I do not support Palestine Action - but proscribing it as a terrorist organisation is intellectually bankrupt
4 min read
It wasn’t easy to vote against my government on the motion to proscribe Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ group.
But it was necessary, even though I have never supported any protests organised by Palestine Action.
Two days later, an 83-year-old retired priest was arrested for ‘terrorism’. All she did was hold up a placard. But she was attending a peaceful Palestine Action protest in Parliament Square, and so deemed a ‘terrorist’.
Her treatment proves what a slippery slope that proscription has already become. As a former UK minister for the Middle East, I support the right of Israel to exist and Israelis to enjoy full security; I am also a long-standing supporter of Palestinian self-determination in their own independent state.
I was vehemently opposed to the widespread antisemitism tolerated under Jeremy Corbyn’s ill-fated Labour leadership. I do not, nor have ever, supported Palestine Action, and believe acts of criminal damage ought to be prosecuted.
In 1969-70, I was proud to lead a militant campaign of direct action to disrupt all-white racist South African rugby and cricket tours, and we succeeded in getting them stopped for two decades. That militant action could have been blocked by the interpretation of the law used for this proscription, as could other anti-apartheid activity, including militant protests to stop Barclays Bank recruiting new students on university campuses, eventually forcing Barclays to withdraw from apartheid South Africa.
The reason is that this is the first time that a group has ever been proscribed solely on the basis of their targeting of property and assets. Irrespective of the causes they espoused or their respective moral stature, consider the historical figures that could be seen as “terrorists” under this legal interpretation of their actions.
As others have pointed out, the Suffragettes could have been suppressed under this proscription, for using violence against property to demand voting rights for women as part of civil disobedience protests, when their peaceful protests seemed futile. Suffragettes cut telegraph and telephone wires to disrupt government and commercial operations. They even hid small homemade bombs inside mailboxes and attempted to bomb Westminster Abbey and prime minister David Lloyd George’s uncompleted house.
Frankly, in terms of the degree of damage and disruption, Palestine Action members spraying paint on military aircraft at Brize Norton seems positively moderate by comparison. Those alleged to have done this are being prosecuted for criminal damage – as indeed they should expect to be.
Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, was labelled a “terrorist” by the apartheid government, by then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, by the United States and other western governments during much of the Cold War, despite the fact that his choice of sabotage as a form of protest was made because precisely it would not involve loss of life.
Historically, the definition of ‘terrorists’ has been reserved for groups that target innocent life, like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Al-Qaeda members suicide-attacked New York’s Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, killing 2,753 people. Islamic State deliberately targeted civilians in public spaces to instil fear, spread panic, gain media attention, and punish any groups or governments opposing them, and became notorious for filmed beheadings and executions. They engaged in widespread sexual slavery, particularly of Yazidi women.
Islamic State attacks killed hundreds of bystanders in Paris, Brussels, Istanbul and Sri Lanka. Nazi-like US racists and the IRA here in the UK also committed terrible atrocities, targeting or killing innocent civilians, properly and rightly labelled ‘terrorists’.
Our Labour government is treating Palestine Action as equivalent to Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, which is intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled and morally wrong.
To even compare Palestine Action with these groups is now legally fraught, and risks giving the impression of adding support to their cause. It surely cannot surely be the government’s intention to close down criticism of the interpretation of the law – but the fact it requires acknowledgement means there is clearly a chilling effect.
There is also the risk the proscription backfires. It has already raised Palestine Action’s profile – and it seems at least possible that it will undermine faith in terrorism law among the public and particularly among those most opposed to the war in Gaza.
Frankly, I am deeply ashamed.
