Last Friday at Woolwich crown court, Mr Justice Johnson sentenced four Palestine Action activists to a total of nearly 27 years (Nelson Mandela’s term in prison) for their role in an action on the Bristol-based research centre of an Israeli weapons factory. At the same time, our history was rewritten. The suffragettes, the chartists, the women of Greenham Common, and many more besides: all terrorists.

Those sentences – six years each for Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio, five years and eight months for Fatema Zainab Rajwani and eight years and eight months for Samuel Corner – were extended by the judge’s finding of a terror connection behind the criminal damage they did at Elbit System’s Filton site. That aggravating factor allowed him to sentence four people as terrorists, none of whom have ever been accused of an act of terrorism, let alone charged with a terrorist crime.

It’s the first time in British history that anyone has been sentenced as a terrorist for damaging property. It won’t be the last.

I’ve interviewed Head and Jordan Devlin (who was acquitted by the jury on all charges). I’ve also interviewed the mothers of Kamio and Zoe Rogers (who was also acquitted last month). Only the deranged could watch those discussions and believe these people are terrorists.

But terrorist derangement syndrome is no joke. Especially when it infects the courts.

The damage caused to Elbit was substantial “to the point of destruction”, Johnson said. But the four came nowhere near to the destruction of Elbit. What’s more, while the damage was valued at over £1m, in 2025, Elbit’s gross profit was nearly $2bn, buoyed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Calling a million substantial against that is like breaking an egg and calling it murder.

Johnson said the four had engaged in the action in order to influence the British government. Previously, he’d said it was to influence the Israeli government. But that was too absurd. Not even Donald Trump can influence Benjamin Netanyahu.

In his new argument, Johnson talked about the strategic aim of Palestine Action, which he said was “to end British complicity” in war crimes by using property damage to influence the government. By simply signing up to the group, he appeared to suggest, it showed that their aim in the Filton action was to influence the government. That is a leap. He gave no answer to the question: did those four individuals have in mind ending British complicity when they smashed up Elbit’s lab? Or did they simply believe they were breaking those weapons, on that night, in that place because they could end up killing yet more children in Gaza if they didn’t act?

He went further. “You all well knew,” he said, “that an attack on Elbit was an action undertaken in the furtherance of Palestine Action’s strategic aim.” Say that’s true. Well, so what? Palestine Action was not proscribed at the time of the Filton raid. Its proscription last summer has since been ruled unlawful by judicial review. They weren’t joining a terrorist organisation. Unless, of course, you believe that any British group that uses direct action – including damage to property – to influence our own government is doing terrorism. It’s hard not to conclude that is what Johnson believes.

Later today, a court will rule on the government’s appeal against the finding of the judicial review that then-home secretary Yvette Cooper should not have proscribed the group. The government may well lose, in which case Palestine Action was never a terrorist organisation. But if it wins, and Johnson’s decision is given as a reason, I won’t be surprised. It’ll be just one more legal loop-de-loop in the loopiness of the general situation.

Johnson also held against the four that they didn’t simply admit their crimes, with their heads high, so it “did not amount to an act of civil disobedience”. But what the Filton 4 knew, which the juries in both the first and second trial did not, is that in admitting the crimes they could be admitting a terror connection. The juries were also not allowed to know their full reasons for why they did the criminal damage. How can you admit to something when you’ve been barred from explaining why you did it?

Addressing the Filton 4 in his sentencing remarks, Johnson referred to Elbit as “the victim of your offending”.

Elbit is not a victim. It’s not a person, for a start, and property damage against a company is not the corporate equivalent of violence against a human being. But if Elbit were a person, it would be the henchman to a murderous psychopath, one that has used its weapons to kill not just thousands of Palestinians, but British citizens too.

How quickly it’s been forgotten that, according to Israeli military sources, it was an Elbit 450 drone that carried out the strikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza in April 2024. Three vehicles were hit, one after the other, with survivors of each strike running to the next vehicle only to be struck again, until finally all seven aid workers were killed. Three of them were Brits.

Elbit is Israel’s largest weapons maker. It’s also the main weapons supplier to the Israeli military. Rather than holding the company to account, not just for its part in enabling war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but also for the murder of three British citizens, the UK government has given it cover in our own country. It has been made a revered guest, one that gets to have private chats with the CPS and successive government ministers.

And when activists tried to do what the government would not – namely disable the possibility of it supplying weapons to a state that kills our citizens and countless others with them – our establishment sided with Elbit rather than us. Rather than punish Elbit for providing the tools to blow up and burn our countrymen (two of the veterans no less), it’s four young people they’ve punished so it can continue to do so.

Not just punished. Labelled them terrorists. Tell me, who did Leona, Charlotte, Fatema Zainab or Samuel kill? Who did they even try to kill? Who did they ever aim to hurt?

People who enjoy commenting far above their intellectual paygrade will point to the fact that Samuel Corner injured a policewoman in the action. That is true, but a jury decided on the facts that he had not intended to. Nor did the judge find a terror-connection in this act. Of his sentence, less than half will be served for that crime. The majority is for criminal damage. A sign, as though we needed another one, that the state values Elbit’s killing objects above the well-being of our public servants.

The new terrorism defined by the Filton 4 ruling is one that reaches far and wide. Left or right, the space for politically motivated action in this country has been radically diminished. In the last few years, even minor disruptive tactics have been criminalised. Now, direct action has been terrorised. One by one, the tools by which our population has been permitted to engage forcefully and politically against its government have been stripped away. Power, always powerful enough, has been allowed to become unchallengeable. The grand theatre of British political life is being reduced to a show of shadow puppets. And anyone who demands more may soon be a terrorist too.

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.