On July 5, British law enforcement swept up some 20 people on suspicion of terrorism offenses in front of the historic Houses of Parliament in London. Just hours earlier, the United Kingdom’s government had designated the Palestine Action activist group a terrorist organization, citing an incident a month earlier in which activists had broken into an airforce base and graffitied military jets. In turn, critics accused the UK government of stifling free speech.
Two days after those arrests and thousands of miles across the Atlantic Sea, a trial began in a case that raised similar concerns in the United States. In a Boston courtroom on July 7, a lawsuit brought by US professors sought to protect international students and faculty who advocate for pro-Palestinian solidarity. Plaintiffs have accused President Donald Trump’s administration of curtailing free speech and creating a chilling effect through a broad clampdown on pro-Palestine activism that includes visa revocations, detentions, and the arrests of now-prominent students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.
From the United States to the UK, and from Germany to Greece, a years-long crackdown on Palestine solidarity movements is now intensifying at a time when Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged Gaza Strip nears the two-year mark. “What we call the ‘Palestine exception’ to free speech has been the norm for a long time,” said Astha Sharma Pokharel, a staff attorney at the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
Now, as countries around the world join the crackdown, legal experts and free speech watchdogs warn of consequences that could reverberate for years. Last October, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Irene Khan warned of a “global crisis of freedom of expression,” pointing to the growing number of measures restricting pro-Palestine protests across Europe and the US.
As US courts weigh allegations of infringements on civil liberties, countries around Europe have likewise taken aim at demonstrators. On July 16, French police arrested a demonstrator who had run onto the racetrack of the annual Tour de France wearing a T-shirt that read “Israel Out of the Tour.”
Less than two weeks later, Columbia University in New York City announced dozens of punitive measures against pro-Palestinian students who had participated in a protest outside the library in May: Some would lose their degrees, while others would be expelled. The Trump administration had previously threatened large-scale funding cuts to Columbia, including the cancellation of research grants, after accusing the university of failing to adequately punish what it called antisemitism on campus. Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations have pointed out that protesters included Jewish groups and that some 15 Jewish students had been suspended in April 2024.
Halfway across the world, Greek demonstrators have held protests all summer long against the arrival of Israeli cruise ships on islands from Rhodes to Syros. In response, riot police have tried to break up rallies, in some cases using force against demonstrators.
In August, the European Legal Support Center published a report — “Europe’s Proscription of Palestine Solidarity” — that offered a damning assessment of repression across the continent. The report placed special emphasis on Germany, the UK, and France, countries that it said have used legal measures to “codify Palestine solidarity as ‘terrorism’ and ‘public threat orders.’”
In Germany, for instance, the report found that “hundreds of criminal charges have been filed — likely even thousands — against individuals” accused of chanting at protests or writing online the pro-Palestinian mantra “from the river to the sea.”
The report warned that “the wave of proscriptions is metastasizing across Europe,” adding that governments across the continent have deployed nearly identical playbooks to silence the pro-Palestine movement. It said that “the same script repeats … from Berlin to London to Paris.”
As the crackdown escalates, researchers have started to count the pattern of repressive measures. In May 2025, the investigative unit Forensic Architecture published a timeline of attacks on Palestinian solidarity movements in Germany and across Europe. The ongoing project, which has initially published an investigation into German efforts to counter solidarity, has already counted “more than 700 incidents in Germany since 2019.”
Beyond legal charges, some European countries — including Germany — have also ostensibly followed the Trump administration’s blueprint for seeking to deport foreign nationals over pro-Palestine activism.
In April, Germany initiated deportation proceedings against four pro-Palestine demonstrators it accused of connections to a protest at Berlin’s Free University in October 2024. Three of those threatened were nationals from the European Union. Critics of the move warned that it threatened free movement, one of the European Union’s principal pillars.
Last year, Greece had similarly threatened deportation actions against nine non-Greek European nationals involved in a pro-Palestine protest at the University of Athens Law School. Yet, the criminal charges brought against protestors were dismissed by a court in March 2025 whilst the deportation plans are still being appealed.
