On Impotence and Radicalisation

The British government wants to ban a pro-Palestinian group

The struggle between pro-Palestine protestors and the British state has reached a new milestone this week, with the government now looking to ban the leading direct action group campaigning for that cause. It follows their break in at Brize Norton airfield where they damaged two RAF jets.

Personally, I’m not convinced of the case for classing Palestine Action as a terrorist group, though I can see that it represents a real problem for law enforcement. What’s more, the pattern of activism that it represents is symptomatic of a radicalisation that results from the inability of people who feel very strongly about the cause to have any effect on what’s happening in Gaza.

Simply put, it’s very hard to target UK arms sales to Israel because there are almost none. As for the strategic relationship between the two countries, there is one, true, but it’s also low level, and there are nuances, such as the RAF being used to get relief supplies to Gaza.

I appreciate that there’s a ‘not in my name’ argument for cutting all support to the Israeli military, and for boycotts more widely. But don’t expect that to have any effect on Israeli operations.

That’s a reality activists are loath to acknowledge, so they tend to exaggerate the importance of things they can have an effect upon. It’s not quite ‘Ernie the milkman fuels genocide because he delivers pints of gold top to the Israeli ambassador’, but it’s not far off.

Direct UK arms exports to Israel are trivial - £18m in 2023, equivalent to 0.1% of their defence spending. Campaigners have focused attention on some components of the F-35 fighter made in Britain.

But F-35s, important as they might be in hitting a state like Iran, have played a minute role in Gaza’s suffering. The vast majority of strikes there are delivered by other means, since stealth jets really aren’t needed for that. This week the High Court in London rejected a legal big to stop the supply of F-35 parts saying the government had the right to do so on the basis of those wider security interests.

For HM Government, as for the activists, this battle has become one of legal principle. The fact that Lockheed-Martin and the Israelis will find other ways to obtain those parts, if ever their supply is stopped, is less important at this moment to British ministers than the country being seen to honour its contracts.

It is worth looking at what happened when the Biden Administration paused the supply of some weapons that were quite directly used for large scale destruction in Gaza, 500 and 2,000lb air-dropped bombs. The latter in particular can have a terrible effect in such a densely built-up environment.

Within months, the Israelis had awarded a $274m contract for domestic production of these weapons, ending dependence on the US. As it happened, the Trump administration resumed supply in January this year, but efforts to reduce reliance on the US for certain key munitions continue.

Israel’s minimal reliance on the UK for defence imports is born of experience. When exports of Britain’s Chieftain tank were blocked in 1970, they opted instead to develop their own, the Merkava.

A go it alone attitude relates to air operations over Gaza too. “They have such comprehensive coverage of their own, they don’t need anything from us”, says one air force contact. Activists like Palestine Action have repeatedly claimed (without producing evidence) that British aircraft flying near the Palestinian enclave are passing information to the Israelis.

Speaking to people in the know, the only meaningful operations conducted in support of Israel were the fighter sorties flown in April 2024 against Iranian drones. Of course, the RAF does conduct occasional intelligence gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean but it is for UK national purposes, not passing to the Israelis.

Since the secrecy involving such missions prevents the Ministry of Defence from issuing a comprehensive denial, this ambiguity is exploited by activists seeking to justify everything from disruption of RAF recruiting to operations at Brize Norton. But by doing this the group has triggered the government’s move to ban it.

Some of these actions are so ill conceived that they raise doubts about protestors’ grasp of reality. A warehouse in Belgium was firebombed a few days ago, with more than £1m of damage done to military vehicles bound for Ukraine, because pro-Palestinian activists had convinced themselves they were intended for Israel.

In seeking to make the case that prescription of Palestine Action is justified, the government has cited the damage to national security caused by some of its actions. That’s the mistake that activists have made rather than confront the limits or their or indeed this country’s ability to end the killing in Gaza.

Why not impose sweeping Russia-style sanctions? OK, but how exactly have these altered Putin’s behaviour in Ukraine?

Impose a no-fly zone over Gaza! One impassioned supporter of the Palestinians suggested this week. Oh my word, it cannot happen, not least because the RAF would be so massively overmatched by Israel’s air force. It is one more area where the consequences of the UK’s underinvestment in hard power is often not understood by the general public.

That peace activists have such a poor understanding of defence is hardly surprising I suppose. But the political realities of this moment should be clearer, however distasteful to them.

The truth that militant supporters of the cause must confront is that the person most likely to influence the Israelis in Gaza is the one who has made the deepest commitment to supporting them through their recent wars. The man that diplomats, Middle Eastern governments and many journalists now paint as most likely to get a ceasefire is someone the activists despise even more than Netanyahu, it is Donald Trump.