Channel 4’s documentary dissecting the proscription of Palestine Action revealed the impetus behind it was to protect pro-Israel and pro-arms interests, but it still engaged in pro-Israel narrative traps.
Parliament Square on Sept. 6, 2025, as protesters displayed support for Palestine Action. (Alisdare Hickson / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Channel 4’s documentary earlier this week on Palestine Action’s proscription as a terrorist organisation was a game of two halves.
The first half, which built the government’s case for proscription, was presumably the “balance” needed to avoid a pile-on by the rest of the establishment media.
The second half then proceeded to tear down the government’s case brick by brick.
Here are the five main takeaways from the second half:
1). The film reminded us that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was done at the behest of Elbit Systems — the Israeli arms firm making killer drones for use in Gaza that Palestine Action was chiefly targeting. Government officials regularly met with Elbit.
A 2023 internal Home Office email, two years before proscription, states: “Reassure Elbit Systems UK and the wider sector affected by Palestine Action that the government cares about the harm the group is causing the private sector [arms industries].”
2). A senior Home Office official told the film-makers that there was a widespread belief among staff that the government was “wrong” to proscribe Palestine Action, and there was “disquiet” that the government was using Palestine Action as a way to curtail rights to protest and speech more generally.
3). Lord Hain, a former Labour government minister, explained that, when MPs and Lords were presented with an amendment to the Terrorism Act in 2020 under which Palestine Action has now been proscribed, the government had made explicit reassurances that criminal damage to property — Palestine Action’s modus operandi — would not qualify as terrorism.
He also reminded viewers that, had earlier governments adopted the same approach as Sir Keir Starmer’s government, the Suffragette and anti-apartheid movements would also have been declared terrorist organisations.
As @simonchilds13 and I reported yesterday, here’s the government’s independent terrorism legislation advisor admitting that the Home Office’s suggestion that Palestine Action had links to Iran was entirely unsubstantiated. https://t.co/10siKI6r3w pic.twitter.com/gKdW6nlhTa
— Rivkah Brown (@rivkahbrown) February 10, 2026
4). The government’s terrorism adviser, Jonathan Hall KC, made clear that there was zero evidence of any links between Palestine Action and Iran — a claim leaked to the press by the government on the same day Palestine Action was proscribed. Private Eye had already reported in November that the claim was concocted by a PR firm for Elbit Systems.
5). Additionally, Lord Walney, the government’s former “independent” adviser on political violence, who has been at the forefront of demanding even more draconian legislation to ban protest in relation to Israel and its genocide, struggled through his interview. It was only too obvious that his views on the subject had nothing to do with the public good but were shaped by his ties to the arms industries and his role as an Israel lobbyist.
Lord Walney appears in C4’s ‘Palestine Action, The Truth behind the ban’ pushing his usual line
Reporter: you’re a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel
Walney: the UK is a friend of Israel
Reporter: is that the right position given the mass slaughter in Gaza? pic.twitter.com/oMPJDiVE5N
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 10, 2026
What the programme made clear was that Starmer’s government took the unprecedented decision to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation not because the group is a terrorist organisation but because large corporations — arms firms like Elbit — have captured the U.K. government.
But I want to add a point of criticism, in particular, about one scene from the first half. An interview with Huda Ammori, Palestine Action’s co-founder, included a truly cringe-inducing request that she condemn Hamas over its Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Nearly two and a half years into Israels genocide and people are still being asked, do you condemn Hamas?
The journalist asking the question is Matt Shea and the the clip is from Channel 4’s Dispatches program ‘Palestine Action, The Truth behind the ban’ pic.twitter.com/yDDJ2ylcsE
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 10, 2026
We should have long moved past the point — more than two years into a genocide of their people — where Palestinians are expected to make such ritual denunciations before they can be heard.
If that isn’t obvious, consider another interview during the programme — this one with Gideon Falter, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. The CAA is a virulently pro-Israel organisation that was recently excoriated by a judge for repeatedly and intentionally misleading him — lying — in an antisemitism case it brought before the court.
Why did the programme makers not ask Falter, who actually is an apologist for violence — in his case, by Israel — whether he would condemn Israel for its two-year slaughter of children in Gaza?
