Elizabeth Morley was born into a broken world – in 1945 Hungary, she was the product of love after turmoil.

On his emancipation from notorious Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, her father Mihaly Steiner found love after scouring the country in search of missing family members.

80 years later, this month Elizabeth went viral thanks to a video of her being helped into a police van - under arrest on suspicion of terror offences for publicly supporting the direct action group Palestine Action.

Having called Aberystwyth her home for three decades, Elizabeth continues a long line of civil disobedience stemming from Wales.

However in 2025, protestors reach a turning point in their right to protest, becoming at risk of arrest under anti-terror laws.

So is Elizabeth Morley née Tóth the new face of ‘terror’ in the UK?

She was arrested along with 531 others on 9 August for holding signs outside Westminster stating ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’

On 5 July Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist group under the 2000 Terrorism Act.

This made it an offence to be a member or seen supporting the group, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

They were proscribed because of “aggressive and intimidatory attacks on businesses, institutions and the public” including spraying paint into the engines of two RAF jets in June, causing an estimated £7m damage.

They were proscribed alongside two other groups – Maniacs Murder Cult, described by the government as a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation encouraging individuals to engage in acts of violence – and Russian Imperial Movement, described as a white supremacist, ethno-nationalist organisation fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine and encouraging people to conduct terror attacks.

The proscription of Palestine Action has been met with significant backlash from the public and even the UN, resulting in over 700 people willingly arrested for showing support for the group.

Elizabeth says not only does she plan to demonstrate and risk being arrested again, but if it wasn’t for her knees, she’d have volunteered to join the direct action that got the group proscribed.

She explains: “When Palestine Action started taking direct action against [Israeli-owned arms company] Elbit Systems, and factories across the UK, I wished I could join them because these death factories should not be allowed to operate in this country - the stuff they make goes to Gaza and kills innocent people.

“So when the opportunity arose to go and protest and get arrested, I thought, why not?

“I am in the lucky position of being retired, having no responsibilities... I’m not a young person who needs a job.

“I must stand up and be counted.”

Elizabeth’s relationship to the Israel-Palestine conflict is a close one.

She was born to 16-year-old Katalina Stadler, who was forced to give Elizabeth up for adoption.

Unable to be with Elizabeth and her mother, her father left for Palestine in 1946 – she has not heard or seen him since.

She doesn’t know the reason why her father went to Palestine - “maybe he was disillusioned, just so shattered that he thought what was the point in staying?”

But she wonders who he became, and what kind of people she and her mother would have been had they joined him: “Would I be a violent settler type or would I be an ethical person?”

Waking up to the tensions in 2008 when 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians were killed in a 22-day conflict, Elizabeth founded the Aberystwyth Palestine Solidarity group still running today.

Having written “thousands” of letters to MPs, signed petitions, held a weekly vigil in Aberystwyth, attended countless protests, she says she has no choice left but to break the law in her campaign for peace.

So, when described as a “terrorist” by media outlets, she laughs: “It’s absolutely ridiculous – deliberate lies and obfuscation”.

But according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, it’s a fact.

In a recent opinion piece in the Observer, she doubled down on the group's proscription, describing them as having “conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries to individuals”.

She doesn’t go into detail due to criminal proceedings, but states the group has taken responsibility for attacks that have caused violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and aggravated burglary, including one against a north London Jewish-owned business ad using pyrotechnics in an attack on a Glasgow factory.

But a judicial review is on its way to challenge the proscription decision, led by a co-founder of Palestine Action.

The judge agreed the proscription could reasonably “amount to a disproportionate interference” to freedom of expression and association.

Since the order, people have been accused of committing terror offences for displaying Palestine flags, holding ‘Free Gaza’ placards, with one former headteacher arrested for displaying a Private Eye cartoon.

In response to Cooper’s op-ed, Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori described it as a “smear campaign” by referencing evidence she didn’t present in court and mentioning the Jewish-owned business, implying antisemitism.

Huda said Palestine Action “targeted dozens of companies associated with Israel’s biggest weapons producer, regardless of the identities of the owners”, adding that “this fact is known by the government, yet they continue to weaponise antisemitism.”

An unnamed Jewish employee of the accountancy firm targeted by Palestine Action told the Observer that “people in the area were shocked” by the attack, describing the activists as “totally cuckoo” and impossible to negotiate with as they called for the firm to divest from Israeli-owned Elbit Systems.

Though he believed Palestine Action are antisemitic, he added: “It isn’t about Jewish or not. It’s nothing to do with antisemitic. They are targeting an Israeli arms company.

“If they [knew] our religious view, we are not so pro-Israel, [believing as part of the Satmar Hasidic sect that] Jews are not allowed to have their own state before the messiah comes, or have our own land, our own military.”

Huda describes Palestine Action as “taking direct action against Israel’s arms trade in Britain”, putting “our bodies in the way of a military machine perpetrating genocide”.

