Visiting Those Who Refused to Look Away

For a year, I have travelled to HMP Bronzefield in Surrey to visit friends accused of disrupting the Israeli arms trade. What I found there changed how I understood prisons, justice, and solidarity.

Nida Jafri on a hike with her best friend Amu Gib, accused of taking direct action at RAF Brize Norton in June 2025. (Photo: supplied)

My best friend stopped calling or texting me and went completely incommunicado. It turned out they had been taken away by counter-terrorism police. The next time I saw Amu, they were behind glass at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. At that point, I didn’t even know what “remand” meant.

It was July 2025, sweltering—the kind of heat that turns the Victoria line into a sauna. Jayne, Amu’s friend from Scotland, had been messaging me all week. Amu had vanished. We agreed that I should go to their family home in Finsbury Park, knock on the door, and try to find out what had happened.

I remember sitting at the dining table waiting for Amu’s father to come home. When he walked through the door, he told me the police had called that morning. Arrested. At first, that was all he said.

Someone I had known since I was sixteen was about to disappear into a world I didn’t yet understand. Over the following weeks, the rest unfolded at brutal speed: Westminster Magistrates’ Court, accusations of breaking into RAF Brize Norton and painting two refuelling aircraft red, bail denied, and then remand to prison.

This was my first exposure to the British government’s new war on direct action, something which would now be a significant part of my life. Eleven months later, I’m at HMP Bronzefield, near Ashford in Surrey. This time, it’s not Amu I’m visiting, but another person accused of direct action: Fatema Zainab Rajwani, one of the Filton 25 activists accused of disrupting a factory belonging to Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, in August 2024.

At the gate, I take a deep breath and tuck my keffiyeh into my bag. Solidarity with Palestine has become suspect everywhere. From politicians calling for keffiyehs to be banned in public institutions to prison officers trained to see a patterned scarf as provocation, the message is clear. Never mind the Union Jack flying outside the prison gates; olive branches and fishnet weaves stitched into fabric can become grounds for a denied visit.

I step forward, am searched, and eventually let in.

Hope

Inside, I find Fatema Zainab’s sister and head straight for the café queue. We need coffee before the line swells. Prisoners work in the prison, including in this café, for just 70p an hour. I call out a table number, collect our drinks, and sit down. After one sip of coffee, Fatema Zainab leans across the table. “I might be getting an internship with Jim Loach.” For a moment, everything changes. We all light up. I picture the films they might make. We look at one another and allow ourselves something that has become increasingly rare: hope.

The week before, I had visited Lottie—Charlotte Head—another Filton prisoner. After spending eighteen months in prison and emerging from the first trial without a single conviction, she had been accepted onto a Politics and Arabic degree during a brief window of freedom between the first trial and the retrial, at which she was convicted of criminal damage.

When she told us, we all exchanged glances and tried not to cry. Lottie barely touched the iced Americano we bought her. We spent most of the visit trying to persuade her to eat something. The injustice of it was overwhelming: a young woman accepted into university while facing the prospect of returning to prison for opposing genocide. Outside, the country baked in another heatwave. Inside, people were spending twenty-three hours a day locked in cells.

I visited them both just two weeks before their sentencing hearing. Fatema Zainab preferred to keep things light that day. The injustice of it is almost too large to hold in a one-hour visit. She had taken direct action for the first time, expected bail, and instead became part of the most high-profile test case for recasting direct action as terrorism. How do you begin to shape this into a one-hour visit?

With Lottie, I had wanted to talk through what we could still do before sentencing, but the heatwave had made being locked almost unbearable, and I could not bring myself to impose those conversations on her. Once sentenced, they would go from daily visits to one visit a week.

In June, Fatema Zainab was given five years and eight months behind bars, while Lottie was sentenced to six years.

Lottie and Fatema Zainab are remarkable poets. To see how much care, compassion, and imagination they bring into the lives of others while being subjected to such sustained attacks on their civil liberties feels almost unbearable. Two days before she was sentenced, Lottie wrote:

If the words die in our mouths, let us

Throw our bodies at the

machinations

Of destruction —

A year earlier, in June 2025, Fatema Zainab wrote these beautiful words:

I wish the love I dream of was enough.

I wish the love I dream of would hold your grief

the same way that our silence holds violence.

When there’s nothing else to write about, I write about love—

because there’s no life worth living,

no strength worth perception,

if not for love.

Damage

Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Lottie, and four others were arrested at an Elbit Systems research and manufacturing facility in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. That night, the six drove an old prison van into the compound and, in under twenty minutes, dismantled Israeli weapons components, including parts used in Israeli-made unmanned aerial systems. At sentencing, these were confirmed to include components for Elbit’s Magni-X and THOR drones, models deployed by the Israeli military in Gaza.

These were not merely surveillance devices. Human rights investigators, including medical witnesses such as Professor Nizam Mamode, have described Israeli drones striking wounded children who had already survived previous bombings. The prosecution alleged the action caused £1.2 million worth of damage to Israel’s largest arms company.

The resulting prosecution was widely regarded by legal observers as politically charged and procedurally irregular. At the first trial, the six faced charges of aggravated burglary, violent disorder, and criminal damage. Aggravated burglary carried a potential life sentence. After ten weeks of proceedings, the jury acquitted them of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. On the remaining charges, jurors were unable to reach verdicts. They left the courtroom unconvicted.

After nearly eighteen months in prison without having been found guilty of any offence, many expected the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to end the case. Instead, it announced a retrial.

Their retrial felt even more disturbing. Once again, Judge Jeremy Johnson barred references to Gaza and prevented any conscience-based defence from being presented to the jury. Jurors were instructed to disregard the broader context of the action and to treat it as irrelevant “emotion”. The consequence was clear: the defendants could be judged for damaging weapons infrastructure, but were not permitted to explain why they had done so.

The restrictions extended beyond the defendants themselves. During the first trial, Rajiv Menon KC faced contempt proceedings after citing Bushel’s Case (1670), the landmark ruling that established the independence of juries and affirmed their right to deliver verdicts according to their convictions. The Bar Council described the prosecution as “troubling”.

Later, during the retrial, Judge Johnson apologised for aspects of how the contempt proceedings had been handled. Yet he declined to recuse himself, despite a letter signed by more than 5,000 legal professionals criticising what they described as bias and discriminatory conduct throughout the Filton cases.

The Tap

Throughout both trials, Fatema Zainab and their co-defendants were denied the opportunity to explain why they targeted Elbit. They could not describe the role of British-made components in Israeli military operations. They could not explain what they believed those weapon components, including quadcopter drones, would eventually be used for. And they could not share the simple analogy from Frank Sherman, accused over an action at Moog Aircraft Group’s Wolverhampton facility: “When a room is flooding and no one will turn off the tap, direct action is turning it off yourself.”

After being convicted of criminal damage, Lottie, Ellie, and Fatema Zainab were remanded to HMP Bronzefield while awaiting sentencing. The prosecution had not requested their remand. Judge Johnson ordered it anyway.

Sam Corner, who had remained in prison throughout the proceedings, was returned to HMP Belmarsh. Others, including Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin, were acquitted on all charges after the CPS’s second attempt to prosecute them failed. Yet the broader message of the trials remains unmistakable: direct action would be met with the full force of the state.