One presumably unintended consequence of the Labour government’s decision to label the activist group Palestine Action a ‘terrorist organisation’ has been a revival of community film screenings. Across the last fortnight, hastily arranged presentations of To Kill A War Machine — Hannan Majid and Richard York’s 2025 feature length documentary following five months of Palestine Action activism — have been organised at community centres and arts spaces across the country. A sense of civil liberties under threat was very palpable at the one I attended, at the Isabel Blackman Centre in Hastings on Sunday night.

One member of the audience — who also attended the previous week’s screening of Blood Fruit, the excellent 2014 documentary about Dublin’s shopworkers who pioneered the boycott strategy which became a vital factor in the dismantling of apartheid — got a rousing cheer for announcing that she would be willing to be arrested if she helped to organise post-proscription screenings. It all reminded me of another urgent collective response to a scarcely credible threat. As a teenager in the 1980s, I attended a similar community screening of The War Game, Peter Watkins’s 1965 BBC film (banned by the corporation for twenty years), which uses fake documentary material to imagine the impact of a Soviet nuclear strike on Kent. My main memory is being captivated by an elderly cockney union official named Mick, who kept bringing the discussion back to Krushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN. 

Stimulating a revival of grassroots popular cinema was perhaps not on Keir Starmer’s bingo card when he took power one year ago this month. But To Kill A War Machine offers a compelling antidote to to the feeling of hopelessness induced by the Prime Minister’s determination to go down in history as an accomplice of genocide. 

Majid and York’s film combines Bodycam and iPhone camera footage with interviews conducted with activists and family members of the imprisoned Filton 18, a group of activists presently detained under counter-terrorism powers for their alleged role in the destruction of weapons intended for Gaza at Elbit Systems in Bristol. The film clearly maps out the evolution of Palestine Action’s rationale and methodology. 

The key point in establishing a direct action counterpoint to the marches, speeches, and letter-writing campaigns that successive governments seemed only too happy to ignore was the decision to focus on the UK operations of Elbit, who are Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. In highlighting the direct connection between the horrifying events unfolding daily on mobile phone screens, and factories operating in Britain’s towns and business parks, Palestine Action brought home the awful reality of Britain’s complicity in the genocide with a clarity that was as uncomfortable for the arms companies as it was for the politicians enabling them. And, to be sure, the Home Office’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action is enabling them: the UK government has separately met Elbit and Israeli embassy officials, although documents have been heavily redacted so that details are scarce (though a 2022 briefing note for then home secretary Priti Patel contains a smoking gun in its title of ‘past lobbying’). 

There are moments of knockabout comedy in the Bodycam footage, as irate security guards gallop to the defence of imperilled, death-delivering technology like so many private-hire Keystone Cops. This does not obscure the seriousness of the stand being taken. You have to have a very strong attachment to the primacy of profit over human life to see the destruction of drone quadcopters used to target children and pregnant women for assassination as anything other than a good thing — and the intercutting of blandly dystopian drone advertising with footage of the devastating use of this weaponry is brutally unanswerable.

Rapper Lowkey talks in the film about Palestine Action ‘articulating a form of love’, and the humility and resourcefulness of the activists depicted on screen (‘the police are here, have you glued the doors?’) confounds a creaking, repressive apparatus through a process of constant adaptation. The Health and Safety regulation that frustrated law enforcers (‘once you’re on the roof, no one can be underneath’) was a particular audience favourite at the screening I attended. 

Palestine Action’s early success in achieving acquittals in court clearly prompted the government to change tack, and legal obstacles placed in the way of defence arguments which had gone down so well with juries — for example, that criminal damage to prevent a war crime is the lesser of two evils — had already secured a sharp upturn in convictions. But now, Yvette Cooper’s decision to gift Elbit and Israeli lobbyists with this highly draconian measure puts To Kill A War Machine directors Majid and York at real risk of prosecution (the directors told the Guardian this week that they are seeking legal advice as this situation develops, and they have now taken steps to withdraw access to the film.) 

The temperature of debate around this issue continues to rise even as the constant stream of Israeli atrocities in Gaza passes virtually unnoticed by mainstream outlets, as the Telegraph demands the imprisonment of London-based punk duo Bob Vylan for their ‘death, death, to the IDF’ chant at last weekend’s Glastonbury Festival (an incident which is duly being investigated by local police forces), and Keir Starmer rubber-stamps the right’s grimly effective appropriation of the language of identity politics by accusing the duo of ‘hate speech’. The probability that (at least in terms of the UN charter-enshrined right of armed resistance to illegal occupation) Bob Vylan’s verbal intervention falls well within the confines of international law does not seem to be getting much media traction. 

The Vylan witch hunt, the ongoing terror charges against Kneecap rapper Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh), the proscription of Palestine Action, and the potential threat to To Kill A War Machine seem to be part of a concerted campaign to shut down any meaningful pro-Palestine protest. Does a prison system already turfing out hardened offenders before the end of their sentences to make room for new inmates really have the capacity to lock people up for wearing Palestine Action t-shirts? Time will tell. In the meantime, this well put together and heartening documentary’s thesis about the ability of ‘groups of people with conscience, morals and a few tools to change the world’ looks like becoming a test case for a government which is more interested in channeling Viktor Orban than Victor Jara.