On Sunday, all being well, I’ll be holding up that same sign outside the venue for the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.
I have no idea how many people will be there. Hundreds, we hope. Pushing up the number of people prepared to be arrested under S.13 of the Terrorism Act. Ramping up the pressure on Andy Burnham to reassert the core values of the Labour Party by doing what his genocidal predecessor, Keir Starmer, would never have done: lift the proscription on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
Here’s the background that Andy Burnham will be mulling over as he arrives at his first Conference as Party Leader.
From 2020, Palestine Action proved itself to be an extremely effective ‘direct action’ organisation, unapologetically inflicting significant economic damage on, amongst others, a company called Elbit, Israel’s largest and most morally repugnant arms manufacturer.
Time after time, they broke the law by occupying and blockading Elbit premises in the certain knowledge that this was the right thing to do – indeed, the only thing to do, morally, given the deployment of Elbit’s weapons in slaughtering tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza. 21,000 children is the official, current death count.
A full-on genocide, in other words, live streamed on our phones and devices from the end of October 2023 onwards.
The UK Government has been complicit in that genocide from the start. By proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, it hoped to silence it, once and for all. But all it has done is to highlight the real terrorists: the Israeli Defence Forces; the Zionist State of Israel and its settlers in the West Bank.
Andy Burnham knows this. Ed Miliband, his Foreign Secretary, knows this. The largely symbolic measures the UK Government has now taken against those ‘settler terrorists’ in the West Bank, clearly intent on wholesale ‘ethnic cleansing’ of all Palestinians (Ed Miliband’s words, in his Statement to Parliament), reveals a deeper knowledge on their part: Israel is a rogue state, in breach of countless rulings from the UN, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, committed to a ‘vision of a Greater Israel’, that demands the removal and, wherever possible, the extermination of all Palestinians. A number of Ministers in Netanyahu’s Cabinet frequently acknowledge that this is indeed the game plan.
More and more people now realise what’s been going on. Despite Israel barring all foreign journalists from Gaza, the images and films, the testimonies, the gut-wrenching personal stories, all speak to that same ineluctable truth.
At the moment, Burnham falls back on Labour Ministers’ go-to excuse for not acting, even now, given all that evidence: ‘we must wait for the determination of International Courts’.
Such callous sophistry came naturally to a palpably dishonest, compassion-free Starmer. It will be a different story with Burnham. At this point in the continuing genocide, Labour supporters will expect a lot more.
The UK Government (under both Tories and Labour) has worked hard to promote that genocide – in total disregard of its formal obligations under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Palestine Action did everything it could to stop that genocide, mindful of the moral obligation of all citizens not to stand by in the face of such an abomination.
That will be our common purpose in Liverpool on Sunday.
Jonathon Porritt 25 September 2026
