RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last month, Jews in London awoke to the sight of shattered glass. A local business, a Jewish business, had been savagely attacked by masked men in the dead of night. The vandals coated the walls in blood-coloured paint to remind residents of the blood-thirstiness of their homeland: Israel. Even the mezuzah, the small parchment scroll some Jews affix to their doorposts to remind them of their faith, was stained red in the frenzied assault. Who carried out this vile act that will have triggered the darkest historical memories among local Jews? Some neo-Nazi outfit? It was Palestine Action, the anti-Israel ‘direct action’ group that has suddenly become a cause célèbre of all of the worst people.

It was in Stamford Hill, a part of London with a large, lively community of Orthodox Jews. It was on 28 May. Three Palestine Action pricks high on the fumes of self-righteousness laid waste to a landlord business. In the kangaroo court of their own Israelophobic delirium, they’d found the business guilty of renting out premises to Elbit, the Israeli arms manufacturer. And they passed their sentence: violent destruction of the sinning premises. But the business said it wasn’t true. We have ‘no connection with Elbit’, said a spokesman. We need to talk about this, no? The possibility that a protest group gushed over by Sally Rooney and praised by every faux-radical arsehole on the internet smashed up a Jewish business with no justification whatsoever?

To my mind, it doesn’t matter if the business had links with Elbit (though I am more inclined to believe the business itself than the turbo-smug vandals that gutted it in the vain and risible belief that they were ‘helping Gaza’). The point is that Palestine Action visited on Stamford Hill a night of broken glass. It inflicted on a Jewish community the historical memory and moral injury of another Jewish business targeted for destruction. There will be Jews in Stamford Hill whose families came to the UK to escape the shattered glass of centuries of Jew-hating mania in Europe. And yet here it was again – those glinting shards on their streets, whispering: ‘Do you belong here?’

Palestine Action’s vandalism struck terror into the heart of Stamford Hill’s Jews. ‘For Jewish people it is very, very scary now’, said a local business-owner. Shomrim, the Jewish neighbourhood security organisation, lamented the return of ‘criminal harassment of Jewish-owned properties’. Who could look at the photographs of Orthodox Jews surveying the red-stained ruins of a local business and not feel sickened? So, my question for all those activists, novelists, luvvies and even MPs who are swarming social media to say ‘We are all Palestine Action’ – are you this?

Palestine Action is all over the news following UK home secretary Yvette Cooper’s promise to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation. Its incursion into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where activists sprayed red paint on two planes, was the last straw for the government. The activist class, the Guardian and human-rights groups are up in arms: it’s ‘unhinged’, they say, to proscribe a protest group. I agree. Like Luke Gittos, I think the banning of Palestine Action would set a terrible and authoritarian precedent. They’re posh irritants, not ISIS. Here’s the thing, though: while I’ll defend these people’s right to organise, I also want to explain how awful they are. They’re even worse than you might think.

The media handwringing over Palestine Action tends to focus on its destruction of property. That’s understandable. Its infiltration of an RAF base was a very serious matter. Its ghoulish splashing of red paint on the walls of every business judged to have consorted with the devil – Israel – is pompous in the extreme and grossly anti-social. I regularly cycle through Portman Square in London where there is always the fresh red paint of their sanctimonious rage on the walls of the investment firm, Invesco. (I pray for the day I’ll catch them in the act.) And yet let’s not forget the other things they do, things that frequently cross the line from protest into sheer immorality and the most despicable theatre.

There was its Stamford Hill stunt that left Jews ‘very, very scared’. In another Jewish part of London, one of its supporters, decked out in a Palestine Action boiler suit, ripped down yellow ribbons. These are the ribbons British Jews put up to keep the Israeli hostages in people’s minds. What purpose does tearing them down serve other than to antagonise Jews and say ‘Fuck the Israelis being held by an army of anti-Semites in Gaza’? At this week’s London protest in defence of Palestine Action, one attendee wore a death-camp uniform, only the yellow star had been replaced by a yellow crescent moon, symbolising Islam. In short, Palestinians are the new Jews, and Jews are the new Nazis.

Listen, if you attack Jewish-owned businesses, and remove ribbons for Jewish hostages, and do death-camp drag in grotesque mimicry of Jewish suffering, then it’s possible you are not actually on ‘the right side of history’. That’s how Palestine Action conceives of itself: as being on the right side of history. As morally unimpeachable warriors against the great evil of our times – Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza. And it is precisely this delusion of holy purity, this self-righteousness on steroids, that means this movement feels so untethered from the moral norms and practical considerations of traditional protest groups and instead thinks it can do whatever the fuck it wants.

Palestine Action embodies the religious mania of Israelophobia. It is a devotional cult masquerading as a left-wing organisation. It has it all. The holy garments – the keffiyeh – and the Satanic entity that must be conquered at all costs: Israel and its supporters. Its love of red paint, to symbolise the Jewish State’s ‘bloodletting’, speaks to its driving force of visceral wrath over temperate analysis. A toxic mix of infantile Third Worldism and bourgeois self-regard has birthed this army of white saviours that imagines it must slay the unholy ‘Zionist entity’ and rescue the wretched of Gaza. The end result is the demonisation of Israel, the infantilisation of Palestine and the overestimation of the worldly role of a gaggle of plummy tossers in keffiyehs.

This is the toxic narcissism of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement. A movement so drunk on self-importance that it has become utterly blind to the moral complexities of the Middle East. A movement so allergic to truth and reason that it calls a pogrom ‘resistance’ and war ‘genocide’. A movement so cavalier about Jewish security that it will holler ‘Globalise the intifada!’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ that involved the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis. A movement so bereft of logic and calm that it will creep into a Jewish suburb in the dead of night, armed with hammers and paint, and not once stop to think: ‘Should we be doing this? Is this bad?’

The state should not proscribe Palestine Action, no. But everyone who gives a single damn for truth, reason and Jews should oppose it, and ruthlessly. The reign of the pompous and hateful has gone on for too long.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy