Glastonbury Festival have denied giving the Palestine Action organisation the green-light to use this year’s festival as a recruitment and fund-raising opportunity ahead of their expected proscription by the UK government.
Jewish News infiltrated one of the meetings put on by the group at Glastonbury, which was advertised on the official festival app, at which supporters of the violently anti-Israel group boasting of further and more extreme actions in the future at which those involved had be supported despite the likelihood of them receiving long prison sentences.
At a Palestine Action event inside Glastonbury’s Speakers Forum tent, Francesca Nadin, who had been remanded in prison ahead of a trial on criminal damage charges, read out the work of of Georges Abdallah, an ex-guerrilla in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the murders of US military attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov.
Inside Palestine Action Glastonbury meeting
Nadin, who has described herself as a “political prisoner” and who writes on the Revolutionary Communist Group’s website, urged those in attendance at the numerous Glastonbury events she spoke at to purchase black “We Are Palestine Action” t-shirts, and to donate funds to the group as they launched a legal challenge to the government’s attempt to proscribe them.
All of the stage crew in control of the sound at the event on Saturday also sported black T-shirts.
In an earlier appearance on stage on Thursday evening Nadin, remanded in prison earlier this year over charges relating to the attack on a Barclays bank, and over a separate case, was cheered as she boasted:”Palestine Action, we do direct action against arms factories in this country …. we smash them up.”
After Jewish News filmed and recorded some of the speakers at Saturday’s event, we were challenged by a female who said she was working for the festival who asked us to delete pictures of those taking part in a Q&A session.
We refused, citing the comments made by one activist who threatened extreme actions by Palestine activists even if the group are proscribed.
Palestine Action activist says “resistence will continue” after the group are proscribed at Glastonbury meeting
Glastonbury was quick to distance itself from comments made by the punk-rap artist Bobby Vylon on Saturday night after he led an audience in chants of “Death To The IDF” from the West Holts stage.
On Monday, Avon and Somerset Police confirmed they were launching a criminal investigation into Bobby Vylon and Kneecap over their comments on the West Holts stage.
Jewish News was present just a few hours before Vylon took to the stage at one of several meetings put on by Palestine Action on the official festival site, at which an activist, who did not give his name, speaking from the floor at the meeting said:”I think about the Palestinian prison resistance, and how no matter where people are the resistance will continue, no matter what context that is in.”
“This refusal to isolate those who are put behind bars with these charges – people that spend decades in prison, and people refuse to cut them off.
“In the UK, over the next few years it’s like the UK is going to get scary very quickly for a lot of us … I already know people in prison, and I’m sure lots of other people do too.
“We have to refuse to cut people off, no matter what charge they put behind them.”
Dismissing the impact of future proscription of Palestine Action, he added:”People are going to get long prison sentences. It’s not about people there in the first months, it’s about being there in six years and continuing.
“The steadfastness isn’t about what we are going to do in the next two weeks with the proscription order, it’s about what we are going to do in the next three years, six years, when we have got people being bars.”
Palestine Museum at Glastonbury
The meeting held inside the Speakers Forum tent last Saturday at 1pm attracted little publicity compared to the antics of musical acts Bobby Vylon and Kneecap on stage just hours earlier, but it was one of several officially sanctioned events taking place at the festival, leading to claims that Glastonbury organisers had at the very least turned a blind-eye to the violent antics of Palestine Action.
Ahead of their performance Kneecap were promoted on the Palestine Action social media platform, and once on the West Holts staged openly expressed their support for the group, which are set to be proscribed by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s pledge to proscribe Palestine Action under section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Alongside Nadin at Saturday’s meeting was David Currey, another Palestine Action and Youth Demand activist.
He confirmed to those seated in the tent that he was indeed one of two individuals who attempted to rush on stage and disrupt Israeli Eurovision Song Contest entry Yuval Raphael’s performance at the event in Basel, Switzerland.
Currey also praised “Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation” before he was applauded after he confirmed he was “the lad who got slapped up at the front of Eurovision last month.”
He claimed Zionism is the “arm of Western capitalist imperialism” and that resistance against Israel was part of a “broader anti-imperialist struggle.”
Palestine flags on display during Kneecap perfomance at Glastonbury
Like Nadin, Currey’s political direction appeared to be aligned to that of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
While it would be wrong to portray Glastonbury this year only as a seething pit of anti-Israel hatred and of antisemitism, extreme pro-Palestine activity was not hard to find on the festival’s fringes.
A Palestine Museum tent included literature explaining Israel’s creation in 1948 accepted that “Jewish people were living in Palestine throughout the Ottoman era and long before” but added:”The ancient kingdom of Israel, and the pre-roman Hasmonean kingdom of Judea, have no historial link, to the modern Israeli state.”
“Mainstream Zionism has always been at heart a secular nationalist movement….,” it added, “historically Jews experienced a level of religious and cultural freedom in the Middle East that they did not have in Europe.”
Hamas meanwhile, has “grown in power and popularity” as it gestured towards “more conciliatory positions” on Israel . But, adds the literature inside the tent, on October 7th 2023 “the Al Qassam bridges lead an attack in coordination with other militant groups in Gaza.”
It continues: “While misinformation has been rampant in the wake of the attack, there is no doubt the militants committed war crimes including firing on civilians and sexual violence.”
literature on Israel’s creation in the Palestine Museum tent at Glastonbury
Jewish News approached the Glastonbury Festival to ask if they gave the green-light for Palestine Action to promote its activities and fun-raise at this year’s event.
They said:”Glastonbury Festival was created in 1970 as a place for people to come together and rejoice in music, the arts and the best of human endeavour. As a festival, we stand against all forms of war and terrorism. We will always believe in – and actively campaign for – hope, unity, peace and love.
“With almost 4,000 performances at Glastonbury 2025, there will inevitably have been artists and speakers appearing on our stages whose views we do not share, and a performer’s presence here should never be seen as a tacit endorsement of their opinions and beliefs.
“As previously stated, Glastonbury Festival and the Eavis family do not condone hate speech or incitement to violence of any kind from any of the festival’s performers or speakers.”
