The unbanning of Palestine Action

JVL Introduction

A fascinating interview with Charlie Thomas, a researcher into and activist with Palestine Action (PA), who was charged in 2022 with causing criminal damage.

Here Equator explores with him the emergence of Palestine Action, a direct action group focused on sites of arms production and research, with the aim of disrupting military supply chains between Britain and Israel.

Thomas makes clear the disjuncture between the arguments Yvette Cooper used publicly in her smear campaign against PA, and the technocratic legal arguments deployed in court.

The real reason, traces of which appeared in the prosecution argument , was about the need to defend “businesses and institutions” and the “defence enterprise”, i.e. to assure private companies in the arms sector that their investments were safe.

Thomas is full of praise for the Lift the Ban campaign, an act of “strategic brilliance” which made it easy for people to engage and mass action a reality.

Whatever steps the government takes to remedy the situation it has suffered a strategic loss of legitimacy for its vindictive decision to try to tarnish Palestine Action as “terrorist”.

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Thanks to Equator magazine for permission to repost this article.

For those who don’t know it, Equator is a relatively new high quality magazine of politics, culture and art. You might like to read Our Monstrous Ideas by Natalia Ginzburg; Surrealism Against Fascism by Naomi Klein; Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco by Daniel Trilling; Beyond the Apocalypse by Amitav Ghosh; How Gaza Broke the Art World by David Velasco – and so much else besides.

Make sure to bookmark Equator.

RK

This article was originally published by Equator on Sat 14 Feb 2026. Read the original here.