“The real ‘disturbance of the peace’ is not the banners or the slogans.” – Iasonas Apostolopoulos
Iasonas Apostolopoulos, a well-known Greek human rights activist, told Inkstick that he was facing prosecution in Greece due to having taken part in what he said was a peaceful protest on the island of Amorgos in August during a music festival. “In fact, they claim that I committed the offense of disturbing the public peace,” he explained, “while the mayor himself has declared that if charges are pressed, he will appear in court as a civil claimant to support the accusation against all of us who took part in the action.”
To Apostolopoulos’s knowledge, the incident marked the first time a local Greek municipality had attempted such a measure. “The real ‘disturbance of the peace’ is not the banners or the slogans,” he argued. “It is the genocide in Gaza, the blockade, the hunger, and the bombings.”
Pro-Palestine advocates often refer to these tactics of punitive measures against activism as “lawfare,” which they say weaponizes the legal system and is increasingly common the globe over.
In the UK, some groups have begun to push back against pro-Israel lawfare. The Public Interest Law Centre and the European Legal Support Center have recently lodged a complaint with the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority (SRA), a body that monitors the professional standards of solicitors in England. The complaint alleges that the organization UK Lawyers for Israel is in breach of the SRA’s code of conduct, including the use of what are known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. The groups have called for an investigation into whether UK Lawyers for Israel (UKFLI) is acting as an unregulated law firm.
The complaint alleged that eight “threatening” letters were sent to individuals and organizations between January 2022 and May 2025. Taken together, the complaint argued, the letters constitute a “pattern of vexatious and legally baseless correspondence aimed at silencing and intimidating Palestine solidarity efforts.” Those targeted included a subsequently cancelled classical music concert called The World Stands with Palestine in November 2024, as well as a letter sent to the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh for planning a Palestinian film festival in May 2025.
Paul Heron, a solicitor from the Public Interest Law Centre, told Inkstick that the clients they represent had done nothing more than organize a poetry event or express solidarity with Palestine. “My personal perspective is that the actions of UKLFI do a disservice to genuine attempts to combat antisemitism in the UK by clearly equating it with genuine disagreements with what Israel is doing in Gaza and Palestine as a whole.”
In response, UKLFI has denied sending “vexatious” letters. It also insists it does not conduct litigation on behalf of clients, claiming that it only sends out letters to “point out what is happening, the effect that this has had on the Jewish or Israeli customer or patient, and how applicable laws or regulatory requirements are being breached. We also explain how the problem may be solved.”
Back in the US, Washington remains one of Israel’s staunchest allies and its largest financial backer, having given an estimated $17.9 billion in military aid since the latest war began. “I think it makes a lot of sense that you see some of that targeting occurring in the United States as an epicenter just because of the role of the United States,” said Pokharel.
In February 2024, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal published a joint report charting the history of the attacks on Palestine solidarity movements in the US and its origins in US antiterrorism laws. The report’s authors remarked that “the danger of the present moment is not theoretical,” adding: “Israel and its allies in the US are exploiting the current crisis to further expand and criminalize advocacy for Palestinian rights in all its forms.”
The way Pokharel put it, attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, especially in the US, did not start with the deadly Hamas-led incursion on Oct. 7, 2023. “For decades, private actors as well as the government have been using a range of tactics to silence Palestinians,” she said.
“At the same time, it’s of course true that since Oct. 7, the movement against Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians has grown,” Pokharel added. “Now with the Trump administration in office, you have this situation where there’s this strong movement to punish Palestinians and their supporters, and a federal government that’s willing to further that goal.”
Many attempts to detain or silence critics of US support for Israel have ultimately failed, though “they nonetheless deeply affect the people who are impacted by them,” she explained. “The goal of most of these attempts, even by the government, is not actually to be legally successful … It’s really to [frighten] and silence people.”