Radicalism in a Keffiyeh
JOHN MAC GHLIONN
On Saturday night, agitators linked to Palestine Action forced their way into the lobby of HMP Wormwood Scrubs, shouting through megaphones, banging lockers, and refusing police orders to leave. Nearly a hundred were arrested. It wasn’t a policy protest, but pressure, staged at the heart of a system built for absolute control. The audacity of Palestine Action may shock, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention these past few years. This is what happens when victimhood is trained, funded, and turned into a method.
Supporters now compare this movement to the suffragettes. That analogy is nonsensical; like comparing a ballot box to a battering ram. The suffrage campaign fought for legal inclusion through political struggle. Palestine Action has built its identity on sabotage, intimidation, and lawbreaking aimed at paralysing infrastructure and humiliating the state. The suffrage movement fought to be included in the law. For Palestine Action, the law exists only to be violated on camera. The suffragettes battled the state for a seat at the table. Palestine Action smashes the table. The suffragettes disrupted polite society. Palestine Action disrupts infrastructure. One sought legitimacy. The other seeks leverage. That difference matters. A lot.
Civil disobedience works by exposing injustice through restraint. You break a rule so clearly and calmly that the rule itself looks foolish. What Palestine Action practices is something else entirely. It is sabotage with slack-brained slogans. Spray-painting RAF aircraft. Breaking into air bases. Crashing vans into factories. Trespassing on private property. Digging up golf greens. To call these symbolic gestures requires either bad faith or a brain on airplane mode.
If this sounds exaggerated, it isn’t. This is a movement whose wealthy backers chant “death to America”, praise Hamas, and openly fantasize about making ordinary people afraid to leave their homes. Its manuals teach technique: how to smash windows, how to block sewage pipes, how to bring nations to their knees, and how to vanish. Saul Alinsky taught that pressure beats persuasion and disruption beats debate. Palestine Action takes that logic and pushes it further. Call it activism if you like, but activism does not require crowbars, balaclavas, and exit strategies. Terrorism does.
Supporters insist this is about Israel. In practice, it is about Britain. British factories. British air bases. British prisons. British universities. The targets are not in Tel Aviv, but in Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, and London. Palestine Action doesn’t merely oppose Israeli policy. It treats British institutions as legitimate targets in a global struggle. Arms companies become “enemy sites” and airfields become “war machines”. This is the language of insurgency. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with logical, civil protest against the Israeli state. Argue the case. March the streets. Lobby Parliament. Write the brief. That is politics. What this movement does instead is turn protest into punishment and dissent into damage. It doesn’t seek to convince Britain, but to coerce it. And when a group trains people to sneak, smash, and disappear while cheering the enemies of the West, the issue is no longer Israel.
This is why the UK moved to proscribe the organisation under terrorism legislation. Palestine Action’s strategy mirrors that of extremist movements. It is a pipeline logic, normalising illegal action today to justify harsher action tomorrow. Extremist movements may end with bullets and bombs, but they rarely begin there. They begin with broken windows and bold claims. First comes the thrill of transgression, then the applause for arrests, and then the belief that every crackdown proves moral purity.
The group’s American offshoot makes the direction unmistakable. It has prayed for Iranian missiles to hit U.S. bases, and posted images of coffins draped in American flags with the caption “Soon”. You don’t stumble into that sort of language by accident. You learn it, rehearse it, and arrive there through repetition.
Saturday night was a warning. Unless Palestine Action is confronted with the full force of the law, the country will be left with a well-funded movement intent on tearing at a nation already at breaking point.
This article (PALESTINE ACTION AND THE ASSAULT ON BRITISH AUTHORITY) was created and published by Courage Media and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author John Mac Ghlionn
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