Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?

It is now​ a criminal offence, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to express support for Palestine Action, a direct-action group formed in 2020 with the aim of disrupting the British factories, installations and infrastructure that supply and support the Israeli military. Their trademark is red paint: they break into arms factories and airbases, and spray the facilities as well as dismantling equipment, smashing windows and chaining themselves to gates – anything that upsets the production and use of weapons of war against Palestinians. Four members of the group have been charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage after breaking into RAF Brize Norton on 20 June and spraying aircraft they believed had been used to refuel Israeli jets bombing Gaza.

In making Palestine Action a proscribed terrorist organisation, the government has added it to a list that includes al-Qaida, the UDA and the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, all of which advocate terror and murder to achieve political ends. Palestine Action advocates direct action to destroy weapons of war and the logistics that enable them. Yet the government has used a far-reaching political mechanism not only to shut down the organisation, but to suppress support for it. To say that you support Palestine Action’s campaign against the Israeli occupation is to make yourself liable for arrest as a terrorist, as happened on 5 July, when members of the legal campaign group Defend Our Juries were arrested at a silent demonstration outside Parliament while holding signs that read: ‘I oppose genocide – I support Palestine Action.’ Among them was an 83-year-old retired priest called Sue Parfitt, who now faces a six-month jail term.

I don’t often talk about it, but I have a criminal record. After the Labour government declared war on Iraq in 2003, I skipped school to join a protest in the nearby town of Kendal. I was sixteen. Four of us went to Oxenholme, a train station on the West Coast main line, to continue our protest. We waited for the train from Glasgow to pull in and, when it had come to a stop, we jumped onto the tracks and sat in front of it. I can’t remember how long we were there: perhaps only half an hour. Eventually, the police negotiated with us. We’d made our point, and given the rising tensions that day, they’d had orders from above not to charge anyone who had engaged in non-violent civil disobedience.

When my mother found out, she gave me one of her frank, no bullshit talks. She wanted to know if I could account for my actions. My aim was to disrupt the smooth running of a country that was about to commit a war crime. Had I chosen the right target? Did those train passengers deserve to be disrupted? Was I right to break the law in this instance? I felt her disappointment, as I saw it, tarnishing my heroic self-image. Twenty-two years later, I’m still not sure whether it was the right thing to do, although history has at least shown that my anger was justified. One thing I do know, though: it wasn’t terrorism.

Three weeks after the protest, my mother, who had been ill for some time, died. On the morning of her funeral, among the sympathy cards delivered by our postman, I received a letter. It was a summons to the local police station to account for my actions, this time legally. The police had, of course, lied to me: they fully intended to press charges. As I sat through the funeral, I passed the letter, which I’d slipped inside the order of service, back and forth between my hands and thought about my mum’s demand to inspect my conscience. A week later, at the station, they took my DNA and fingerprints, and I accepted my caution.

After her death, mum’s friends assured me she had been proud of what I’d done. But she had also felt obliged to make me construct my own moral argument, knowing that many in the community would be quick to congratulate me. After all, it wasn’t just sympathy cards I was getting in the post. I also received a number of cards from friends of my grandparents who had read of my arrest in the local paper. I was, they said, following in the footsteps of my grandfather, a conscientious objector in the Second World War and a lifelong member of the peace movement. After the war, he converted from Methodism to the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mum was raised a Quaker, and so was I, spending my early childhood living in Rookhow, a historic Quaker meeting house where my parents were wardens. I would watch each month as they hung another of the famous Quaker posters in the glass box outside the meeting house. One of them, issued by the Friends Peace and International Relations Committee, reads: ‘World Peace will come through the will of ordinary people like yourself.’

This idea is at the heart of the Peace Testimony, perhaps the most famous of the Quaker testimonies. It expresses a commitment not just to the belief in peace and in non-violence, but to its practice, an obligation to work against violence and war and to witness its effects. It is a call, in effect, to wage peace through action. Quakers often wrestle with the implications of the testimony, not least when it comes into conflict with state power. Despite its position at the core of Quaker life, it was always the testimony I struggled with most. As a younger, angrier man, I would often sit at Westminster Meeting House and wonder how, living a life of relative comfort and security in London, I could sustain such a position against those suffering violence and oppression, those who take up arms to defend their lives and their families. What does it mean to advocate non-violence to a people who are at risk of death from above, morning, noon and night? The answer for me was within the testimony. In making the rejection of violence a consistent practice, the community has built a capacity to enact it, and in doing so, to remove the causes of war. Whether we are intermediaries in sectarian conflicts or protesters against the armaments industry, the testimony provides a guarantee that any actions we undertake are not in the service of encouraging more violence.

The campaigns of Palestine Action have involved disabling the factory in the Wirral that produces components for the F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza, dismantling UAVs at a Runcorn drone factory and occupying facilities owned by Elbit Systems, which produces 85 per cent of the IDF’s land vehicles. In doing so, Palestine Action has drawn attention to the war – and to the mounting death toll – as well as to the UK’s role in the weapons industry that sustains it.

