CAGE releases comprehensive study on the effectiveness of Palestine Action’s direct action campaign in the UK
London – CAGE International has released a major new report documenting how direct action for Palestine - and Palestine Action (PA) in particular, has fundamentally reshaped Britain’s political landscape by directly disrupting the UK’s material links to Israeli genocide. The report shows how PA’s strategic focus on Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has been exceptionally effective: closing factories, halting production, driving up costs, and forcing corporations, investors and logistics providers to reconsider their role in enabling genocide.
The report, “Putting Bodies on the Line: The Landscape of Direct Action and Civil Disobedience for Palestine in the UK,” documents the rise of direct action from 2020–2025. It charts how a disciplined, targeted, movement driven by its own conscience and purpose made complicity too costly to ignore, and how this pressure sparked a national reckoning around the limits of conscience, civil resistance, and state power.
Published during the judicial review challenging the proscription of Palestine Action, the report provides a detailed timeline and analysis of the movement’s strategic successes, its own moral clarity, and the escalating repression of the state in response. Its release comes as Palestine Action prisoners have entered a prolonged hunger strike, the Filton 24 trials begin to unfold, and police continue to arrest members of the public for engaging in civil disobedience in solidarity with Palestine Action against Israeli genocide.
The report provides a clear chronology of key actions - from the sustained campaign that shut down Elbit’s Oldham factory, to major production stoppages at Filton and Teledyne - illustrating how strategic disruption, not symbolism, defined the movement’s impact.
The report outlines:
Strategic discipline: Actions were deliberately planned around points of maximum leverage - arms factories, suppliers, logistics infrastructure, financiers, and insurers - rather than symbolic gestures or indiscriminate targets.
Specificity works: Focused, sustained campaigns forced measurable outcomes:
- closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory
- production delays at Teledyne and the Filton site
- withdrawal of services by multiple logistics and supply-chain companies
Scale of action:
- 45 direct actions by Palestine Action documented between 2020-2025
- Over 70 actions in total when including allied groups and wider networks
Civil disobedience protects moral space: Publicly confronting unjust law, especially in front of juries, created openings for conscience to prevail.
- At least 19 acquittals in Elbit-related trials
- Juries have repeatedly refused to convict, arguably recognising the conscience-driven bases upon which defences were run
- Many acquittals were secured under the legal defence of necessity, where damage or trespass is justified when done for the sake of preventing a greater harm
Breadth of complicity requires breadth of targeting: When manufacturers hardened sites, activists shifted to insurers, universities, financiers, and lobbyists - making systemic complicity harder to hide and costlier to maintain.
Direct action works: Over five years, companies tied to Israel’s weapons industry absorbed seven-figure financial losses, suffered supply-chain disruption, and saw premises shuttered or operations delayed. These impacts were not theatrical but structural.
A proof of concept: The record demonstrates that direct action, when strategically applied, can alter the practical operations of power - making it harder, slower, and more expensive for Britain to arm Israeli apartheid.
Huda Ammori, Co-Founder of Palestine Action, said:
“When myself and others began Palestine Action five years ago, we steeled ourselves for repression. Yet, to be proscribed and have masses of support despite the attempt to criminalise it, could not have been predicted. The lengths the state has gone to silence and attack our movement has served to highlight the effectiveness of direct action. The Home Secretary and other government ministers may try and smear Palestine Action to justify the ban, but the real reason we were proscribed is because the movement had severely damaged the Israeli weapons industry – both physically and reputationally.”
She added:
“I hope readers do not merely passively read this report, but also develop a more thorough understanding of the tactics available to the people to truly resist genocide and disrupt the production of weaponry on our doorsteps. The future of the proscription of Palestine Action may be at a crossroads, but what is certain, is the ability for ordinary people to shut down the Israeli weapons industry. Banning one group cannot stop direct action.”
Dr Asim Qureshi, CAGE International’s Research Director and author of the report, said:
“This report sets out a simple truth: when institutions are complicit in genocide, a conscience-driven resistance will always break through the cracks. Direct action is the language of those who refuse to be silent in the face of atrocity. Attempts to suppress these actions through criminalisation have not only failed, but have revealed the state’s determination to protect profit and political alliances over human life. The success of direct action is clear - repeated acquittals of actionists marks a shift in the public’s perception around Zionism, and the role that it plays in the world, especially as this genocide continues.”
The release also highlights the wider context, including the International Court of Justice findings of genocidal acts by Israel, and Britain’s continued political and military support, which has made the UK an active facilitator of ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
“Putting Bodies on the Line” offers a set of urgent reflections and interventions, arguing that conscience-driven resistance will continue to grow so long as Britain remains complicit in such atrocities.
The report can be downloaded here.
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