Emilios Christodoulidis

Professor Emilios Christodoulidis, chair of jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow School of Law, is among signatories to an open letter describing the protest group’s proscription as an attack on “basic freedoms of expression, association, assembly, and protest”.

Identifying themselves as “scholars dedicated to questions of justice and ethics”, they say they are “astonished and dismayed” by the UK government’s continued “material, military and diplomatic support” for Israel.

“No matter how many people are actually starved, bombed or shot to death by the Israeli military, no matter how many UN officials or human rights groups or genocide scholars name this genocide for what it is, to this day [Keir] Starmer and his ministers still decline to characterise Israeli actions as actually criminal or genocidal,” they write.

“They decline to do this, presumably, because it might amount to tacit admission of their own complicity in Israel’s flagrant war crimes.”

The letter applauds the “growing campaign of collective defiance” against the ban on Palestine Action, including demonstrations organised by a group called Defend Our Juries at which hundreds of people have been arrested.

One such demonstration in London on Saturday led to 474 arrests, the largest number of people arrested by the Met on a single day for over a decade. More than 98 per cent of those arrests were on suspicion of showing support for a proscribed organisation.

“In alliance with thousands of trade unionists and teachers across the UK, we affirm our own solidarity with Palestine Action in their campaign against proscription,” the scholars say.

“We fully share both their goal of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel and their belief that all participants in the pro-Palestine movement should be free to make our own decisions about how best to achieve that goal, without having to face down the threat of state repression and violence.”

Palestine Action was designated as a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 after members of the group damaged two British military planes at RAF Brize Norton by spraying them with red paint.