Lawful Excuse

As Cooper and her boss, Keir Starmer, will understand perfectly well, the charge of criminal damage has more than one element. It’s not enough to show that someone has damaged an item of property — you also have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did not have a lawful excuse for doing so.

There is a well-established tradition in Britain of juries acquitting defendants who were charged with causing damage to military equipment and installations on the grounds that they were acting to prevent a crime.

Four women who had sabotaged a Hawk fighter jet at a British Aerospace factory walked free after their trial in 1996. The jury accepted that they believed their actions were necessary to stop the use of the plane against the civilian population of East Timor by the Indonesian military.

In 2007, a jury acquitted two men who were charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage to B-52 bombers at a British air base in March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq began. They contended that they were acting to stop potential war crimes against Iraqi civilians and damage to Iraqi property.

Members of Palestine Action itself were acquitted last year on charges of criminal damage arising from the occupation of a weapons factory in 2021. The defendants argued that their actions were necessary to stop the production of drones that Israel would deploy in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Crime Prevention

There is a British lawyer who writes about various aspects of the legal system using a pseudonym, “the Secret Barrister,” for obvious professional reasons (they have published several books under that moniker). An article of theirs gives an excellent summary of the basic principles at stake in another high-profile trial for criminal damage, involving the four people who tore down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in 2020.

A jury found the defendants not guilty of the alleged crime. This prompted outrage from Conservative politicians and right-wing commentators who claimed that the verdict was an attack on the rule of law. As the Secret Barrister pointed out, this argument completely misrepresented what the rule of law actually means in a country whose citizens have the right to trial by a jury of their peers:

It is well-established, both in our common law and in legislation (section 3(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967, as you ask) that a person is entitled to use reasonable force to prevent the commission of a crime. All defendants argued that the public display by the council of the Edward Colson statue was itself a crime, or potentially two crimes.

First, it was said that displaying the statue amounted to an offence of displaying indecent material contrary to section 1 of the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981. Second, it was said that there was an offence of displaying a visible representation which is abusive, within the sight of a person likely to be caused distress by it, contrary to section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986.

It was this element of the case that resulted in expert evidence being given by historian Professor David Olusoga, who detailed the history of Edward Colston, the role that the Royal African Company, of which Colston was CEO, played in enslaving and shipping African people, and of the violence and brutality inflicted by the RAC upon tens of thousands of enslaved people. It was argued by the defence that the public display of a memorial to Colston was therefore both indecent and abusive, such as to render it criminal under the two Acts cited above.

There were other strands to the defendants’ case, but this is the most relevant one for members of Palestine Action, who could certainly argue that they were using reasonable force to prevent another crime — the production of weapons for a state engaged in genocide.

The Secret Barrister went on to explain that the jury might have accepted some or all of the arguments that the Colston defendants put forward or else based their acquittal on a different principle altogether:

Even if the jury had been sure of the defendants’ guilt, and had been sure that a conviction would be proportionate, our system still does not compel a jury to find defendants guilty. Since the seventeenth century, juries have been entitled to acquit a defendant for any reason. They are not explicitly told this — they are directed by the judge that they must reach verdicts based on the evidence they have heard. But a judge cannot force a jury to convict. So the jury retains the prerogative to acquit, irrespective of the strength of the case against a defendant, and the courts cannot interfere (sometimes referred to as a “perverse verdict” or “jury nullification”). This principle is embedded into our common law.

Cooper, Starmer, and their governmental colleagues would have every reason to fear a humiliating outcome if the British authorities put members of Palestine Action on trial for criminal damage. Even if they were able to secure a conviction, the cost in terms of negative publicity would be very high.

Lawyers for the defense would certainly highlight the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the British government is legally obliged to enforce the warrant if it has the opportunity to do so. Yet the very same government insists on transferring more weapons to the control of Netanyahu, a fugitive from international justice who has been charged with crimes against humanity.

True Believers

Some of the pressure to ban Palestine Action has come from a tiny organization called We Believe in Israel. Although it has just a handful of employees and no meaningful support in British society, this microgroup has an outsize influence inside the Labour Party. Luke Akehurst, its former director, was parachuted into a safe Labour constituency for the 2024 general election after years of service as a factional bruiser for the party’s dominant right-wing clique.

Akehurst’s successor at the helm, the French journalist Catherine Perez-Shakdam, has a bizarre track record. According to Perez-Shakdam, she converted to Shia Islam as an adult, having been brought up in a secular Jewish family. During her time as a believer, she met senior government officials in Iran and appeared on Iranian broadcast networks, expressing ardent support for the Palestinian cause. She also wrote a self-published book praising Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, better known as the Houthis.

As recently as 2018, Perez-Shakdam made the following comments on Iran’s Press TV channel:

I think that people need to be very careful when they relate to the Palestinian struggle and advocate peace all the time. Peace is sometimes very useful but in the case of the Palestinians, I think that the only way forward is through armed resistance because they need to protect their future.

She claims that she was later converted to Zionism by her teenage daughter, who had been watching pro-Israel videos on YouTube.

