Do you support Palestine Action?

Is Britain a free country? (Left-wing version)

Many people were delighted by last week’s jailing of four Palestine Action activists following their trial for breaking into an Israeli-owned defence firm in August 2024. One of them used a sledgehammer to hit a police officer, fracturing her spine, and tried to hit another; he received almost eight years in jail. The other three, who had come armed with sledgehammers and crowbars and two of whom threatened security guards with them, all received sentences around the five-year mark, with no prospect of early release.

It’s not just that they committed a crime. Many people find Palestine Action types annoying, similarly to the zealots of Just Stop Oil; even their names manage to somehow irritate. Whatever their actual backgrounds, they have the vibe of virtuous indulged radical children who frighten their liberal parents, and even the recent hunger strikes had all the hallmarks of ‘acting out’.

In many ways the pro-Palestinian movement has indeed been indulged for too long, allowed to take over central London on repeated weekends while the authorities clamp down on counter-protest, sending the clearest signal that the state will side with whoever it fears most. Previous provocations have been met with a whimper or mysteriously ignored. There is suspicion among the public that well-born idealists in keffiyehs are treated with a degree of leniency which working-class protesters who care only for Britain would not be.

Now the state’s patience has snapped, and four young people described by the judge as being of ‘exemplary good character’ and noted for ‘your kindness, your selflessness, and your caring and compassionate nature’ will spend their best years in prison. I can’t help but feel a certain amount of pity, at least for three of them - after all, they were doing exactly what the prevailing moral norms were telling them to do.

I say this as someone not hugely sympathetic to the cause, which makes me think of Julie Burchill’s phrase from the 2000s, the ‘silly led by the sinister’. At best they’re wasting their lives over an unresolvable conflict they cannot influence; at worst they’re helping to dangerously radicalise British politics. I find the sight of young westerners at music festivals flying the flag of the group who carried out a massacre at a music festival slightly chilling, and the willingness of people to make common cause with obviously hostile actors very odd.

I suppose my attitude to the Palestine Action activists is not a million miles away from how political opponents view the people imprisoned for anti-immigration riots. They’re in jail in part they were influenced by the rhetoric around them; words have consequences, and all that, one word in particular.

By most accounts, 75,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 2023, the fourth deadliest conflict of the 2020s and the first to be disseminated through the highly emotive filter of TikTok. This is an immense death toll, and if what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to genocide, as many politicians and journalists argue, it is hardly surprising that the young and idealistic wish to do something. In the western psychological make-up the word is a mental shortcut to the Holocaust, which is presumably why it is so commonly invoked. This is a generation who have been taught their entire life that Nazism was the greatest moral test in history, and that many failed it; how can they stand by while it happens again?

One can disagree with Zack Polanski that this is merely ‘protesting’ – it obviously isn’t - and still note the severity of the sentences handed out to three of them. It could indeed be argued that turning up armed with crowbars is enough to merit a decent stretch, but the four received far longer sentences than people who otherwise commit violence because a ‘terrorist connection’ was used as an aggravating factor. This was applied, even though they were not actually charged with terrorism, and at the time of the break-in Palestine Action was not a ‘proscribed terrorist organisation’ and membership was not illegal.

While this application is permissible under the Sentencing Act 2020, it is rarely used, and sympathisers regard this measure as ‘chilling and creeping authoritarianism’, as one of the defence lawyers put. Human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield described it as a ‘constitutional threat’.

Admittedly, I don’t always take the words of human rights lawyers with the reverence some do, and the group has committed violence against individuals in order to achieve its goal, while publicising its actions in the hope of inspiring others. That does rather sound like terrorism, although it’s clear that the purpose of these long sentences is to be a salutary warning to others, the equivalent of hanging a horse-thief.

Political crimes are by necessity treated more harshly than ordinary lawbreaking: if people succeed in using violence or intimidation to further their ends, this will escalate and threaten democracy, and MPs have already ceded power to the mob’s veto. Fanatical idealists of a ‘caring and compassionate nature’ are more dangerous to social stability than ordinary criminals, and these things tends to be memetic. It’s clear why they needed to be jailed, just as the Just Stop Oil protesters were, but the measures against Palestine Action go further.

Not only is membership of the group illegal, but even expressing support for Palestine Action is a crime, punishable by up to six months in prison. The protest organisation Defend Our Juries claim that more than 2,700 people have been arrested for holding up signs supporting PA since July last year, a figure which seems plausible considering that 500 people were arrested in just one day for such an offence. The oldest was 87. Although the High Court overruled the ban, yesterday the Court of Appeal ruled on the side of the government. On the same day, coincidentally the anniversary of Magna Carta, Polanski was asked a question by a Labour MP which might constitute a crime if answered incorrectly.