On Sunday, close to the Liverpool conference centre where Andy Burnham will preside over his first Labour Party conference as prime minister, protesters intend to hold what Defend Our Juries — a rights group that organises rallies demanding the ban be dropped — describes as a “mass, silent sign-holding vigil.” The subject is Palestine Action, proscribed in Britain as a terrorist group. The organisers call the vigil an “integrity test” for the UK’s new premier, according to Al Jazeera.
The ban has a paper trail, and it does not hold still. Palestine Action was proscribed in July 2025, days after activists opposing Israel’s war on Gaza broke into an air force base in southern England, Al Jazeera reported; membership became a crime carrying a sentence of up to 14 years, an earlier Al Jazeera account noted. Then, in February of this year, three senior judges ruled the proscription unlawful: the group’s activities, they found, had not crossed what they called the very high bar to make it a terrorist organisation. The ban, for now, stands anyway, while the contest continues in the courts.
The vigil, by design, will be silent. The question it leaves at the conference door is what the new government’s word is worth against the old government’s paperwork.
Three thousand miles east, words have already been replaced by lines. In al-Mughayyir, a Palestinian village northeast of Ramallah, a man named Bilal Abu Alia stands near his home, gazing at land that was his family’s and, he says, has been taken from them by Israeli authorities. As the October olive harvest approaches, Al Jazeera reports, the family can now reach only a small area — the house, and a few olive trees. Of the original 0.4 square kilometres (100 acres), that is what remains within reach.
The words “within reach” are doing the work there. The taking, according to Al Jazeera, is the signature of a little-known office: Israel’s “Blue Line” team, which redraws the boundary maps while illegal settlement expansion grows, turning what the charts say into what the land permits. It is hard to read the two records side by side — the signs held up in silence in Liverpool, the blue lines drawn over olive groves — without noticing that the first is being tested in courtrooms and treated as extraordinary, and the second is administered as routine.
Bilal Abu Alia keeps looking at the land. The harvest comes in October either way.