Description
The relative absence of the spectacular police violence witnessed in other European states (e.g., Germany) has led to a misperception that the repression of Palestine solidarity in Britain is less severe. This paper argues that this reading is a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual workings of repression, which is not a monolithic state project but a function of a distributed network whose very diffuseness and reliance on 'banal' bureaucratic tools renders it largely invisible.
This paper deconstructs the workings of this distributed repression by analysing how two interrelated mechanisms converge at the university level to sustain and reproduce the very international hierarchies and counterterror logics that render genocide not only permissible but necessary. First, we analyse the state-driven securitisation paradigm, which relies on the racialised conflation of Palestine solidarity with inherent ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’. This process, leveraging vague legislation like the Terrorism Act 2000 and the diffuse ‘Prevent’ framework, provides the ideological justification for the entire network, enabling pre-criminal surveillance and disciplinary investigations.
Second, the paper demonstrates how this securitisation is operationalised through administrative weaponisation. Here, the university node acts with significant autonomy, translating the state's security logic into a pretext for repression. The ideological framing of pro-Palestinian discourse as a threat is cynically mapped onto health and safety regulations and risk assessments. Charges of creating a ‘security threat’ or an ‘antisemitic environment’ are mobilised, relying on the false conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism and of discomfort with danger.
The paper concludes that the repression in Britain is potent precisely because of its distributed nature, where explicit state-level counterterrorism frameworks provide the overarching threat narrative, while administrative safety bureaucracy within institutions like universities provides the functional, seemingly apolitical tools for enforcement.
