Palestine Action: protesters or terrorists?

In the early hours of last Friday, two activists from Palestine Action climbed over a fence into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. They then filmed themselves riding unimpeded on scooters across the vast airbase – "a critical part of Britain's defence infrastructure" – and vandalising two Voyager air-to-air refuelling tankers. Reportedly, they smashed the aircraft with crowbars and sprayed paint into their engines.

Their aim, they said, was to "disrupt British military support for Israel". But their main achievement was to provoke the normally "glacial" Home Office into rapid action. By Friday evening, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, had let it be known that she planned to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act; on Monday, she confirmed that it would be put to a vote in the Commons next week.

In a statement, Cooper said this "disgraceful" attack was just the latest in the long history of Palestine Action's "unacceptable criminal damage". And it's true that the group's tactics have become quite extreme, said Sian Bradley and Charlie Parker in The Times. It was set up in 2020 to take direct action against Elbit Systems, a weapons manufacturer it claims "profits from Israel's war crimes". Back then, its members limited themselves to scaling rooftops and vandalising factories. But since the start of Israel's offensive in Gaza, they have ramped up their actions. Last year, they were accused of assaulting two police officers at Elbit's Bristol site and causing millions of pounds worth of damage.

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These extremists are not just hurling soup at paintings, said Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. They are sabotaging RAF aircraft and potentially undermining Britain's defence capability. If proscribing the group allows police to deal with this menace more effectively, "so much the better". It's a drastic step, though, said Karl Hansen in Tribune. It would place Palestine Action "in the same legal category as Isis, al-Qa'eda and neo-Nazi gangs", and criminalise anyone who belongs to the group, funds it, or publicly expresses support for it.

Cooper is setting a "dangerous precedent", said The Guardian. If the state can define a non-violent campaign "it disapproves of as terrorism, the boundary between civil disobedience and extremism becomes whatever a minister says it is". Palestine Action has caused a lot of damage, but its tactics do not include "threats to life". The Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti was right to ask: "When did criminal damage become terrorism?"