Britain’s Index of Repression
For too long, anti-Palestinian repression has been dismissed as incidental, exceptional, and justified. On 25 February, we confirm what the movement has long known: this repression is multi-sited, institutionalised and systematic, unfolding across varied stages.
“The European Legal Support Center (ELSC), in collaboration with Forensic Architecture, launched Britain’s Index of Repression. It is a public database exposing how Palestine solidarity is silenced, criminalised, and sanctioned through a coordinated system involving multiple sectors and actors. A comprehensive report providing contextual analysis of the data accompanied the launch.”c
Britain’s Index of Repression, developed by ELSC and Forensic Architecture, documents 964 verified incidents (2019–2025) of legal, institutional, and political repression targeting students, academics, workers, journalists, artists, and organisers standing in solidarity with Palestine.
Originally launched in Germany in 2025, the Index is now Britain’s first publicly accessible database of its kind. It identifies the key actors, targets, and mechanisms of anti-Palestinian repression, making the resource freely available so the movement can challenge the repression it documents and render it undeniable.
Our documentation draws from years of legal casework, monitoring, and research by a team embedded in the Palestine solidarity movement. The database builds on Germany’s Index of Repression and is both a continuation of this work and an expansion into a broader transnational effort to document and expose repression across Europe. The forthcoming iteration of the Index will focus on the Netherlands.
The report, On All Fronts: The Multi-Sited Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Britain, contextualises the data and explains how repression operates. It reveals that repression is cross-sectoral, affecting education, workplaces, cultural institutions, and public protest. The 964 documented incidents represent the tip of the iceberg; they are a monitorable sample indicative of a far wider and deeper pattern.
Our data show that the entire architecture of repression is built upon an interpretive framework defined by two allegations against the Palestine solidarity movement: antisemitism and support for terrorism. The efficacy of these allegations as tools of repression stems from long-standing political projects rooted in imperial logic, which we briefly trace in this report.
The report demonstrates a systematic effort to depoliticise and demobilise the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain – a process that seeks to strip the movement of its political character and ethical force as part of a wider project to erase Palestinian history, presence, and the facts of their oppression from public consciousness and institutional memory.
It tells a story of resistance. Repression intensifies when people resist, yet this very crackdown often becomes the catalyst for further struggle – leading, time and again, to hard-won victories.
It is the first cross-sector dataset of its kind on anti-Palestinian repression in Britain.
This Index is the first of its kind in Britain to document how state and non-state actors coordinate a multi-sited, institutionalised repression aimed at depoliticising and isolating the Palestine solidarity movement.
It traces repression before October 2023.
Spanning 2019–2025, the data demonstrates that repression did not begin in October 2023, nor with the high-profile proscription of Palestine Action. It is structural, evolving, and premeditated. Repression intensifies when people stand in solidarity – not only with those facing repression, but with Palestinians resisting oppression.
It situates Britain within a transnational system of repression.
The Index of Repression operates on a transnational level. By tracing patterns across Europe, our database provides a tool that allows the public to understand repression not only as a national phenomenon but as an interconnected, cross-border system. Repressive tactics are adapted and imported across jurisdictions; what succeeds in one country is replicated in another.
It is rigorously documented and embedded in the movement.
Drawing on years of legal casework, monitoring, and research by a team embedded in the Palestine solidarity movement,
we applied a comprehensive range of methods to document, monitor, and verify the incidents.
It reveals the architecture of anti-Palestinian repression.
It is systematic and institutionalised, carried out by state and non-state actors. This database and report go beyond our legal work. They identify a coordinated, multi-sited system that evolves in phases — from smears, to sanctions, to lasting and debilitating repercussions — and exposes the structural logic that enables and sustains it.
It’s a resource for the movement.
Understanding how this repression works – its actors, mechanisms, and targets – gives us the power to strategise how to protect our communities and sustain our struggle.
It makes denial impossible.
This public evidence stands as an undeniable record of anti-Palestinian repression.
It tells a story of resistance.
Repression intensifies when people resist, yet this very crackdown often becomes the catalyst for further struggle – leading, time and again, to hard-won victories.
964 verified incidents of repression targeting Palestine solidarity documented across education, workplaces, protest spaces, and cultural institutions in Britain over a six-year period (January 2019 – August 2025).
- Moves beyond isolated case reporting, identifying recurring institutional and enforcement patterns across sectors.
- The report finds UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) Involved in 128 Incidents leading to institutional repression of Palestine solidarity.
- The repression evolves in phases: from smears to sanctions (like disciplinary hearings, suspensions) to more lasting and debilitating repercussions (such as legal charges and dismissals).
- The main two allegations used against the Palestine solidarity movement are antisemitism and support for terrorism.
- Repression focuses deliberately on sectors fundamental to shaping public discourse and holding public trust: education, activism and protest, and Culture.
- This strategic targeting across sectors represents a division of repressive labour. It aims to dismantle solidarity at every stage: from the formation of political consciousness in universities and schools, to its expression in culture, to its organisation in public spaces.
- Victories are a testament to the power of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain: anti-Zionist belief is now protected as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2000 (Miller v University of Bristol); trade unions continue to pass policies to protect their workers’ freedom of speech, protest rights, and right to reject their workplaces’ complicity in the Israeli genocide in Palestine; and a successful Judicial Review ruled that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, with juries acquitting activists as part of the trials against the ‘Filton 24’.
1) Report repression of Palestine solidarity to the ELSC here.
2) Circulate the Index and the report within your network and amplify our social
media posts on the day of the launch. Feel free to post your own messages over the coming days.
3) Use them against the normalisation of anti-Palestinian repression and to inform your strategy.
4) If you are a journalist: Report on these findings and the stories of the people who face and resist repression. We believe the scope and patterns we reveal here are of the utmost public concern – precisely the kind of issues journalism exists to address.
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