Palestine Action

I am writing this post while I still have time.

It is true that activists can be hypocritical, judgmental, middle-class. It is true that some activists are thrill seekers, chasing endorphin rushes and losing sight of the causes they purportedly stand for. I think it’s also presumably true, though I’m not sure and have never encountered it, that at least one person in Palestine Action is motivated by deep-seated anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is in resurgence, and is to be condemned in all forms; the ordinary citizenry of Israel does not deserve ire, but its leaders.

It is true that this presumably applies to many members of Palestine Action.

But women and children are being killed while trying to access aid in Palestine, or doctors and patients are killed in hospitals. And the UK government is directly complicit in this, selling mail-order weapons so that they can more efficiently rip the citizenry of Gaza to shreds. And this will continue, regardless of a few petty bits of criminal damage. It is a problem not in a distant country but directly caused by the actions of the UK government.

Palestine Action was desperately drawing attention to this problem, which I find impossible to fathom, and, like many people, do nothing about. The UK government really needs to stop selling weapons to the Israeli government, which we citizens are mostly powerless to do anything about.

I do feel that proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation sends all the wrong messages. Which, again, is not to say Palestine Action are saints. The government has instituted a record crackdown on activists, and any criminal acts committed by members of the group are punishable already by increasingly harsh sentences.

I think the UK government should, instead, focus their energies on immediately ceasing to send any weapons to a government that is killing thousands of innocent people.