Palestine Action’s bid for martyrdom

The bloody massacre at a Chanukah celebration on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach this week that left 16 people dead and three times as many injured has underlined the blindingly obvious fact that there seems to be nowhere safe from terrorism.

Jewish communities have been reminded of this reality on far too many occasions since the Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. On Yom Kippur, two Jews lost their lives when a Syrian-born Islamist carried out a car-ramming attack at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in the English city of Manchester. Here in the United States, the last year has witnessed the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers by a far-left gunman in Washington, D.C., as well as a Molotov cocktail attack by an Egyptian-born Islamist upon a pro-Israel gathering in Boulder, Colo., resulting in the death of an 82-year-old Jewish woman.

But while Jews are on the front lines, they are not the only targets. In Africa and the Middle East, Christians are also hunted down and murdered by Islamists. Even in Europe, security for Christian holidays and events can no longer be guaranteed, with several Christmas festivals and markets canceled this month because the terror risk has been deemed too great. The New Year’s Eve party on the Champs Élysées in Paris has been scratched this year for the same reason.

Terrorism, however, doesn’t always rely on gun or bomb attacks to promote its goals. Hamas, to take one example, is a terror group that understands the value of propaganda networks, particularly in the West, which frame its depraved violence as “resistance” and present its goal of destroying the State of Israel as a noble one rooted in justice.

A key amplifier of Hamas disinformation has been Palestine Action, based in the United Kingdom. From its inception in 2020, the group sought to distinguish itself from other organizations in the pro-Hamas space by skirting the edges of the law through “direct action” against Israeli companies in Britain, as well as other businesses suspected of trading with the Jewish state. In targeting Elbit, an Israeli defense manufacturer, it deployed vandalism and property destruction as its trademark methods, at the same time sneering at other pro-Hamas groups, like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, for failing to venture beyond public statements and demonstrations in their activism.

In the months that followed Oct. 7, Palestine Action stepped up its attacks, turning its violence against property into violence against people. In August 2024, activists from the group used a prison van to break into Elbit’s factory at Filton, near the city of Bristol. When police intervened, one officer, Sgt. Kate Evans, was beaten so badly that she was left unable to drive, dress or wash by herself. As Evans attempted to handcuff one of the activists, another delivered a powerful blow to her back with a sledgehammer, causing pain, she recalled, that “extended through my whole body down to my legs. I was stunned to begin with. I didn’t know what it was. I remember looking round and seeing the male with the sledgehammer behind me.”

The British government eventually acceded to growing calls to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization in July of this year. The decision followed a raid on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton during which the infiltrators damaged two refueling planes by pouring paint into their engines. Subsequent angry demonstrations protesting the government ban, which forbids declarations of support or solidarity with Palestine Action, resulted in nearly 3,000 arrests.

Riding the wave of publicity generated by its actions, Palestine Action has now opted for another tactic pioneered by Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners at the height of the Irish Republican campaign of terror on the British mainland. In early November, eight of its imprisoned operatives announced that they were beginning a hunger strike.

Six of those prisoners remain on that strike as of this writing, with their supporters, largely drawn from the ranks of the far left, issuing daily warnings that all of them face imminent death. So far, the British government has held its ground, refusing to meet with delegations of its supporters and rejecting their demands, which include the reversal of the proscription against Palestine Action, in addition to the closure of the British operations of Elbit and other Israeli companies.

Back in 1981, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government faced a similar situation when the Irish Republicans in Belfast’s Maze prison declared a hunger strike that eventually led to the deaths of 10 of them. Thatcher stuck to her refusal to classify the IRA/INLA hunger strikers as political prisoners—their key demand. In a letter to four U.S. legislators who objected to her position, Thatcher rejected the claim that the British government was responsible for their fate, arguing that the culpability for any deaths “rests firmly on the shoulders of those who are ordering these young men to commit suicide in the cause of subverting institutions in Ireland, north and south.”

A similar logic applies in the case of the Palestine Action prisoners. If the six currently on hunger strike do die, it is they—and those who support them both in the United Kingdom and from abroad—who are responsible for that outcome, and no one else. The internal discipline that governs terrorist organizations, including the demand that members risk their own lives for the cause, illustrates the cultural overlap with religious and political cults that callously regard individual lives as expendable if their greater goals are served in the process.

If the pro-Hamas movement in the West continues to shed its more casual supporters, leaving a hardcore remnant to carry the torch, then it is reasonable to expect that the terror-inflected, radical activism that distinguishes Palestine Action will surface in other countries. Instead of protests, citizens will see the already visible shift toward violence and vandalism become far more acute. Those activists who sign up to participate will be brainwashed into the same fantasies of martyrdom that Palestine Action prisoners have succumbed to.

No one should welcome or rejoice in the deaths of young people like these. But equally, acquiescing to the moral blackmail that their hunger strike represents cannot be an option.

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