A protester raises a hand showing the message “I support Palestine Action” while being arrested during a demonstration at Woolwich Crown Court on June 12, 2026 in London, England. Photo: Martin Pope/Getty Images

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems UK factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the UK in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists using a manipulated court process.”

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: the defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

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Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the UK, including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the UK provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the UK’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials – a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

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