Saying ‘I support Palestine Action’ should not be a crime

Nearly 900 people were arrested in Parliament Square in London at the weekend. It makes for the highest number of arrests carried out by the Metropolitan Police at a single event in decades. Just for perspective, that’s nearly three times the number of people arrested by the Met during the infamous Poll Tax riot in Trafalgar Square in 1990 – a riot in which well over 100 people, including 45 police officers, were injured.

So what heinous crime did the many more arrested on Saturday commit? What acts of violence did they engage in that could possibly have warranted such a response from the Met? They voiced support for anti-Israel group Palestine Action, invariably in the form of a placard bearing the words: ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’

These protesters, many of pensionable age, did little more than express a political view. There were a few more arrests for other offences, but beyond that, the statins-and-stairlifts crowd limited their actions to sitting down and waving a few hundred placards.

If anything captures the absurdity of the Home Office’s decision in July to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, thus making even expressing support for the group a crime, it is surely this: the now regular sight of hundreds of people being carted off in police vans for what amounts to a speech crime.

To defend these people’s right to speak their minds is not to defend their views or indeed Palestine Action itself. It is a genuinely abhorrent group fuelled by a visceral loathing of the Jewish State. Through acts of sabotage and vandalism, it has consistently advanced the Israelophobic propaganda that there is a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. It gained a degree of infamy in June after Palestine Action activists broke into an RAF military base in Oxfordshire and caused around £7million worth of damage to aircraft – an act that ultimately prompted then home secretary Yvette Cooper to seek the group’s proscription.

But Palestine Action’s antics have been even worse than that. Its activists have been caught on camera vandalising memorials to the Israeli hostages Hamas took during the 7 October pogrom. And in one particularly sinister act, they attacked a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill, an area of London famous for its large community of Orthodox Jews. The activists daubed the business’s premises with red paint and smashed its windows, falsely claiming it had a connection to Elbit, an Israeli arms manufacturer. As the business’s owner told the press: ‘For Jewish people it is very, very scary now.’

So Palestine Action needs to be vigorously challenged and criticised. And insofar as its members have committed acts of vandalism, breached national security and sought, above all, to make Jewish people’s lives thoroughly miserable, they should face the full force of the law.

But the government is doing much more than challenging Palestine Action and sanctioning it where it engages in unlawful activity. The government is criminalising those who are merely expressing support for it, further corroding freedom of speech in a nation with increasingly little of it.

The proscription of Palestine Action is creating the worst of all worlds. It is trampling over free speech while transforming these achingly middle-class protesters, cleaving to the rancid cause of anti-Israel bigotry, into free-speech martyrs. We should never have given them the satisfaction.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.