A Transnational Index of Anti-Palestinian Repression
For too long, anti-Palestinian repression has been dismissed as incidental, exceptional, and justified. The Index of Repression confirms what the movement has long known: this repression is multi-sited, institutionalised, and systematic, unfolding across varied stages.
What is the Index?
The Index of Repression is a transnational database documenting verified incidents of legal, institutional, and political repression targeting students, academics, workers, journalists, artists, and organisers standing in solidarity with Palestine. Developed by ELSC and Forensic Architecture, the Index traces how repression operates across borders, across institutions, and across sectors by identifying the actors, mechanisms, and targets of repression.
The Index as a Transnational Initiative
The first iteration of the Index was published in Germany in 2025, documenting 766 verified incidents of anti‑Palestinian repression (2019–2025). This database was subsequently updated for the first time in February 2026 with 356 new incidents, alongside the release of the first British dataset documenting 964 verified incidents in Britain (2019–2025). Taken together, the Index now records more than 2000 incidents across these two countries — providing clear evidence that repression across Europe is systematic, institutional, and undeniable.
Our documentation draws on years of legal casework, monitoring, and research by a team embedded in the Palestine solidarity movement. What began with the publication of Germany’s dataset has developed into a broader effort to expose repression across Europe. Rather than presenting repression as isolated national phenomena, the Index reveals patterns and connections across jurisdictions.
Repressive tactics — from smears and censorship to prosecutions and dismissals — circulate and evolve, adapting from one context to another. The forthcoming iteration will build on this transnational effort in the Netherlands.
What Makes the Index Unique?
First cross-sector dataset of its kind
The Index is the first of its kind to document how state and non-state actors coordinate a multi-sited, institutionalised repression aimed at depoliticising and isolating the Palestine solidarity movement across Europe.
Traces repression before October 2023
Spanning 2019–2026, the data demonstrate that repression did not begin in October 2023, nor with the high-profile proscription of groups like Samidoun in Germany or Palestine Action in Britain. It is structural, evolving, and premeditated. Repression intensifies when people stand in solidarity – not only with those facing repression, but with Palestinians resisting oppression.
Situated within a transnational architecture
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. These patterns are sustained through the repeated mobilisation of legal and quasi-legal frameworks and the strategic deployment of institutional power. Understanding how these mechanisms are operationalised and adapted is essential to challenging them, including through strategic litigation, as well as by anticipating and delegitimising emerging practices.
Rigorously documented and embedded in the movement
The Index is grounded in a rigorous and evolving methodology, developed through sustained engagement with the Palestine solidarity movement and those directly affected by repression. This work would not be possible without the trust, collaboration, and contributions of individuals, groups, and organisations who mobilise, report incidents and share their testimonies.
Our work draws on submissions through our report form, systematic media monitoring, and fieldwork, enabling us to document both highly visible and underreported forms of repression. This approach ensures that the dataset is robust, verifiable, and actionable for advocacy, legal intervention, and organising.
We rely on people reporting all forms of anti-Palestinian repression, including those not pursued through legal action, to fully capture the scope of repression and support collective mobilisation.
Why Does the Index Matter?
It reveals the architecture of anti-Palestinian repression
The Index goes beyond our legal work and shows that repression is systematic and institutionalised, carried out by state and non-state actors. Together with our report On All Fronts: The Multi-Sited Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Britain, it identifies 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 also exposes key mechanisms of repression (Incident Types), identifies the main actors involved and the people targeted, and allows users to search incidents by date and keywords, including commonly used legal acts and policies used to repress Palestine solidarity.
It’s a resource for the movement
The Index is intended as a tool for organisers, workers, students, legal advocates, researchers, and communities resisting repression in practice. 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. Its value depends on it being used, shared, tested, and developed to identify openings, leverage points, campaign targets, and opportunities that build stronger movement strategy.
It makes denial impossible
This public evidence stands as an undeniable record of anti-Palestinian repression. By revealing patterns across sectors and across countries, the Index resists claims that repression is isolated, random, or justified.
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 that expand the space for mobilisation.
The Report: On All Fronts
On All Fronts: The Multi-Sited Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Britain contextualises the Britain dataset within the broader patterns identified by the Index and explains how repression operates. Drawing on Britain’s dataset, it moves beyond documentation to examine the legal, political, and institutional frameworks that structure repression, and the conditions that enable its expansion across sectors.
Key insights
- The documented incidents represent a monitorable sample indicative of a far wider and deeper pattern.
- Situates contemporary forms of repression within longer historical trajectories, demonstrating how they are rooted in and shaped by Britain’s imperial policy and its enduring political commitments.
- Traces how key allegations – particularly antisemitism and support for terrorism – function as central organising frames through which Palestine solidarity is governed, restricted, and sanctioned.
- Shows how repression operates as a multi-sited and cumulative process advancing a broader political project: the depoliticisation and demobilisation of the Palestine solidarity movement.
The report highlights that repression does not simply constrain the movement but actively generates new sites of struggle. Those targeted contest these practices through legal challenges, collective organising, and public advocacy, repeatedly exposing and disrupting the mechanisms deployed against them.
Main Findings
The Data
- 2000+ verified incidents (Germany: 1122; Britain: 964) targeting Palestine solidarity documented across education, workplaces, protest spaces, and cultural institutions since 2019.
- Moves beyond isolated case reporting, identifying recurring institutional and enforcement patterns across sectors.
- 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).
Key Actors & Mechanisms
- The report finds UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) involved in 128 incidents leading to institutional repression of Palestine solidarity.
- In Germany, the second most frequent actor category, after the police, is the State or a member of a State Institution (144 incidents), showing that institutional repression is predominantly administered directly at the hands of the state.
- The main two allegations used against the Palestine solidarity movement are antisemitism and support for terrorism.
Strategic Targeting Across Sectors
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 of the Palestine Solidarity Movement
In Britain:
- Anti-Zionist belief is now protected as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010 (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
- 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’
In Germany:
- Activists defended the slogan “From the River to the Sea” at protests in Hesse
- Successfully challenged attempts to shut down Palestine solidarity events in Berlin
- Protected a family whose one-year-old child had been separated under migration law over their political activism
- Secured acquittals for Schengen-bans against activists like Ghassan Abu‑Sitta, setting important precedents for political speech and protest
- Running Germany‑wide campaigns, including for the first time, a nation-wide academic boycott campaign, in spite of the government’s continued efforts to criminalise BDS since 2017
All these efforts are pushing public discourse and exposing the political character of repression and its complicity with genocide.
What Can You Do?
Take Action Now
Report repression of Palestine solidarity to the ELSC here. All submissions are confidential and treated with care.
Share the Index and the report within your network. Amplify our social media posts on the day of the launch and in the days following.
Use the Index and report against the normalisation of anti-Palestinian repression and to inform your strategy, campaigns, and advocacy.
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.
Resources
Access the Index PlatformRead the ReportReport RepressionThe Index as a Transnational Initiative
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