A professional organiser behind the high-profile protest against the Byron burger restaurant chain was arrested by Israeli authorities and accused of having links to terror groups.
Ewa Jasiewicz, 38, was stopped at immigration control in Tel Aviv and was subject to a weeks-long criminal probe over alleged links to terrorists in the occupied territories.
Her detention sparked a long legal row in the Israeli courts which eventually saw her expelled from the country.
Jasiewicz, who works for the Unite union and has written for the Guardian, was front and centre in the protest on Monday.
She spoke to large crowds, which shut down the restaurant for the evening, through a megaphone, and was quoted extensively in newspaper reports afterwards.
Her opinions on Byron’s co-operation with the Home Office in enforcing immigration laws were carried by outlets from The Independent to The Sun to Iran’s Press TV.
Columnist Owen Jones cited her separate times in a single outraged column.
Jasiewicz was detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport in 2004 while trying to get to the occupied territories.
When Heat Street approached Jasiewicz about her past, she characterised her arrest as “part of Israeli state policy to criminalise activists”.
She added that she was “uncomfortable” with links being drawn between the incarceration and her present activism.
According to Jasiewicz, she was detained after an investigation by the Shin Bet Israeli intelligence service, who said she had links to terror groups.
As the case progressed, Israel said that she was not an active threat to national security, but cited her links to the International Solidarity Movement group as proof she could be “unconsciously exploited by terrorists”.
In an account of her detention published by the far-Left Red Pepper magazine after she was sent back to the UK, Jasiewicz claimed that Israel’s courts had no right to ban her from the country in the first place, and also threw in that she supports violent resistance by Palestinians.
She wrote: “I do not recognise the authority of a judiciary that condones war crimes, collective punishment, the theft of land, colonisation and the criminalisation and killing of a people who have every right to resist, militarily or otherwise, that occupation.”