DAVE RICH
There is a growing campaign against the proscription of Palestine Action, the group that used organised criminality to pursue its anti-Israel politics until they were banned as a terrorist group by the Home Secretary last month.
The latest statement in their support is a letter to the Guardian (where else?) by a predictable list of academics and veteran activists. It includes this revealing sentence:
We fully share the aim of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel and the belief that all participants in the pro-Palestine movement should be free to make our own decisions about how best to achieve that goal.
This kind of thinking, with no qualifications or restrictions, could justify Elias Rodriguez shooting dead Sarah Milgim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. in May. Rodriguez was a participant in the pro-Palestinian movement, and he made his own decision that shooting dead two people leaving a Jewish community event was the best way to achieve his goal. He even shouted “Free Palestine” when he did it. And he isn’t the only example.
I hope the signatories of the Guardian letter would agree that this was terrorism, but who knows? That sentence could be read as justifying the use of violence to achieve a political goal, which serves as a decent shorthand definition of terrorism anyway. Rodriguez has been glorified and his political manifesto shared by plenty of people and organisations in the pro-Palestinian movement, including Unity of Fields, an American group that used to be Palestine Action U.S., so it isn’t too far-fetched to think there will be similar attacks in future.
The Guardian letter also claims that proscribing Palestine Action “represents an attack both on the entire pro-Palestine movement and on fundamental freedoms of expression, association, assembly and protest.” This is nonsense. Palestine Action’s entire approach was to use criminal methods to achieve a political goal. Their activists set out to smash up buildings and cover them in paint. If they gained entry, they smashed up the offices and equipment as well. This criminal modus operandi was not an add-on, or an occasional by-product: it was the whole point. It shouldn’t need saying, but there is no automatic freedom to break the law.
It is perfectly possible to protest against Israel and campaign for Palestine without using criminal methods. Violence is a choice. Palestine Action advised their activists take a sledgehammer with them when they went out to do a Palestine Action activity – and you don’t need a sledgehammer for peaceful protest.
Cutting through the high-blown political rhetoric, it is hard to avoid the view that the signatories of that Guardian letter support Palestine Action because they believe the Palestinian cause is just, and therefore the suffering in Gaza justifies any response. The same goes for the people getting themselves arrested in Palestine Action’s name every weekend. But this is not an example of cause-agnostic support for free expression or political protest. If a far right group used Palestine Action’s tactics to attack immigration centres, asylum hotels and the offices of law firms who work on immigration cases, using organised criminal damage and intimidation to try to bring about an end to immigration, similar support would not be forthcoming from the people now supporting Palestine Action. This is a case of the ends being seen to justify the means: which is, ironically, the logic that terrorists have used for decades.
These letter-writers reveal more than they intend. If proscription really is an attack on the entire pro-Palestine movement, then that would imply the entire movement supports the use of political violence and criminality to achieve its goals. And who knows, maybe they are right about that – who am I to argue? – in which case, proscription of the most violent element of that movement seems more, not less, justified as a result.
This article (Ends and Means) was created and published by Everyday Hate and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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Britain is breaking apart
Neocommunal politics leads to the collapse of the common good
TOM JONES
Usually, it’s in the interests of opinion writers — or people like me, who’d be described better as opinionated writers — to be right. That is basically the whole reason for these pieces to exist; to observe, analyse, and argue with the confidence that you’ve grasped something true and are offering readers a clearer way to see the world.
Yet recently, I’ve started to hope that I am wrong — fundamentally, monumentally, embarrassingly wrong in my prediction, written elsewhere, that Britain is slowly becoming a neocommunal country, a process characterised by “the slow and inexorable intensification of ethnic identification and political factionalism, the result of ethnic hostilities being transplanted to Britain.”
I pray I am wrong because this path runs through such dark and foreboding shadows. There will be — as there always has been — hope for the future and joy in the present. I still believe, unabashedly, that it is the most marvellous country in the world, and that I know not a better little spot for death; but neocommunal Britain is not going to be a comfortable place to live, nor a happy one.
This weekend, thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators are preparing to gather in London in what could become one of the most direct challenges to the UK’s anti-terror laws in recent memory. At the heart of this mobilisation is Palestine Action — the activist network recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Despite the serious legal consequences, including up to 14 years in prison for expressing support for a banned group, organisers and supporters remain undeterred. Since July 5, over 200 individuals have been arrested under the Act. Now, campaigners intend to escalate by openly and collectively defying the ban.
A briefing document shared by the civil liberties group Defend Our Juries, and obtained by The Telegraph, outlines the plan in striking terms. It concedes the personal risks of participation but argues that the state may be unable — or unwilling — to respond if faced with mass civil disobedience on such a scale.
“Even assuming [the state] had the physical capacity to arrest so many people on the same day,” the document states, “the political fallout… would be incalculable.” The briefing goes further, suggesting that overwhelming the criminal justice system could create the pressure needed to reverse the ban entirely.
The planned demonstration is a calculated stress test of the government’s ability, and willingness, to enforce the law in the face of widespread opposition. With one of Palestine Action’s co-founders now cleared to challenge the legality of the ban in court, campaigners sense an opening.
This is what neocommunal politics looks like. A neocommunal country’s politics are less concerned with the common good than with ethnic loyalty and demographic influence. When loyalty to ethnic or ideological factions outweighs loyalty to anything else, political discourse becomes less about finding consensus and more about securing power for your own group.
Politics is therefore no longer a contest of ideas or a debate over the future of the nation; it is a struggle for dominance between competing interests. The old politics of debate and dialogue seem increasingly naïve; politics will increasingly play out through confrontation, rather than persuasion.
And this applies just as much to the rolling protests around Britain’s migrant hotels as it does to the weekend mobilisations of Palestine Action. When the great Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew said that in ethnically mixed societies “all political life devolves to ethnic loyalties,” few people appreciate the significance of the word all. Lee did not mean just that but that it becomes the basis for all politics, but that it applies to all ethnicities. Both the hotel riots and the defiance of Palestine Action tap into the same underlying motivation: the mobilisation of a community around shared identity, and the belief that the stakes of the battle transcend national law or order. People have learnt that direct action works, and our political culture will retard accordingly.
When people lose faith in the system’s ability to represent their interests, they will begin to rely more on their communities
The true impact of this change will be difficult to fully grasp until we witness it unfolding in real time — by which time, it might be too late. I wrote recently of the dark prospect that “civic-minded vigilantism” might inadvertently accelerate the process by which public institutions lose their legitimacy. We now see a direct challenge to the government’s declaration of Palestine Action as a terrorist group and protestors tackling what they suspected was an delivery rider working illegally at the Britannia hotel in Canary Wharf.
When people lose faith in the system’s ability to represent their interests, they will begin to rely more on their communities — and when whole communities start to question the legitimacy of the state, we may begin to see just how vulnerable a nation can become.
I still hope I’m wrong.
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