Heba Muraisi who is on hunger strike in HMP New Hall, outside Wakefield.
As I write these words, less than 200 miles away from me, a young woman is starving herself in a prison. Heba Muraisi has been on hunger strike for 68 days. She might die. She might suffer lifelong brain damage.
And as I write these words, I know very well what the response from so many will be. Terrorist. Terrorism supporter. Who cares?
Muraisi was arrested in November 2024, charged with involvement with a break-in at a factory that supplies weapons to Israel. It was more than six months later that Yvette Cooper moved to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Muraisi herself has not been charged with, or tried for, or found guilty of, any terrorist offence, but the purported connection with terrorism has apparently made her conditions in prison harsher. And by the time she goes to trial – if she survives – she will have been locked up for 20 months.
The government’s decision to classify Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is simply baffling to many. Members of the group did carry out destructive protests, one of which involved serious injury to a police officer, but the proscription is – in the words of Volker Turk, UN human rights commissioner – “disproportionate and unnecessary”, and it has dragged the police into having to arrest hundreds of peaceful supporters, including priests, poets and Greta Thunberg.
Protesters outside HMP New Hall near Wakefield, where Heba Muraisi is imprisoned, December 2025. Photo: Martin Pope/Getty
The classification of these hunger strikers (apart from Muraisi, two others Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello are also refusing food, Ahmed for 61 days to date and Chiaramello for 47) as terrorists has one outcome that the government clearly values. By accusing them of being part of a terrorist organisation rather than a protest movement, the government ensures that these people who broke machinery in factories or sprayed paint on aeroplanes or helped to plan these actions can be seen not as ordinary people who are innocent until found guilty of ordinary crimes such as criminal damage or violent disorder, but as outside forces that are deeply threatening to social order and our ways of life. Even when they are still – as with Muraisi – not convicted of any offence, even when they are locked up for over a year without trial, even when they are on the point of death, they can be successfully dehumanised. Indeed, even if Muraisi dies, I don’t think her death will truly register to the politicians who made her into such a bogeyman and to all those hundreds of people who send laughing emojis to social media posts about her suffering.
We are seeing language being used in this way so that ordinary people will be nervous about supporting them, caring about them, crying for them, remembering them, memorialising them
Two days ago, 4,000 miles away from me, a woman was shot and bled out without medical assistance in her own car. I don’t want to suggest a parallel between Renee Nicole Good and Heba Muraisi that does not exist. Muraisi is a committed activist who may have helped to plan ambitious protests. Good was a mother and a poet who was driving her car away from aggressive immigration enforcement agents when she was attacked. But there is a parallel in the language that authorities use about both women. Kristi Noem, the US secretary for homeland security, quickly stated that Good had been committing an act of “domestic terrorism”.
Terrorist. Terrorism supporter.
Again, the term “terrorism” is being used with intent to damp down ordinary empathy, to pretend that the real threat to order and to democracy lies with those who might try to resist violence and authoritarianism.
‘There is a parallel in the language that authorities use about Renee Nicole Good",” says Natasha Walter. “Kristi Noem, the US secretary for homeland security, quickly stated that Good had been committing an act of “domestic terrorism”.’ Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty
Over and over again now, we are seeing language being used in this way, twisted to dehumanise those who protest, and to paint them as the threat to decent society, so that ordinary people will be nervous about supporting them, caring about them, crying for them, remembering them, memorialising them, joining them, and instead put all their faith in the governments and officials who claim to protect them from such dangerous forces.
The possibility of dehumanising and separating from others in this way is dangerous. It isn’t just dangerous to those individuals who are bearing the brunt of authoritarianism. It’s dangerous to all of us, as we are constantly encouraged to believe that some people – people like us! – are human and deserving of rights, while others – people like them! – can be ignored, imprisoned without trial, arrested, shot.
I spent much of the Christmas holiday on the sofa with a virus, and caught up on The Rose Field, Philip Pullman’s ending to his huge Book of Dust trilogy. I found the ending, when Lyra comes face to face with a new kind of evil, weirdly resonant for our times. The most shocking aspect of this new evil was not its violence or its aggression. Instead, it was the indifference that it had spawned in bystanders. Somehow, it had destroyed the bonds among people and also destroyed the bond between a person and their own imagination. As I think about those whom we are encouraged to see as less than human, because they are terrorists, because they are supporters of terrorism, I realise that we are not only harming them. We are also harming ourselves, and our abilities to empathise and to care. Let 2026 be the year we take back our humanity.
Natasha Walter is an author and the founder of Women for Refugee Women, her new book, Feminism for a World on Fire will be published on 7 May 2026