You can read my article on that for all the details, but on the livestream yesterday I explained several updates that have happened since my report was published.

As I’m going to press with this post, the news has come through that the “terrorist” ban on Palestine Action has been quashed by the High Court. My full report on that will also be up on EI by the end of today — and posted here on my Substack tomorrow morning.

Six Palestine Action activists who broke into an Israeli arms factory in the UK have been acquitted or not convicted of all charges against them.

Campaigners told The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday that the result was a “monumental” and “total” victory.

After eight days of deliberation in January and February, the jury either acquitted or refused to convict Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of all charges.

Five out of the six were released on bail Wednesday evening.

(Click here to watch video of their release on X.com.)

All six were found not guilty of aggravated burglary, the most serious charge which could have led to life sentences.

The six activists were arrested on site in August 2024 and held on remand for 17 months.

They were the first of a total of 24 defendants to face trials relating to the invasion and smashing of a factory in Filton, near Bristol in the west of England, owned by a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

The group of 24 includes some of the prisoners who recently went on a hunger strike.

Once inside, the group destroyed Israeli quadcopter drones, which have been used frequently to massacre Palestinians in Gaza.

During the trial, acquitted defendant Fatema Zainab Rajwani (a third-year film student at the time of the action) was open that, “I damaged drones which is what I went in to do.” She commented on video footage shown to the court, saying, “That is me dismantling a quadcopter drone with a crowbar,” and explaining that the group wanted to “document the presence of quadcopters and [Elbit’s] crimes.”

Fourteen other defendants were rounded up by Britain’s feared Counter Terrorism Police, in a series of violent pre-dawn raids in November 2024 and July last year.

A Palestine Action source told The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday that the remaining Filton 24 prisoners will now appeal to be released on bail.

Such prisoners can usually be held on remand before trial for up to six months. But the politicization and fallacious government “terrorism” campaign against the group – in connivance with Israel – meant that the campaigners have been held on remand for as long as 17 months.

Not guilty

In addition to beating the most serious charge, the jury acquitted Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of violent disorder. It refused to convict Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner and Leona Kamio of the same charge.

Samuel Corner was also not convicted of “grievous bodily harm with intent” for allegedly striking a police officer.

Crucially, the jury refused to convict any of the defendants of criminal damage.

Yet five of the group had admitted in court to destroying Israeli weapons and equipment belonging to Elbit at the factory.

That the jury could not reach a majority verdict on some of the lesser charges means in theory that there could be retrails in some cases – though that is not expected to have a realistic chance of success.

That is why the sixth defendant, Samuel Corner, was not immediately bailed on Wednesday. Government prosecutors asked the court for more time to decide if they wanted to pursue a retrial in relation to the grievous bodily harm charge.

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The Palestine Action source also said that certain issues relating to matters under reporting restrictions imposed by the judge in this trial meant that the verdict was the best possible outcome for the group.

The source said that the verdict represented a “total victory” for the six Palestine Action campaigners.

Most of the remaining “Filton 24” group have been held on draconian remand for months – for more than a year in some cases.

But one, Sean Middlebrough, escaped during a short-term release in November last year. In an exclusive statement, he told The Electronic Intifada that he was not on the run, and was instead “refusing to be held as a prisoner of war of Israel in a British prison.”

Government ministers such as former Home Secretary Yvette Cooperattemptedto portray the Filton activists as violent criminals who assaulted a police officer. The British press for the most part obediently parroted such claims and insinuations.

But during this “Filton 6” trial, body-cam footage released to the jury – some of which can be viewed in the video above – showed the exact opposite: Elbit security guards apparently assaulting the activists with sledgehammers.

In a statement released on Wednesday the Filton 24 Defence Committee said the result was a “monumental victory.”

The committee detailed how the trial unfolded.

According to the committee, the verdicts demonstrated that “the jury did not accept the prosecution case that the defendants entered the Elbit weapons factory with the intention of using the items they carried as weapons.”

They said that instead the “jury agreed with the defense argument, that the defendants’ sole intention was to use the items, including sledgehammers, as tools to disarm Israeli weapons … The jury understood that it is not those who destroy Israeli weapons which are guilty, rather the guilty party is the one that deploys such weapons to commit genocide in Gaza.”

The trial also revealed that footage went missing from a number of Elbit’s internal CCTV cameras covering key angles, the committee said. The security guards’ body-worn videos had also been repeatedly turned off and on, as well as edited by Elbit.

Twenty-first century suffragettes

Defense lawyer Rajiv Menon compared the six to the suffragettes – women who demanded the right to vote. In the early 20th century, the suffragettes were routinely denounced as “terrorists and extremists,” although “the reality of course is very different,” Menon said.

