Actually, we are not “all Palestine Action”. The group, which used coercion, harassment and serious property damage to vandalise RAF tankers vital to UK national security, has been proscribed under anti-terror legislation.
I’ve campaigned for Palestinian statehood the whole of my adult life, and in 2014 reported the war in Gaza close enough to expose the callous indifference and criminal behaviour of the Israeli Defence Force. But I will not be joining the defence of Palestine Action.
Though use of anti-terror laws against them risks criminalising people who believe they are simply engaged in non-violent protest action, in the absence of a more nuanced counter-extremism law it looks like the only way to stop them doing further harm – above all to the teenagers they are trying to recruit into what is now a designated terrorist group.
Does throwing red paint at an object constitute terrorism? Not on its own. Does walking into a museum and shooting dead two Israeli diplomats, while shouting “Free Palestine” constitute terrorism? Incontrovertibly.
But PA has been deliberately designed to inhabit the space between these two extremes. In that space it has done millions of pounds’ worth of damage – not just to the Israeli arms firm Elbit but to a whole raft of UK defence-related businesses and universities whose freedom to trade, and to research, is vital to Britain’s national security.
And PA has done more than just “throw red paint”. Its activists have threatened people with sledgehammers; they daubed “Happy Nakba Day” on a Jewish shop in Prestwich, one of the centres of Jewish life in Manchester, on the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. They smashed a Jewish-owned estate agents in Stamford Hill, London. And by attacking the Voyagers at Brize Norton they carried out one of the classic “hybrid” actions that defence planners expect at the start of a shooting war.
According to the government, PA’s own materials state: “We are not non-violent”. Which means: “We are violent”. So while, yes, spraying red paint is not an act of violence, doing so in order induce the fear of violence, and to coerce the elected government to abandon its duty to defend us from aggression, most definitely conforms to the legal definition of terrorism.
If the UK had a counter-extremism law like Germany’s, which allows police to monitor groups in danger of passing over to outright violence, to negotiate with them and set strict limits on their behaviour short of proscription, we would be in a different place. But PA have walked right into this confrontation and show no signs of altering their behaviour to remain legal. In fact they are threatening to escalate.
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Meanwhile, in Gaza…
PA’s “Underground Manual” incites people to form autonomous groups, plan and execute serious crimes, and then destroy the evidence. It has landed dozens of perpetrators in jail, because of the aggravated nature of the offences they commit. Comparing them to the Suffragettes makes exactly the wrong point. The Suffragettes were fighting an undemocratic system: PA is using coercion to overturn policies decided by the democratic parliament the suffragettes fought for.
If you want to know where this violence ends up, consider the case of Elias Rodriquez, who murdered two Israeli diplomats in Washington DC in May. Rodriquez was involved in the American far left, but dropped out to become a bedroom fantasist of insurrectionary violence. His social media and private chats were full of the kind of rhetoric PA specialises in. In a manifesto entitled “Escalate for Gaza: Bring the War Home,” Rodriguez concluded that violent action is “the only sane thing”.
The US branch of Palestine Action is called Unity of Fields. In late 2024 UoF announced it would “open a new front” for the Palestinian resistance in America itself: like its British counterpart, it broadened its targets from Israeli-owned firms to the entire defence apparatus of the US and “Zionist institutions”. Its supporters increasingly began using slogans involving the word “death”: Death to Israel, Death to Zionism etc. Then, when Rodriquez shot the two diplomats, Unity of Fields started a campaign to set him free. They praised the murders as a “legitimate act of resistance against the Zionist state”.
At Glastonbury, the singer Bobby Vylan started the chant: “Death to the IDF”. That slogan has been unheard during 21 months of Gaza protests here. Amid the controversy about the BBC’s decision to run the live feed, what’s been lost is that someone, somewhere, took a conscious decision to introduce “Death to…” to the conversation. Everyone who monitors extremism – left, right or Islamist – knows that when “down with” gets replaced with “death to”, there is a danger that someone will be motivated to make it happen.
I want to uphold the rights of protesters who are fighting for Palestinian statehood, and to bring the Israeli government to international justice, for the crimes being committed against civilians in Gaza. But I also want to protect young people here against manipulation. If the Palestinian solidarity movement here becomes irrevocably tainted by association with organised criminality, coercion and terror, that would be the worst outcome for the Palestinian people. Because, in the end, only the British state can recognise Palestine – a goal which I support and which I hope can be achieved this year.
If Palestine Action were acting within the norms of democratic culture, they would disband and form a new movement dedicated to peaceful protest only. But they have done the opposite. Their supporters outside a court in Bristol this week chanted “Death to the IDF”. And they are pledging to escalate the confrontation, calling for “copycat direct action groups to spring up everywhere”. No matter how strongly you detest Israel’s war crimes, let’s make this about the Palestinians, not PA.
