Huda Ammori: ‘It was beyond our comprehension that Palestine Action could become a terrorist organisation’

The word Huda Ammori uses when asked what it was like to be accused of terrorism isn’t shocking or frightening or bewildering. It’s infuriating. “I never expected to be proscribed,” she says, using the legal language for what happened. Last year Palestine Action, which she co-founded, was proscribed by the Home Office as a terrorist organisation after two of its members broke into RAF Brize Norton on electric scooters and spray-painted a Pathfinder refuelling jet.

For Yvette Cooper , then home secretary, it was the latest in a “long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action”. For Ammori, to be branded a terrorist because of it was “incredibly infuriating… and I think the main reason for that is that everything we were doing was to save lives in Palestine”. We’re in a big city park within earshot of bellowing elephants (they may have been hippos), but have agreed not to say where because Ammori is worried about security.

She’s also worried about the outcome of the case she brought to the supreme court in London last week – probably the most important test of the balance between freedom of expression and public safety in the court’s history. Was the government right to outlaw PA under Britain’s terrorism laws? Or does that violate citizens’ rights to free speech and assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights? The judges have heard two days of arguments and withdrawn to think.

Outside the court, much of the political and security establishment has lined up behind two home secretaries who decided that PA crossed a line in its eight-year struggle to shut down Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems. In PA’s crowded corner: thousands of supporters and veterans of direct action campaigns, NGOs including Liberty and Amnesty International, left-leaning intellectuals and the novelist Sally Rooney, whose books are no longer on sale in the UK lest their publisher be accused of supporting terrorism .

Related articles: Labour MPs regret voting for Palestine Action proscription Entering the Age of Censorship (for Sally Rooney) Britain’s Jewish community is split between groups that see PA as part of a worsening threat to their safety in the UK, and a smaller number of supporters for whom its activities are a vital response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza. In the middle of it all is Ammori, catapulted from obscurity to the role of the country’s most notable litigant by two things: a government effort to “stifle” PA which has achieved the opposite effect, and her own steely refusal to yield.

Not that things seem to have gone well last week at the supreme court, she admits as we seek shelter from the drizzle. “I was quite astonished, to be honest, at what happened.” She and her lawyers had been prepping for months and had “very detailed arguments”, she says. “And unfortunately my lawyers were interrupted over 100 times and they had about three hours to make their case… so I think the judges were very hostile.” Court-watchers without a stake in the proceedings agreed that the judges seemed sceptical of Palestine Action’s case.

Its argument was that the court should revisit the fundamental question of whether its activities count as terrorism; end the proscription on the basis that it violates articles 10 and 11 of the European convention; and find that PA is in fact a protest group in the time-honoured tradition of the suffragettes. The government’s response was that the terrorism question was settled when the court of appeal ruled against PA earlier this year; that home secretaries need broad discretion in interpreting and enforcing anti-terrorism laws; and that their “interference” with ECHR protections in this case is therefore warranted.

The legalese feels remote from the burning issues that make Ammori get up and go to work each day – issues that have dominated her life since 2017. That is when, as a student at Manchester University, she started organising direct action protests against an Elbit Systems subsidiary in Oldham because, she argues, the company’s principal customer is the Israel Defense Forces and its main focus, then and since, has been Gaza. Targeting Elbit Systems seemed “the logical thing to do”, she said last year.

Some family history helps to explain why. Ammori’s parents, both medics, met in Iraq and studied together at the University of Baghdad. But her father, who is Palestinian, grew up in the West Bank. “And when he was six years old he and his younger siblings – he’s the oldest – were at their home during the 1967 war when the Israeli military basically came and started shooting into their house so they were forced to hide under the table in their front room,” she says.

“They had no choice but to crawl out of their own house with the clothes they had on at the time and run for their lives. My auntie, who was just a toddler at the time, had to run without any shoes, and they ended up having to hide for several days in caves until my granddad could get them.” She has clearly told the story before, and she tells it without emotion, hands folded by this time on a table under an outdoor shelter. Her father’s family fled that year to Kuwait and thence to Iraq, and eventually made their way to England.

She grew up in and around Manchester, where her parents hoped she might follow them into medicine. “I think I was destined to be a pharmacist,” she says. “Coming from Palestine and Iraq, they wanted us to be able to, you know, have a nice, comfortable life.” That’s not the one she has chosen. As a student in 2015, she visited the Greek island of Lesbos and was “devastated” to see people who “look the same as me, the same as my family” arriving from the Middle East to the general indifference of international agencies she’d thought were there to help.