Some may find this story a little hard to believe. A 2022 profile of Perez-Shakdam in the Times of Israel addressed the spooky-looking elephant in the room with the following headline: “I’m no Mossad spy, says Jewish journalist who interviewed [Ebrahim] Raisi, worked for Iran TV.” However, she has strongly implied that she was engaged in a reconnaissance mission of her own devising:

Keen to be let in, I neither argued nor revealed my true motivations. I realised pretty early on that if I was to witness first-hand what it is that the region is really about I’d better blend in and listen.

If we take Perez-Shakdam’s autobiographical narrative at face value, she has the profile of an ideological zealot liable to make wild shifts between incompatible worldviews — perhaps her next move will be toward Scientology or the Free Presbyterian Church.

In any case, the campaigning record of We Believe in Israel shows it to be a virulent anti-Palestinian hate group that is fully conscious of its role as a minor cog in the machinery of genocide. It campaigns against Palestine’s right to exist while demanding that the British government cut off funding for legitimate humanitarian aid groups that operate in Gaza. We Believe in Israel even accused the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, of “appeasement” and “emboldening terrorist propaganda” after he suspended talks on a free-trade agreement with Israel in a mild, tokenistic gesture of disapproval.

A report from We Believe in Israel that pressed for the criminalization of Palestine Action contained the following passage:

In July 2022, the group was investigated under counter-terrorism protocols following intelligence suggesting contact between some of its members and individuals linked to Hamas-aligned networks abroad (see: Metropolitan Police briefing, classified). While the investigation yielded no direct terror charges, it underscored the degree of concern shared by law enforcement agencies over Palestine Action’s increasingly radicalised behaviour.

A careful reader will immediately notice how vague the allegation is. “Suggesting,” of course, is not the same as “demonstrating,” and the terms “contact,” “linked,” and “aligned” are equally nebulous. The word “direct” before “terror charges” is also a redundancy, intended to minimize the only solid piece of evidence that we can detect in this farrago — namely, the fact that this investigation could find nothing to use against Palestine Action.

However, the report does inadvertently supply proof of wrongdoing by those who produced it. As the Guardian’s legal affairs editor, Haroon Sidique, noted, “It is not clear how or why We Believe in Israel was granted access to classified documents.” There should have been a full investigation of how this private lobbying group, acting on behalf of a foreign power whose atrocities it describes as “lawful military operations” got hold of such material.

“Lacking Any Foundation”

The statement from Yvette Cooper announcing the ban made no attention of alleged ties between Palestine Action and Hamas. Nor did it say anything about possible links with other external actors. Yet an article in the Times subsequently passed on anonymous briefings from officials at the Home Office who claimed to be suspicious of the group’s funding:

Officials are understood to be investigating its source of donations amid concerns that the Iranian regime, via proxies, is funding the group’s activities given that their objectives are aligned. The group states that it is committed to “dismantling the apartheid regime in Israel through targeted campaigns against companies that profit from the occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people.”

That is the sum total of the evidence presented in a piece that is almost 1,300 words in length. By the same feeble logic, we could say that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Court of Justice are “aligned” with Iranian objectives, since they all level the charge of apartheid against Israel.

The Times also includes a quote from the organization NGO Monitor accusing Palestine Action of “a lack of transparency and accountability.” In a preposterous flourish, the article describes NGO Monitor as “a research institute that holds campaign groups to account and promotes transparency.” In reality, it is a surrogate organization of the Israeli government that demonizes all supporters of Palestinian human rights.

In 2012, the European Court of Justice threw out a lavishly funded case that NGO Monitor brought against the European Union on the grounds that it was “in part, manifestly inadmissible and, in part, manifestly lacking any foundation in law.” Its “international advisory board” is stuffed with figures like Douglas Murray, Alan Dershowitz, and Richard Kemp who have become notorious for their anti-Palestinian advocacy and support for war crimes. Wikipedia, whose editors have a far more serious commitment to accuracy than their counterparts at the Times, has banned the use of NGO Monitor as a source.

Palestine Action has dismissed the “investigation” as a cynical diversionary exercise:

We are funded by ordinary people who support us. They are doing it because they don’t believe that banning an organisation causing damage to weapons factories and companies who enable the production of weapons sits well with a lot of the public, and therefore they’re trying to create a smear campaign in order to justify the proscription.

The ban fits into a wider pattern of attacks on the right to protest by the British authorities, including the trumped-up charges against the organizers of a Palestine solidarity march in London earlier this year. The clampdown reflects the isolation of those at the helm of the British state. The dedicated support of Britain’s political class for Israel, which includes the faux-insurgent Reform leader Nigel Farage as well as the two major parties, is completely out of step with public opinion.

In Britain, as in several other countries, notably France, Germany, and the United States, the Gaza genocide is proving to be an urgent threat to democracy, fueling the most harmful and destructive tendencies at work in contemporary politics. From the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil to the ban on Palestine Action, opposition to the horrific crimes that Israel is carrying out against the people of Palestine is directly linked to the defense of basic democratic rights.