On the day Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Parliament she intended to ban the militant campaign group Palestine Action under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act after its notorious break-in at RAF Brize Norton, the far-Left group staged a show of strength.
Dozens of police vans and ambulances were deployed along the Strand in London last week as around 500 supporters, some of them hiding their faces with scarves, gathered in Trafalgar Square.
One, who was later questioned by police, wore an outfit resembling the concentration camp uniform handed to Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
Clashes between police and protesters led to 13 arrests, with seven people charged – one for a racially aggravated public-order offence.
So just who are the ringleaders of this radical group, and what are their plans?
To find out, The Mail on Sunday infiltrated one of a series of webinars on Zoom, as Palestine Action capitalised on its notoriety by embarking on a recruitment campaign.
‘Nobody here is doing anything illegal by being here,’ says the woman leading the ‘crash course’.
She is understood to be Turkish-Cypriot artist Gamze Sanli, whose work ‘weaves folklore and mythology, abolition and political resistance, death and witchcraft’.
Turkish-Cypriot witchcraft artist Gamze Sanli formerly squirted ketchup – to represent blood – on a statue of former foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in the House of Commons in 2022
Palestine Action was set up in 2020 by Huda Ammori, the daughter of a former NHS surgeon who is Palestinian by birth, in partnership with ‘Christian anarchist’ and former Extinction Rebellion member Richard Barnard, 51
Activists from Palestine Action let off smoke grenades, spray blood red paint and grapple with a security guard outside the offices of Elbit Systems in 2022
In 2022 she used a tourist pass to enter the House of Commons before squirting ketchup – to represent blood – on a statue of former foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, author of the 1917 ‘Balfour declaration’ that set out British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
She was found not guilty of criminal damage at a subsequent trial.
In her webinar she gives a list of primary and secondary ‘targets’ for direct action (which includes breaking into factories, where she urges us to smash ‘everything you can with a sledgehammer’) and tips on what to do when we’re arrested.
Remarkably, given the cross-party condemnation of the Brize Norton attack, fresh targets include three other RAF bases: RAF Cranwell and RAF Barkston Heath, both in Lincolnshire, and RAF Valley, in Anglesey, North Wales.
Yesterday, it was reported that the group had 148 UK targets in all, according to a map on its website – including the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, the 11 locations of insurance firm Allianz (for its supposed links to Israel’s defence industry) and, bizarrely, Shannon Airport in Ireland.
If Ms Cooper’s legislation is successful, Palestine Action could go on Britain’s list of 81 proscribed organisations this week, rubbing shoulders with Al Qaeda, the IRA and Hamas.
But many on this Zoom call seem to have been spurred into action by what they see as the Government’s over-zealous response to the Brize Norton incident.
At least two people broke into the RAF base at night. One rode a scooter up to an Airbus Voyager – a mid-air refuelling aircraft – and sprayed paint into its engine, allegedly causing damage valued at up to £25 million.
One activist rode a scooter up to an Airbus Voyager – a mid-air refuelling aircraft – and sprayed paint into its engine, allegedly causing damage valued at up to £25 million, at Brize Norton
On Friday, a woman aged 29 and men aged 36 and 24 were arrested on suspicion of terror offences relating to the incident. A 41-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender
On Friday, a woman aged 29 and men aged 36 and 24 were arrested on suspicion of terror offences relating to the incident.
A 41-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.
A note preceding last Wednesday’s Zoom meeting claimed many new followers would be joining in ‘solidarity’.
A fundraiser set up to challenge its banning has already raised more than £180,000, and human-rights solicitor Gareth Peirce has been lined up to represent the group in court.
Her past clients include Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg – whose Islamist advocacy group Cage, which once praised Islamic State executioner Jihadi John as a ‘beautiful young man’, is closely linked to Palestine Action.
The amount being raised has reportedly led to Home Office fears that Iran may be bankrolling the group’s activities through proxies.
But Palestine Action insists it is funded by ‘ordinary people’ and condemned any Iran link as a smear.
The group says its support base is made up of anyone from nursery teachers to surgeons, ranging in age from 18 to 80.
Palestine Action was set up in 2020 by Huda Ammori, the daughter of a former NHS surgeon, who is Palestinian by birth
Wednesday’s online workshop was very much a silver-haired affair, with a dozen or so people of pensionable age, including a retired reverend.
But the founders of Palestine Action are rather more hardcore. It was set up in 2020 by Huda Ammori, the daughter of a former NHS surgeon, who is Palestinian by birth, in partnership with ‘Christian anarchist’ and former Extinction Rebellion member Richard Barnard, 51.
Ms Ammori told The Guardian yesterday that she found the group’s proposed banning ‘hard to absorb’.
‘I don’t have a single conviction, but if this goes through I would have co-founded what will be a terrorist organisation,’ she said.
Now 31, she gained a reputation as a serial protester while studying international business and finance at Manchester University.
Her activism coincided with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and, in an article for The New Arab magazine in 2022, she revealed it was her Iraqi mother who insisted she join the party.
