July 3 2025 - 1:20pm
On Wednesday MPs voted by an overwhelming majority to ban Palestine Action (PA) as a terrorist organization. This will come into effect on Saturday. PA, for its part, has described the ban as “unlawful, dangerous and ill thought out”; it has also sought to temporarily stop the order, with a hearing scheduled to take place on Friday at the High Court. Should it be unsuccessful in this, belonging to or supporting PA will become a terrorist offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
I must confess that my first reaction to this was that the ban was overly draconian, primarily because PA doesn’t carry out acts of serious violence against civilians. It hasn’t, for example, beheaded film-makers or teachers or blown anything up. It hasn’t hijacked any planes or poisoned anyone or inspired any vehicle rammings and you won’t see any of its members brandishing large phallic guns in its official propaganda. In other words, PA isn’t very “terroristy” — or so, on the face of it, it seems.
But terrorism is not just about bullets and bombs, and increasingly, knives; it can also involve the deliberate destruction or sabotage of property with the aim of punishing or coercing a government or the wider civilian population. Indeed, UK terrorism legislation is very clear on the matter: terrorism is “the use or threat of action…designed to influence the government…or intimidate the public…for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause” and involves, among other things, “serious violence against a person” and “serious damage to property”.
Roughly speaking, there are two ways of making the case for proscribing PA as a terrorist group. The first is to insist that its members and those who support it are mad Leftists whose antics do not advance the cause of Palestinians one bit. Many of those who support the proscription of the group are in this camp, although they wouldn’t necessarily publicly express the matter this way. Needless to say, this isn’t a strong case, because whether someone is a terrorist or not isn’t or shouldn’t be determined by how stupid they or their ideas are.
The second case is to argue that Palestine Action’s actions have rendered it a terrorist group. Last month, for example, four PA activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and damaged the turbines of two Voyager aircraft by spraying them with paint, causing £7 million in damages. In 2022, the group staged an attack on a weapons equipment factory in Glasgow, scaling its roof from which they hurled smoke bombs; this resulted in more than £1 million of damage. The group is planning and even training for many more such actions.
Needless to say, this is a much stronger case and one which regards the actual substance of PA’s ideas or its speech rights as wholly irrelevant to whether it should be defined as a terrorist group or not. What matters, rather, is the group’s methods. If, for example, a far-Right group decided to protest against what it sees as the Islamisation of Britain by breaking into a mosque and covering its walls in red spray-paint, there would be an equally strong case for that group to be proscribed as a terrorist one, especially if it used this method as part of a sustained campaign of political coercion.
There is a broader point to bear in mind which seems to be lost on PA’s defenders. Damaging or destroying property is emphatically a form of violence and when that violence is motivated by an ideology and is sufficiently serious in its consequences it is rightly seen as a form of terrorism.
Even more broadly, it is salutary to remember that not all terrorism is catastrophic and that it exists on a wide spectrum which includes bloodthirsty executioners from west London and well-meaning “teachers, nurses, students and parents” who sabotage Government and civilian property.
