Why won’t the left condemn the violence of Palestine Action?

If Palestine Action wanted to stop the mass arrests of its supporters, if it wanted to escape its designation as a terrorist group, if it wanted to allow Sally Rooney to enjoy her royalty payments, and if, above all, it wanted to actually help Palestinians, it would renounce violence. Its co-founder Huda Ammori is at the Supreme Court today to argue that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group is a breach of our human rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

Few ask why 4,000 people were willing to be arrested for an organisation that attacks the RAF and police sergeants, or why Sally Rooney wants to give her royalties to Palestine Action rather than peaceful pro-Palestinian groups She faces an obvious difficulty. The vicars and Quakers the police arrests for defending Palestine Action might uphold the best traditions of peaceful assembly and protest. But the hardcore supporters of Palestine Action do not.

As the judges in the Court of Appeal said , they ‘are engaged in causing serious damage to property using weapons, including sledgehammers, presenting very real risks of injury to members of the public.’ The sledgehammer was wielded by Samuel Corner, a 23-year-old, who fractured the spine of Police Sergeant Kate Evans during a raid on an Israeli-linked arms producer in Bristol. Yet Corner and his fellow defendants have not been denounced by their comrades as the enemies of peaceful protest.

Quite the reverse. The Green Party leader Zack Polanski said it was ‘gut-wrenching to see four young people jailed for direct action against an arms supplier to Israel’. Apparently gut-wrenching is worse than back-breaking in the new-look Green party. Nor has there been hand-wringing on the left about Palestine Action breaking into Brize Norton and spray-painting RAF planes. Most popular Alexander Larman The sudden end of the World of David Walliams Douglas Murray Would you pass the ‘fake breasts’ test?

Geoff Bagwell Sir Lenny Henry should pay reparations True, officers have arrested more than 4,000 genuinely peaceful protesters for declaring their support for Palestine Action in one of the most ludicrous overreactions in the history of modern policing. For all that, few ask why 4,000 people were willing to be arrested for an organisation that attacks the RAF and police sergeants, or why Sally Rooney wants to give her royalties to Palestine Action rather than peaceful pro-Palestinian groups.

Instead of asking hard questions, they duck them. ‘If a government can define non-violent acts it disapproves of as terrorism, the boundary between civil disobedience and extremism becomes whatever a minister says it is,’ thundered the Guardian in June 2025 when the Home Secretary issued the terrorist designation. But Palestine Action does engage in violence, as poor Sergeant Evans can testify. It may not be al-Qaeda, but then nor is National Action, the far-right group the Conservatives banned because it ‘promoted and encouraged acts of terrorism’, and one does not hear the Guardian thunder about that.

Indeed, the Court of Appeal published Palestine Action’s ‘Underground Manual’ which showed that it encourages its followers to prevent police infiltration by using the classic cell structure of terrorist organisations. Guardian leader writers aren’t intellectually dishonest. Often, they produce the best-argued pieces in the paper. Yet when it comes to the left’s attitude to violence, they write in bad faith. They avoid the hard questions because people on the left have had their careers destroyed for asking them.

The implicit assumption they can never state plainly is that Israel has it coming. Israelis are committing genocide. People are rightly furious. They want vengeance. They want Israel to suffer. And compared to an actual genocide , a few fractured spines and arson attacks are trifles. Reputable people can’t say that in public. And so they never raise the question I began with: does Palestine Action help Palestinians? Martin Luther King embraced non-violence for religious reasons.

Christian imagery and thought run through his writing and speeches. ‘Unearned suffering is redemptive,’ he wrote in 1960. But as everyone in the 1960s knew, the sight of racist police officers attacking peaceful black demonstrators boosted support for King’s civil rights movement. Today the sight of British police officers arresting peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators provokes sympathy. But the sight of Palestine Action attacking the RAF provokes scorn.

If they were serious about helping the Palestinian cause, left-wing commentators and journalists would be telling their readers to stick to the principles of non-violent civil disobedience. But they are too frightened of attack from the far left to do it. The dangers were made clear in one of the worst examples of cancel culture of the woke era. David Shor is a brilliant American political analyst. I admired his practical determination to highlight ways to break the power of the MAGA movement.

Here was a man, I thought, who was not afraid to tell hard truths. Such men live dangerously. After a police officer murdered George Floyd in May 2020, the American left was consumed with understandable rage – just as today’s rage about Gaza is understandable. Looting and vandalism followed in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor sent out a tweet for his fellow political nerds. He referred to research by Omar Wasow of Princeton University, which showed that non-violent protests by the civil rights movement increased support for the centre-left in the 1960s, while race riots alienated white sympathisers and drove them into the arms of conservatives.

Hardly a controversial finding to repeat, you might think. It was in 2020. All hell broke loose as activists lined up to denounce Shor as a racist. He was damned for ‘concern trolling’ by the podcast host Benjamin Dixon, while Ari Trujillo Wesler, the man behind a popular organising app, denounced his ‘anti-Blackness. Shor’s tweet was condemned on a forum for progressive data operatives. His own colleagues described it as ‘racist’ and maintained that by arguing with his critics on Twitter, he had ‘encouraged harassment that led to death threats.’

To their disgrace, Shor’s employers forced him out. Suppose you are a leader writer or a columnist for a left-wing news site. You could make a strong case that the sanctification of Palestine Action is wrong in principle and in practice. You could say that the pretence that it is a non-violent organisation is a joke. Today’s case follows the Court of Appeal overturning an earlier High Court ruling. The appeal judges said that Palestine Action ‘is concerned in terrorism as defined in the 2000 Act.’

It targeted ‘key national infrastructure and defence firms that provide services and supplies to support Ukraine [and] Nato.’ Its Underground Manual I mentioned above showed that Palestine Action operated through cells of ‘trusted people.’ It offered advice on ‘smashing stuff… with an efficient sledgehammer in your hand’ as something that could cause ‘quite a bit of damage.’ As well as causing millions of pounds of damage at RAF Brize Norton and attacking police and security officers at the Israeli arms firm in Bristol, Palestine Action has also ‘broadened its targets from the defence industry to include financial firms, charities, universities and government buildings.’

You could lay out the evidence, politely, for you should never insult your readers. And then you would save the killer line for your payoff. Far from building support for the Palestinians, you would say, violence makes neutrals think of the violence of Hamas and turn away. If you were serious about opposing Israel, you would oppose Palestine Action. Far more people on the left than conservatives imagine would be happy to hear this argument.

But which left-wing writer would dare write it? And which left-wing editor would dare publish it? They are too frightened to condemn and too frightened to applaud, so they bite their tongues and say nothing.