That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature and name is chang’d; to be
Then humble to her is idolatry.
~ John Donne, Satire III
Seven activists smashed their way into an engineering plant at Sandwich, Kent, before dawn on 17 June 2024. Instro Precision, the firm there, manufactures targeting gear for drones. It is a subsidiary of the better-known Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. The prosecution alleges that, once inside, the defendants threw stock to the floor, smashing computers with a crowbar – and puts the damage done inside the factory that morning at more than £1 million. Two days later, a British export licence (Instro Precision Ltd) to Israel was stopped. No one was injured in the raid.
The trial of those seven, plus two more (ten in total were originally charged), is now under way at the Old Bailey. The youngest of the nine is twenty-one, while the oldest is fifty-two, and they are: Nasser Akhtar, Elliot Wilson, Maximillian Dixon, Nirad Abrol, Seirol Davies, Xavi Davies, Eoin O’Meara, Hannah Davidson and Julija Brigadirova. The Crown has charged them with criminal damage, burglary and violent disorder, and the hearing will run for eight weeks. Prosecutors dropped aggravated burglary – the one charge based on intent to injure – before the case reached court. Indeed, over five years and hundreds of actions, Palestine Action has injured no one; MI5’s own Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre found that the group “does not advocate for violence against persons”.
In a report on this on October 1, The Grayzone discussed a secret meeting between the Crown Prosecution Service and senior UK counter-terrorism officers which took place just ten days following the Instro raid. Those heavily redacted documents showed the existence of a so-called “threat matrix” and how authorities are categorising political activity in the UK. For example, “high level aggravated activism” is defined as involving “unlawful behaviour that has… a significant negative impact on UK businesses”. Declassified UK separately reported that when the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre recommended Palestine Action’s proscription in March 2025, it turned its case on a mere three incidents, each said to have caused damage “in excess of £1m”, and actually presented that figure to ministers as evidence of “terrorism”. No mention of violence against a person there.
Instro Precision’s CEO is Dagan Yogev, and he served as a major in the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon, after which he held senior posts at Elbit’s headquarters before being appointed head of its Sandwich plant. Palestine Action raided Sandwich because it manufactures the targeting units fitted to drones used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as its illegal incursions into southern Lebanon.
Palestine Action’s offensive against Elbit has paid off since it closed an Elbit factory at Oldham for good in the years before any terror charge. The same campaign saw the firm retreat from its London headquarters. The state noticed this was biting in 2022, after some £280 million in Ministry of Defence contracts with Elbit had gone up in smoke, and domestic and European suppliers had begun to pull out. Come the Sandwich raid, Elbit was reeling – its factories closing and contracts lost to a movement that the courts had so far been unable to restrain.
The gravest part of all of this is that – as in the earlier Elbit trial – the British press cannot tell you the most sensitive bits, since a reporting restriction has been imposed on the trial, preventing the newspapers – and the jury deciding the case – from knowing that a conviction on any charge could lead to a terrorism sentence. The jurors decide on damage to property, and yet the matter that will determine the nine’s punishment is kept from them. So the UK media are covering the trial this week, but not one of them can report, under the restriction, what a conviction could mean for the defendants.
If section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 defines “serious (damage to property)” as terrorism – then on that one word hinges a world of nuance. Section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020 is the mechanism that enables a judge to attach such a “terrorist connection”. So is a broken window just minor criminal damage and a matter for a magistrates’ court, or does it become a “serious” matter and possibly an act of terror to be tried at Crown Court? We have seen this playbook before, in the Filton case, in June of this year. The machinery ran all the way to sentence when a Woolwich jury convicted four Palestine Action activists of criminal damage for the raid on Elbit’s Bristol factory, and Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson then ruled under section 69 that the damage carried that “terrorist connection” – making legal history as the first occasion on which such a finding has been attached to the breaking of property.
Once that unprecedented, some would say authoritarian ruling stood, the sentences rose as high as eight years, with fifteen-year notification requirements imposed. The nine Instro defendants are currently facing that same finding, despite it having been declined in an earlier case by a judge who found the circumstances of a wrecked Barclays branch in Burnley “significant” but short of “serious”; though crucially the principle itself survived his decision.