The lawyer also said that Judge Jeremy Johnson tried to exclude evidence on Elbit Systems, and interrupted when counsel for the defense asked questions about the Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Menon said that the judge “has restricted what the defendants have been allowed to tell you … what they knew about Elbit’s role in the Israeli attack on Gaza. The consequence of that is that you do not know everything that the defendants knew about Elbit before” they took action against the factory.

The lawyer told the jury that Elbit is a “massive weapons company that has played a critical role in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”

At the end of the evidence, the judge told the jury that the “situation in the Middle East” and Elbit’s operations are “not relevant” to the case and directed the jury to “follow the legal directions I’ve given you and not anything else.”

The judge also issued a series of reporting restrictions on the case. As a result, I am still prevented from reporting certain details here.

Nonetheless, because the case was heard in open court, I am able to report the following.

During the trial, a juror asked whether they were allowed to acquit because the defendants genuinely believed that they were destroying weapons to prevent their use in genocide.

The judge’s response was “no.”

Trials of the remaining Filton 24 prisoners are still due to happen at some point in the future.

Blow to UK and Israel

Clare Rogers, the mother of defendant Zoe Rogers and a relentless campaigner in her own right said in the committee’s statement that “these are six young people of conscience … They had tried everything else – marches, petitions, writing to MPs, encampments … They felt they had no option but to take action themselves, to try to save as many lives as they could.”

The verdicts are a severe blow to the UK government’s attempt to smear Palestine campaigners as violent criminals and “terrorists.”

In a controversial move last July the home secretary banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” group, marking the first time ever a non-violent protest group had been outlawed under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act of 2000.

Activistlisa minerva luxx, from the Filton 24 Defence Committee, criticized the government for prejudicing the trial: “This was a trial by media. Yvette Cooper and [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer took evidence in this case out of context and broadcast it on televisions and tabloids across the country in order to justify proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.”

With the result of a legal challenge to that ban expected any week now, the verdict also represents a serious blow to the credibility of that proscription.

This is despite the government – and even the legal system – going to the greatest lengths to try and stitch up this case.

There are also serious implications for the continuing right to trial by jury in the UK.

The fact that a jury of their peers acquitted or refused to convict the first six of the Filton 24 shows the importance and the democratic potential of jury trials.

It is exactly for those reasons that the UK government is seeking to abolish, or seriously erode, the right to trial by jury in the UK. In large part, these so-called “reforms” seem to be targeted precisely at supporting Israel and preventing juries from acquitting according to their conscience.

Originally published by The Electronic Intifada, 4 February 2026.

Earlier this month I reported on the ending of the Palestine Action prisoners’ hunger strike and the concessions it won from the British government.

Since we broadcast this livestream, the final hunger striker Umer Khalid (who had resumed his hunger strike after previously ending one) has also ended his hunger strike, as well as a thirst strike.

Watch the full segment in the video above.

Last month I appeared on the Empire Watch livestream. It was a long two hour session, and we covered several different topics. I was their guest for most of the stream. I’ve previously posted the segment where we talked about Your Party and the prospects for an anti-imperialist British socialism.

There was another segment in which we talked about the history of Palestine Action and the British establishment’s attempt to fix an important recent legal case.

You can watch the Palestine Action segment in the video above or the entire stream in the video below.

On The Electronic Intifada’s livestream last week, we talked about the recent controversy in the UK over the word “intifada” and the attempt by the British government and the pro-Israel lobby to effectively ban the word on threat of police arrest.

We debunked the lies about this Arabic word, which simply means “uprising”. The word rose to wide global attention in 1987, when the first Palestinian uprising broke out — an almost entirely unarmed popular uprising against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.

Even the second intifada in 2000 began as a mass popular uprising by the Palestinian people themselves. It was only after Palestinian protesters were killed — with Israeli soldiers shooting a million bullets at them in the first three weeks — that armed Palestinian groups began to fight back.

Watch the full segment in the video above.

I joined the Empire Watch livestream last month to talk about Your Party, and the prospects for an anti-imperialist mass socialist party in the UK. We discussed it in the context of my book Weaponising Anti-Semitism.

You can watch the segment in the video above (26 minutes), or the entire 2 hour 16 minute livestream in the video below.

On The Electronic Intifada livestream last week, I broke down my recent story about the judge leading the panel that will rule on the application currently before the UK’s High Court to unban Palestine Action.

As a lawyer in the 1980s, Victoria Sharp once advised Robert Maxwell.

I also talked about the wider context of government repression in the UK targeting Palestine solidarity activists; about how justice minister David Lammy seems to want to end the ancient British right to a trial by jury.

But I also recounted three important recent legal victories for Palestine — cases that should never have been brought in the first place.

Watch the whole segment in the video above.