Presumably they shied away from that confrontation because it would have suggested that they were holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.
In which case, why is it still ok to imply that Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas?
That this double standard is still a respectable position for journalists to adopt should be genuinely shocking.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Arms companies in the UK are certainly not the biggest corporations but they do have huge levels of access to government.
“On average, between 2009-19, senior government officials and ministers met with their arms industry counterparts 1.64 times a day.”
(From Revolving Door to Open Plan Office, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, September 2024).
Weapons manufacturers are one division of our true existential enemy – the soulless corporation (given their shared BoD members & ownership of stock in each other, there is, in reality, only 1, easily controlled by Lucifer & his minions both demonic & human, due to it being a person but lacking a soul.) The lamestream media serves as its propaganda division, while it finances (& therefore controls) all of the major political parties. This control enables it to dictate that one of its minions will always be Ministers or Secretaries of War, Diplomacy & Finance.
To Protect, Support and Serve the Arms Industry could be described as the Mission Statement for all of the nations of the so-called “Free World”.
Almost all politicians protect, support and serve the Arms Industry. The very few exceptions are spotted by the fact that they are regularly smeared in the corporate media that serves as corporate partners to the Arms Industry, and are probably under regular political attack by even members of their own party. And of course, in this century, any politician who does not Protect, Support and Serve the Arms Industry ever gains any high office or real power. That is a certainty, because support for the Arms Industry is a requirement for high office, or even for a long and successful legislative career.
Put, please, everybody put on their Surprise Party Face and act very Surprised that a government is protecting the Arms Industry. Act like this is something completely unheard of and never ever seen before.
Would Falter & all the other Israeli violence apologists condemn the French Resistance Movement which brought many of our WW2 pilots home & rescued many Jewish people from the Nazi clutches? The French Resistance Movement had every right to take the battle to the German Nazi Occupiers.
The problem, is of course, that to hail the French Resistance as heroes for their subversive activities as righteous, would necessarily apply equally to the Palestinian Resistance Movement(Hamas) in their fight against the illegal occupation of Palestine which has lasted 75+ years.
Collective Punishment by the Israeli illegal Occupation should no more apply to Palestinians than it did to the French in German occupied France. It is prohibited by International Law, unless of course you are Israeli.
I’d love to be able to leave the UK and it’s fascist surveillance and denialist approach to human rights but would not know where to go. to get away rom
After the Red Army entered Berlin and World War II was ended in Europe, the surviving Resistance fighters were heroes amongst the liberated populations. But, the USA and UK worked hard to make sure they could not get elected in early post-war elections. Foreign governments interfering in those elections to make sure the ”right” people won, who were not the heroes from the Resistance.
This was because the anti-fascist movement had died, with the death of FDR perhaps as a symbolic marker, and The Free World had entered the anti-commie era. Those people’s Resistance movements and fighters were deemed to be far too lefty and people oriented to be allowed into power. Instead, the USA and UK interfered with the early post-war elections in liberated Europe to make sure that much more reliable right-wingers were restored to power.
That’s how the post-war leaders of The Free World really respected the ideas of democracy and freedom. The brave souls from the underground who had rescued allied pilots then found those Free World nations interfering in elections to make sure the right-wingers, who were much more reliably anti-commie, were in power.
The same Free World nations who now claim that Palestinian Resistance is “terrorism”. Which of course is how the Vichy French and their Nazi partners referred to the French Resistance.
Excellent comment.
In other words, the Allied Powers defeated the Nazis, but fascism won the war. The anti-communist governments installed by the US were sub-fascist in ideology but fascist in their methods.
George Carlin wrote that Germany lost the war but the NAZIs won it. Given how many “former” NAZIs were “rehabilitated” and brought to the US to build our new National Security State (the origin of the real Deep State) I’d say he got it exactly right. Before Hitler declared war on us (in solidarity with his Imperial Japanese allies) most American Cons strongly supported him and his policies. Those traitors never went away, just hid underground. Now they’re rearing their ugly heads once again in the belief that they’re strong enough to overthrow our liberal Constitution by force. If they succeed only God can save humanity from destroying all life on earth.
War good. Peace bad.
No, war profitable, peace less so.