“On New Year’s Eve I remember a five-month-old Syrian baby dying from hypothermia in front of us in the camp, and I just saw thousands of people coming in and not getting much help, struggling, dying in Europe.” She made a second trip to Lesbos but eventually decided that as a British citizen it was in Britain that she should try to make a difference. “That was my thought process, and that was what I set out to do.” Before focusing on Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest defence contractor, Ammori joined the student-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli companies and their investors.

She set up Palestine Action in 2020 with Richard Barnard, a former Extinction Rebellion member who has been charged under the Terrorism Act with expressing support for Hamas. They marked the group’s launch by spray-painting Elbit Systems’ London headquarters. Palestine Action co-founders Richard Barnard and Huda Ammori outside Westminster Magistrates Court Part of the Home Office case against Palestine Action has been that it used a manual that urged members to disrupt and degrade Elbit Systems’ facilities “without restraint”, and that its actions were “escalatory”, especially after 7 October 2023 , when Hamas killed at least 1,195 people in what is recognised as the single deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Did PA go too far? Ammori doesn’t accept the idea. She recalls the horror of following the war on Gaza which followed, in which at least 70,000 Palestinians were killed, among them 21 members of the family of a friend of hers. Direct action against Elbit Systems was more empowering for “the movement”, she says, than “screaming into the void”. ‘This is about Palestinians having equal rights to Jewish people in that region’ ‘This is about Palestinians having equal rights to Jewish people in that region’ Huma Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action And she mentions a meeting in 2023 between Chris Philp, the then policing minister, and representatives of Elbit Systems, at which according to documents released in response to a freedom of information request, an official from the Crown Prosecution Service said Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold for terrorism.

In all her years of activism, has she wrestled at all with the question of Israel’s right to exist? She pauses before answering. “To be perfectly honest, it was quite simple to me because I always understood what Israel’s right to exist meant for the Palestinian people, and it meant being forced out and ethnically cleansed from their homes.” She presumably knows that the historiography of the creation of Israel is complex, but presses on.

“And that the existence of the creation of Israel was created on the destruction on Palestinian homes. For me, it’s not about the state’s right to exist. It’s about people’s right to exist.” She stresses that she is not calling for anyone to be expelled from Israel. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about Palestinians having equal rights to the Jewish people in that region.” Ammori has been arrested seven times but never jailed. Proscription came as a shock even after members of Palestine Action were re-arrested under terrorism laws after an action against an Elbit Systems plant in Filton, near Bristol, where a police officer was seriously injured with a sledgehammer.

Four members were convicted and jailed – one for grievous bodily harm; the other three for criminal damage put at over £1m. Even then it was “beyond our comprehension that Palestine Action could become a terrorist organisation”, she says. Then, on 20 June last year, the group broke into RAF Brize Norton and left red spray paint on the engine cowling of the Pathfinder. Ammori didn’t know about it in advance and won’t say whether she would have intervened to stop it if she had.

But that evening, she says, “a friend texted me saying a journalist at the BBC is saying you’re going to be proscribed, and I thought you got that wrong. That was my reaction. Someone’s being paranoid.” Cooper’s intent to proscribe was confirmed that evening and as it sunk in Ammori found herself thinking: “what the hell is going on?” A Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton targeted by Palestine Action It was a good question. A devastating war on Gaza was in progress.

Mass demonstrations in support of the Palestinian cause were commonplace in western capitals and on western campuses. Military support for Israel from the US and its allies was more contentious and contested than ever. At the same time, Jewish communities in the UK and elsewhere, never mind in Israel, felt threatened by what they experienced, and the Community Security Trust reported, as a rising tide of antisemitism. It’s about Palestinians having equal rights to the Jewish people in that region It’s about Palestinians having equal rights to the Jewish people in that region Ammori realised her life was about to change dramatically.

In the first 48 hours after news of the proscription broke, she says, Palestine Action raised £300,000 from supporters. But fundraising for the group thereafter would become an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000. Supporters would be liable to be arrested simply for holding placards saying they backed the group. Thousands would do precisely that, among them an 80-year-old magistrate and the children of Holocaust survivors. Others, wary of getting a criminal record, would distance themselves.

Sure enough, Ammori says, smaller activist groups and media outlets that supported Palestine Action from the start are now “scared to have me on their shows or to talk to us because they’re scared that they’re an easy target and that they will be prosecuted”. Cooper, the former home secretary, has said free speech will never be curtailed by terrorism laws but in fact this chilling effect is deliberate. UK laws define terrorism and support for terrorism broadly, which is why the government’s legal advisers and the court of appeal as well as the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre have supported Cooper and the proscription from the start.

We stop at an oddly enormous war memorial