The ugly truth about the cult of Palestinianism

So this is the movement that the queen of smug, Sally Rooney, promised to share her fat royalty cheques with. This is the movement that plummy vicars fawned over in Westminster Square with their placards saying ‘I Support Palestine Action’. A movement that counts within its ranks men content to use a 7lb sledgehammer to fracture the back of a woman. A movement so far up the fundament of its own self-righteousness that its members think nothing of raining steel blows on a woman’s spine. I would engage in some serious self-reflection if an organisation I gushed over was found to contain blokes who use weapons to crack women’s bones.

This is the news that four members of Palestine Action were found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court yesterday of causing criminal damage at a UK site of the Israel-based defence firm, Elbit Systems. One of them was also found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm. He twice whacked a female police officer, Sgt Kate Evans, with a sledgehammer as she tried to arrest one of the keffiyeh-wearing intruders. He fractured her spine. She was off work for three months. To this day she experiences back pain. As Tom Gent of Avon & Somerset Police said yesterday, battering the spinal column of a female officer is not ‘protest’ – it is ‘thuggery’ and it had ‘devastating consequences’ for Sgt Evans.

It was in August 2024 that the Palestine Action gimps in their dumb red boiler suits crashed a van into the security gates of the Elbit factory near Bristol. They stormed inside, tooled up with weapons to destroy the evil wares of those demonic Israelis. They used crowbars and hammers to smash computers, drones and other equipment. They caused a million quids’ worth of damage. When security guards and cops tried to stop their carnival of hubristic vandalism, they turned on them. Alongside the whack of Sgt Evans’ back, the court also heard that one security guard was whipped by one of the Israelophobic mugs, and another allegedly had a firework thrown at him, causing him to suffer a 4cm cut to his face that had to be stapled at hospital.

Is this what Ms Rooney had in mind when she said she would ‘go on supporting Palestine Action’ even after it was proscribed as a terrorist group by Keir Starmer’s government last year? A group that fucked up a woman’s back and humiliated security guards? One of the intruders, with a keffiyeh around his waist, was heard taunting a security guard with the words, ‘You’re not going to have a job tomorrow’. You will search in vain for a better snapshot of the bilious snobbery of the bourgeois left than this image of four arseholes from the leafy part of town wielding whips and hammers as they mocked basic-wage security guards.

The digital left has been strangely schtum about Palestine Action these past 24 hours. The six bozos were found not guilty of aggravated burglary in February – Rooney and all the other Gazaholics lapped that up. But now four of them have been found guilty of criminal damage, and one of GBH, while the remaining two were acquitted. Perhaps even through the mental fog of their malarial loathing for Israel, the keffiyeh set can see it is not a good look to cheer twats who smash property, smash backs and clash with working-class men, all in order to make a spectacle of their own deluded sense of ethical rectitude.

That’s what this case has really revealed – the lethal narcissism of the keffiyeh classes. This is a class of people so drunk on moral vanity, so convinced of their own saintedness, that they seem to think anything is justified in the name of ‘the cause’. That cause being to advertise to the world their bloated vision of themselves as holy crusaders against the wickedest state in existence. Indeed, one of the activists told the jury, ‘with absolute certainty’, that breaking into the Elbit base ‘is the best thing I have ever done’. You sad bastard. ‘There is a good chance’, they said, that ‘innocent lives were saved’ as a result of ‘our actions that night’. This is a level of self-delusion that borders on the pathological. Lost in a cocoon of sanctimonious fantasy, they really believe that breaking a computer in Bristol will save a life in Gaza.

This is the modus operandi of Palestine Action – it executes dumb stunts not to impact world affairs but to assert the cultural supremacy of the credentialled haters of Israel here at home. It is moral hubris and class arrogance masquerading as ‘anti-war’. Sometimes it crosses the line into something darker, like when Palestine Action smashed up a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill in London. This feels ‘very, very scary now’, said local Jews amid the shattered glass of that woke mini-Kristallnacht. Who could have guessed that the bourgeois left’s division of the world into ‘the anointed’ who righteously hate the Jewish State, and ‘the demonic’ who support it, would prove so catastrophic for the liberty and dignity of Britain’s Jews? All of us. That’s who.

It feels like this has been a mask-slipping week for the cult of Palestinianism. More people can surely see the sectarian malice that lurks behind that veil of pacifism. A keffiyeh mob smashing a woman’s back. Rancid anti-Semites who call Jews ‘cockroaches’ stinking up the Green Party of England and Wales. Another gaggle of sanctimonious sea-farers setting off for Gaza, even though there’s no famine there, while in South Sudan nearly eight million face ‘acute hunger’. The stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green glossed over by supposed ‘anti-fascists’, who seem more interested in their own right to chant ‘Globalise the intifada’ than in Jews’ right to live in peace. Just think about that: mere days after violence against Jews, they were demanding the right to agitate for more violence against Jews.

Some of us have known for some time that Palestinianism is bigotry in a keffiyeh, the mask Jew hatred wears in the 21st century. We’ve seen this bourgeois army and its Islamist chums engage in the most vile demonisation of the world’s only Jewish nation, and of all who support it, which includes most of the world’s Jews. Are others now clocking this truth? No, anti-Zionism and the winds of hate it has unleashed are not going away. They are far too entrenched in the cultural establishment. But a reckoning might be brewing. Let us hope so.

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 latest 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.