3 days ago
The Palestine Action protests reveal Britain's spiritual sickness
Palestine Action's campaign against Israel recalls the famed elevator scene from Mad Men. Sore at being sidelined in a pitch meeting, ambitious and impatient advertising executive Michael Ginsberg confronts his boss, Don Draper, and pouts: 'I feel bad for you.' Draper, icier than the rocks in his Old Fashioned, replies: 'I don't think about you at all.'
It's doubtful if Israel will think at all about crowds taking to Britain's streets to demand the unbanning of proscribed terror organisation Palestine Action. Reports of some protesters chanting 'f*** your Jewish state' are unlikely to give anyone in Jerusalem much pause. Such scenes will be regarded as a matter of private grief not to be intruded on.
For all that Palestine Action's criminal campaign of thuggery and intimidation is directed at the state of Israel, and specifically its ability to defend itself, it's not Israel that needs to worry about Saturday's events. Israel can take care of itself, but can the UK?
Because these protests portend nothing good for Britain. Recall that Palestine Action is not merely anti-Israel. This is an organisation that openly, proudly targets British companies for vandalism and destruction. That uses criminal conduct to terrorise British business owners into changing their commercial relationships. An organisation whose activists have breached a British military base and damaged RAF planes.
And not insignificant numbers of Britons have assembled in UK cities in solidarity with that organisation. This is not a well country. The last time we found ourselves in this level of economic decline and political dysfunction, in the 1970s, we were called the Sick Man of Europe. But this is a different kind of sickness. It's a spiritual sickness, a new British disease.
Chants of 'f*** your Jewish state' will have been alarming for British Jews, who have been forced to watch in horror as their country, including and perhaps especially its educated middle classes, have been radicalised by events in the Middle East since October 7, 2023.
From Parliament to the press, churches to the universities, the BBC to the NGOs, Britain has become fixated on the war in Gaza, to the exclusion of other, deadlier conflicts. And in a way that is detached from all reason, so that even the sketchiest Hamas propaganda is accepted at face value. It is not simply that Britons are troubled by the human suffering in Gaza – a very real and very grave situation – but that the public square has become thoroughly Palestinianised in a short space of time. All other foreign conflicts, and even some domestic matters, have been pushed aside. Gaza is the new unifying issue of British politics.
That reflects trends that have been in train for some time now. The UK political class is so thoroughly in sway to the political culture of American progressivism that, after Black Lives Matter and 'trans women are women', it was inevitable that they would embrace the historically illiterate Civil Rights frame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The mass immigration of foreign-born Muslims is also making obsessive hatred of Jews and Israel a fact of mainstream political discourse in Britain.
Given the decline of the UK and the modish self-loathing promoted in classrooms, lecture halls, on television and in museums, it should not surprise us that there is some level of sympathy out there for an organisation that vandalises RAF planes, those symbols and guarantors of British self-determination and sovereignty. It's not just Israel's defensive capability that is under attack.
Nothing Palestine Action or its acolytes do will change reality on the ground in Gaza or alter the strategic aims of the Israeli government. Israel draws strength not only from its military but from the national self-confidence of its people. In Britain, they take to the streets in the name of foreign nations and imported hatreds.