The proscription of Palestine Action means that the group can no longer make such protests, or any protests at all. Criminal laws exist that can and have been brought against these actions. But it is this very course of justice that the proscription aims to impede. In a number of similar cases, activists who have disarmed weapons systems have been acquitted by juries because their actions were aimed at preventing war crimes. Although laws around such a defence have been tightened, juries can still acquit on the basis of jury nullification, where an acquittal is determined to be in the interests of justice as a matter of conscience. In 1996, the Ploughshares Four, a group of women who broke into an aerodrome to vandalise a BAE Hawk aircraft due to be exported to East Timor, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They had argued that they were using reasonable force to prevent BAE Systems from complicity in the East Timor genocide. In 2007, two members of the Fairford Five, a group who broke into RAF Fairford in 2003 to damage equipment used to support B-52 bombers headed for Iraq, were acquitted by a jury on the same basis. In 2022, five Palestine Action activists were acquitted by a jury following a demonstration during which they sprayed red paint on the headquarters of Elbit Systems. Keir Starmer is aware of this legal anomaly: as a human rights barrister, he defended Josh Richards, a member of the Fairford Five who was acquitted when a jury failed to reach a verdict. Such an outcome is exactly what the government is trying to avoid. In taking Palestine Action activists to court on charges of criminal damage, they risk exposing the chasm between government policy and public opinion. It is not terror the government fears, but embarrassment.

They have good reason to worry. A YouGov poll in June showed that 55 per cent of British people oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, while only 15 per cent support them. A full 45 per cent believe Israel’s actions amount to a genocide of the Palestinian people. Last November, a UN Special Committee found Israel’s onslaught to be ‘consistent with the characteristics of genocide’, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war. International Criminal Court warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister for defence, Yoav Gallant, remain outstanding, and Britain would be obliged to arrest the men were they to set foot on British soil (an obligation Starmer has said he will abide by). And the destruction continues: according to Unicef, 1309 Palestinian children have been killed since the ‘ceasefire’ of 18 March, bringing the total of dead and maimed children to more than fifty thousand. Almost a million children in Gaza are at risk of starvation. The willingness of the average British citizen to convict someone of smashing up a plane to prevent more deaths would be hard to guarantee. Now there is no need to worry: the weight of the government’s anti-terror machinery can be brought against anyone undertaking, or claiming to support, these direct actions against the war machine.

The Palestine Action proscription is part of a wider effort to limit jury nullification. When two climate activists informed the jury of their reasoning during a trial in 2023, the judge cleared the court and jailed them for seven weeks for contempt. The same judge warned another jury that any attempt at jury nullification would itself be a criminal act rendering them open to prosecution. Government lawyers even sought to bring contempt proceedings against Trudi Warner, a retired social worker, for standing outside the Inner London Crown Court with a sign that read: ‘Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit, according to your conscience’. The principle of jury nullification dates back to Bushel’s Case of 1670, when two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, were accused of preaching to an unlawful assembly in Gracechurch Street. When the jury found, according to their consciences, that the men had preached, but that the assembly was not unlawful, the jurors were themselves imprisoned and then fined. A trial of the last jury member to refuse to pay the fine, Edward Bushel, established that juries did have the right to acquit according to conscience and could not be punished for doing so. There is a plaque to commemorate the trial at the Old Bailey.

The Labour government is using the Terrorism Act 2000 to prevent Palestine Action activists from staging non-violent protests that might result in such trials. According to Francesca Cociani, a criminal defence lawyer at Hodge Jones and Allen who is representing some of the protesters, the arrest of Rev. Parfitt under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act means that she will be tried before a district judge and won’t have the opportunity to appear before a jury at all. All of this amounts to a devastating attack on freedom of conscience. A group of UN special rapporteurs urged the government not to include the group on the list of proscribed terror organisations. ‘Protest actions that are not genuinely “terrorist”, but which involve alleged property damage, should be properly investigated as ordinary crimes or other security offences,’ they argued. ‘Individuals could be prosecuted for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and opinion, assembly, association and participation in political life. This would have a chilling effect on political protest and advocacy generally in relation to defending human rights in Palestine.’ This has already happened. Like Trudi Warner, Rev. Parfitt has been arrested for holding a sign. Can that be understood by any but the most authoritarian of rubrics as an act of terrorism? Before the passing of the amendment, Miriam Margolyes, Sally Rooney and Steve Coogan all publicly expressed support for Palestine Action and called for the group not to be banned. Were they to repeat those calls today, they too would be terrorists under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, having invited ‘support for a proscribed organisation’ and expressed ‘an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation’.

To break such a law is not an act to be taken lightly. But those Palestine Action activists who have chained themselves to factory gates, smashed windows and sprayed planes have risked their freedom to disrupt the machinery of war. Speaking out in defence of the right to protest and to cause disruption is a mild act in comparison, but nonetheless, as a Quaker, I feel compelled to do so. I am reminded of the words of Edward Burrough, a member of the ‘Valiant Sixty’, an early group of Quaker preachers. He was born in Underbarrow, just outside Kendal. He died in prison aged 29, having been arrested under the 1662 Act of Uniformity (also known as the Quaker Act) for holding a meeting, an act of criminality that was driven by his own conscience. ‘If anything be commanded of us by the present authority, which is not according to equity, justice and a good conscience towards God,’ he wrote, ‘we must in such cases obey God only and deny active obedience for conscience’ sake, and patiently suffer what is inflicted upon us for such our disobedience to men.’

If we believe in freedom of conscience, we must deny active obedience. The article you are currently reading could be considered a criminal act and a terrorist document. I do not speak for Palestine Action. I am not a member of the group. I don’t know if anyone in Palestine Action is taking part in their actions on the basis of their spiritual belief. But I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons of war is one way of waging peace: I can only conclude that for the British government, the waging of peace is terrorism. And I believe that the proscription under the Terrorism Act of groups that seek peace through non-violent means is political repression of the freedom of conscience. Resisting the destruction of human life and the perpetuation of a genocide against the Palestinian people is not wrong. It is the law, and this government, that is wrong.