As British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper moves to proscribe the group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000, making it illegal to be a member of, express support for, and promote the organization, left-wing critics have decried this action as a violation of free speech.
Their cries ring hollow and obfuscate reality. Defenders of Palestine Action engage in a deliberate distortion of truth to recast hundreds of incidents of violence and vandalism that have cost businesses and taxpayers alike millions of pounds as “speech.”
Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn, addressing parliament on June 24, derided the Home Secretary’s decision as “an outrageous and authoritarian crackdown on the right to oppose genocide.” Independent MP Adnan Hussain asserted that proscribing Palestine Action was “a dangerous encroachment” on the freedom to protest. Independent Alliance, the far-left political alliance to which both men belong, released a statement denouncing the government’s decision as “absurd,” “authoritarian,” and “a draconian assault on the democratic right to protest.”
Unaddressed in these posts, speeches, and documents defending Palestine Action is a key question: what prompted the Home Secretary to seek proscription? Last Friday, June 20, Palestine Action members infiltrated the RAF Brize Norton base, the largest air force base in the country, and used modified fire extinguishers and crowbars to vandalize the engines of two Airbus Voyager planes. Yet how did defenders of Palestine Action describe this incident?
Sally Rooney, a vocal critic of Israel who refused to have her books translated into Hebrew, dismissed the inciting incident in a June 22 op-ed in the Guardian. The article dismisses the vandalism of two RAF planes as insignificant in the face of Israeli actions in Gaza, and decries the proscription of Palestine Action as an “alarming curtailment of free speech.” The Guardian editorial board released a concurring article the following day, arguing that the government was “limiting belief and speech,” and rhetorically asking, “if red paint is terrorism, what isn’t?”
In reality, the “red paint” and vandalism of two RAF planes that spurred the British government to act could have damaged the engine of one plane beyond repair, costing taxpayers £25 million to replace. Times reporting notes that Palestine Action, in their five years in existence, have conducted 356 raids across the United Kingdom, with several firms telling the government that the damage has exceeded £30 million.
These attacks against factories and companies that Palestine Action charges with complicity in Israel’s “genocide” have not only been costly, but have exposed an anti-Semitic ideology at the core of the group’s mission. If not antisemitism, what compelled the organization to commemorate “Nakba Day” by vandalizing a building housing Jewish-owned businesses in Prestwich? Why else would activists spray-paint “Happy Nakba Day” and splash red paint (meant to symbolize blood, evoking the blood libel) on a building complex housing a Jewish-owned jeweler and property management firm?
Palestine Action’s influence, however, has not been confined to the United Kingdom. This past May, the group’s Spanish branch targeted the Spanish Defense Ministry building, and its Italian wing disrupted - with shouts, flares, and paint - a shareholders meeting in Rome. Unity of Fields, the renamed American branch of Palestine Action, condoned the May murder of a young couple leaving a Jewish event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., calling it a “a legitimate act of resistance.”
To respond to the Guardian editorial board’s rhetorical question with another rhetorical question: if targeting Jewish-owned businesses, expressing support for murder, and causing millions of pounds of damage to the British defense industry at a time of renewed challenges (as their very newspaper has reported) isn’t terrorism, what is?
Attempts to deflect from Palestine Action’s crimes with accusations of suppressing free speech, or efforts to minimize the true extent of the damage caused by the group’s vandalism and hate, are cynical distortions of reality to defend the indefensible. Similarly, Palestine Action itself has reframed vandals as “actionists,” vandalism as “direct action,” and the destruction of factories and spray-painting of storefronts as “victories,” engaging in doublespeak and bending facts to better fit its ideological framework.
Such disturbing behavior follows a familiar pattern observed by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who noted that adherents of totalitarian ideologies subordinate truth to advance their cause. Hoffer, in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movement, argued, “There is nothing that a fanatic will not do to achieve his goal: the end justifies the use of any means,” and “The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle.” Palestine Action’s lawless behavior and its supporters’ twisted defense proves Hoffer correct.
Free speech is the cornerstone of Western civilization, and the right to dissent and civil discourse is a shibboleth that distinguishes liberalism’s supporters from its authoritarian detractors. Those who cynically employ the defense of “free speech” when discussing destructive acts of vandalism out themselves as opportunists, willing to weaponize a core societal principle to advance their illiberal agenda. The false claims and distortions of reality of the organization’s defenders, who obfuscate reality out of blind devotion to their cause, must be repudiated.
Derek Tassone is a research associate for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).