On the accusations of violent intent, the 31-year-old wrote: “It is false to claim the organisation had violent intent against people.

“The home secretary’s own security assessments say the direct action group didn’t advocate violence or pose a threat to life.”

The judicial review was argued on the grounds that the proscription has had a chilling effect on people's rights to speech and protest – something Angie Zelter knows about all too well.

The Powys-based 74-year-old was another of the 532 arrested on 9 August, and prior to that wrote a book, Activism for Life, on her 40+ years of protest experience, which she describes as being shaped at Greenham Common.

The Women’s Peace Camp was a protest movement which started with a march from Rhondda to RAF Greenham Common US military airbase in Berkshire in 1981, thought up by a Rhondda CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) group.

The march called on the US to stop hosting 96 nuclear warheads at the base, which turned into a 19-year campaign by the camp outside the base until RAF Greenham Common was decommissioned in 2000.

Angie said on this: “Greenham Common showed me that there’s no right way to protest.”

She has lost count of the number of times she’s been arrested for her ‘civil disobedience’.

Her arrest on 9 August was her second associated with Palestine Action - she was also one of 29 arrested on 5 July for holding a sign in support of the group, breaking bail conditions in August by doing it again.

She said being arrested is a natural part of resisting “in our broken democracy – they don’t take notice of lobbying and letter writing and petitions, so what do you do when your government is breaking international law?”

“A lot of my arrests [including those at Greenham Common] have been about weapons of mass destruction going against international law.

“I go, not to get arrested, I go to prevent crimes.

“Sitting on runways or destroying infrastructure is upholding international law.”

She has been acquitted by judges and juries multiple times for doing just that, from disarming an aerospace hawk going to Indonesia to tampering with a Trident weapon system, “we called that disarmament action not criminal damage – the judge and jury found us not guilty”.

This is the first time however that she’s been accused of terrorism offences: “This muddling up of terrorism, when it's our state that's allowing and abetting terror, is absolutely horrendous.”

Cambrian News’ own columnist Elly Foster was at Greenham Common, referencing Wales' many endeavours to bring peace from the Welsh Women’s Peace Petition in 1923 to Greenham Common, calling on “Welsh women to start walking again” for peace.

Others have drawn comparisons to protests by Cymdeithas yr Iaith/ Welsh Language Society, starting with an Aberystwyth sit-in in 1963 to demand the right to use the Welsh language, winning the right to court summonses in Welsh, to bilingual road signs, to Welsh language media.

Over the years, more than 1,000 supporters of the society were seen in courts and some jailed for their actions, with former Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales Police and former member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Arfon Jones stating that “some were imprisoned for their activities but none, however, were stigmatised by the British state as terrorists!”

He wrote in a letter to the Daily Post: “What language campaigners were doing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s was no different to what Palestine Action was doing prior to it being proscribed for protesting against a genocide the British state is complicit in.

“Both were using non-violent, direct action against property, and proscription was unreasonable, unjustified and disproportionate.

“This comparison gives some indication of how far the British state has moved from a social democratic, tolerant and progressive state in the 1970s, to a right-wing autocratic and oppressive state in 2025, where a Nazi salute is tolerated but protesting a genocide is not.”

Perhaps because of this, some have criticised Welsh police for joining the Metropolitan Police in enforcement at the 9 August protest- 16 Dyfed-Powys officers, 17 from South Wales Police and 17 from Gwent.

Mike Reed is a 79-year-old criminal defence lawyer specialising in protest law from Carmarthen who was arrested on 9 August, joining a priest, a magistrate, GPs and teachers – those who are liable to be struck off or suspended for having a criminal record.

Mike remembers defending those who protested against a nuclear bunker being built in Carmarthen in the 80s.

He was carried away by police because of his “bad knee” and was bailed the following morning, stating: “The arresting and custody officers were pleasant – I sense both of them felt it wasn’t something they wanted to do, not really police work.

“I think they felt as most people in the country feel that people like us aren’t terrorists, it's absurd to say we are.”

His hope is that the judicial review will reverse the proscription decision and that the 700+ arrested (with 1,000 pledging to demonstrate in September) will have their cases, along with Palestine Action’s, thrown out.

Home Office minister Dan Jarvis defended the move: “By implementing this measure, we will remove Palestine Action’s veil of legitimacy, tackle its financial support and degrade its efforts to recruit and radicalise people into committing terrorist activity in its name.

“But we must be under no illusion.

“Palestine Action is not a legitimate protest group.

“People engaged in lawful protests don’t need weapons.

“People engaged in lawful protests do not throw smoke bombs and fire pyrotechnics around innocent members of the public.

“And people engaged in lawful protests do not cause millions of pounds of damage to national security infrastructure, including submarines and defensive equipment for NATO.”

The Israeli government has repeatedly denied accusations of genocide, so far killing over 60,000 Palestinians.