Naomi Klein and Angela Davis are among dozens of international scholars and writers who have signed a letter to the Guardian calling on the UK government to reverse the ban on Palestine Action.
The letter applauds what it describes as a “growing campaign of collective defiance” against the ban and commends the “courageous stand” of hundreds of people who plan to risk arrest by declaring their support for Palestine Action during a mass protest in London on Saturday.
Signatories from major academic institutions around the world also say they are “especially concerned” about the ban’s possible impact on universities across Britain and beyond.
It comes as the pressure group Defend Our Juries plans to hold a “mass action” in London on Saturday where participants have been asked to hold up signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Police have warned they will carry out mass arrests of anyone contravening terrorism laws. A separate Palestine solidarity march is taking place in London on the same day.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, proscribed Palestine Action last month after activists caused an estimated £7m of damage to jets at RAF Brize Norton military base in Oxfordshire.
On Wednesday, a cabinet minister urged members of the public to stay away from events supporting proscribed organisations. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, said the government would not dictate to police how they handled any action and added that some coverage had also been “conflating legitimate protests”.
She commended pro-Palestinian protesters who she said had been peacefully demonstrating outside parliament. But she added: “There’s a difference between that and supporting a proscribed terror organisation that wishes harm on the British people. And I would just urge people to stay away from those sorts of events and to exercise their democratic rights in a peaceful and legitimate way.”
The letter from Klein, Davis and others states: “As scholars dedicated to questions of justice and ethics we believe that Yvette Cooper’s recent proscription of Palestine Action represents an attack both on the entire pro-Palestine movement and on fundamental freedoms of expression, association, assembly and protest.”
It adds: “As hundreds of people again risk arrest by joining street protests on 9 August and as so many students and teachers prepare for the start of another turbulent academic year, we express our full solidarity with those mobilising on their campuses or in their workplaces and communities to prevent genocide and to end all UK complicity with Israel’s crimes.”
Along with Klein, the Canadian author and activist who is now a professor at the University of British Columbia, and Davis, a former member of the Black Panther party who is now a distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, other signatories include the American feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Others who have signed the letter include the philosophers Étienne Balibar and Rebecca Comay. Historians include the Israeli political scientist Ilan Pappé of the University of Exeter and the British-Israeli academic Avi Shlaim of the University of Oxford.
Prominent Palestinian signatories include Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, Abdaljawad Omar, an assistant professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, and Haidar Eid, an associate professor of postcolonial literature at al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
They are joined by the political thinker Michael Hardt of Duke University and Eyal Weizman, the British-Israeli founding director of Forensic Architecture and a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Their letter comes after 300 left-leaning Jewish figures, including the director Mike Leigh and the author Michael Rosen, earlier this week wrote to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, to describe the ban on Palestine Action as “illegitimate and unethical”.
That letter, by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman KC and the playwright Gillian Slovo, also accused the government of “hand-wringing over the level of slaughter and suffering in Gaza and the West Bank” and of offering “tacit support” for the actions of the Israeli state.