She said: ‘This was quite confusing given that Tony Blair, under the Labour government, led the invasion and destruction of Iraq.’
She added: ‘However, this time round, the renewal of hope was alive, with Jeremy Corbyn, a committed anti-imperialist activist and politician, elected as leader.’
Ms Ammori told The Guardian that she found the group’s proposed banning ‘hard to absorb’
But by 2019 Mr Corbyn had lost the leadership and, under his successor Keir Starmer, Ms Ammori saw ‘a bias towards apartheid and imperialism’.
She claimed successive governments had ‘supported Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people’, and this led her to launch Palestine Action.
Its goal is to attack bodies behind arms exports to Israel, particularly the UK sites of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, which was described in Wednesday’s online ‘crash course’ as the ‘Zionist manifestation in the UK’.
An Elbit factory in Staffordshire became its first target. In 2020, activists climbed on its roof and spent three nights wreaking havoc with hammers and paint.
In an interview with Prospect magazine last year, Ms Ammori recalled how she felt when she looked at the wrecked building as police carried her down on a stretcher (the group teaches activists to ‘go floppy’ when being arrested to cause disruption).
‘I just remember saying how beautiful it all looked,’ she said.
Since then, its tactics have become increasingly militant. Ten members allegedly used an old prison van to break into an Elbit Systems site in Bristol last August in an act described as a ‘ram raid’.
Eighteen were arrested and remanded in custody, and will be tried this year. Ms Ammori was not involved. In March, activists on a cherry picker targeted Elbit in Bristol again, spraying it with red paint and using a sledgehammer on a rope to smash windows.
Palestine Action protesters targeted Elbit Systems in Bristol earlier this year
This militancy seems a far cry from Ms Ammori’s upbringing in a detached house in a gated cul-de-sac in an affluent area of Bolton.
But she appears to have been radicalised young. She claims her great-grandfather was killed by British soldiers in the 1936 uprising in Palestine, a major Arab revolt against British rule and increasing Jewish immigration.
She also endured turmoil in 2013 when her father, Professor Basil Ammori, left the family home and moved in with a woman 30 years his junior, whom he later married.
In 2014, she and her father were said to have had a violent doorstep altercation after she allegedly posted his new wife’s name on a personal ads website causing men to post messages asking for sex.
She also claimed he had ‘f***** off with a white whore’ and had a ‘b****** son’, a General Medical Council tribunal heard in 2016. Accused of hitting Ms Ammori when she confronted him at his home in Altrincham, Cheshire, the obesity surgeon was cleared.
Ms Ammori’s mother declined to discuss her daughter’s militant activities with the MoS.
Richard Barnard has a similarly conflicted background. Among his 30 tattoos are Buddhist chants, an IRA slogan, ‘freedom’ in Arabic and ‘all cops are b*****ds’ in code.
Once part of the Christian anarchist group Catholic Worker, he told Prospect he was now Muslim.
Protestors and Met Police officers clashed during a rally in support of Palestine Action
He is said to have been in a hardline faction of the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) around founder Roger Hallam, who also established Just Stop Oil. Hallam is serving a four-year prison sentence for conspiring to disrupt traffic over the M25.
Barnard was arrested in 2019 but later acquitted for protesting on top of Tube trains in an XR stunt.
He is due to be tried next year for allegedly eliciting support for Hamas and encouraging criminal damage.
At a demo in Manchester the day after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, he reportedly told the crowd: ‘When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa Flood [as Hamas called the attack] we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.’
Other supporters include NHS orthopaedic doctor Rahmeh Aladwan, who on Thursday reposted a tweet from Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, which read: ‘I offer my congratulations on the victory over the fallacious Zionist regime.’
She has also tweeted: ‘Let the record show that I support [Palestine Action]… upholders of truth and justice. Our British heroes.’
Then there is Paul Shortt, 52, from Dumfries, Scotland, who posed with what appears to be a handgun on social media alongside a post stating: ‘Resistance is not terrorism! Resistance is justified. When people are occupied. Resist! By any means necessary.’
He was one of ten activists who attacked Elbit’s Bristol HQ in 2022. He received a suspended jail term.
Palestine Action supporters stage a protest in Trafalgar Square against government plans to proscribe the activist group
Palestine Action has produced a manual on how to plot disruption. Members should organise themselves into cells of three or four, use ‘burner’ phones and code names, cover their faces and pay for any supplies in cash.
Today, it is due to carry out a ‘training day’ in Leicester for recruits, who are expected to ‘harness the strength of the grassroots and direct it towards bringing down Israel’s war machine’. More are scheduled for London, Liverpool and Glasgow next month.
In our webinar, Gamze Sanli says members are expected to make a ‘level of sacrifice’.
But in a slide marked ‘police station tips’, detainees are told they can ask for ‘a free tracksuit’.
These middle-class activists seem ready to part with their liberty for the cause. But some home comforts clearly remain essential.
