The Purpose of Palestine Action

On 2 July 2025, the UK Parliament voted to proscribe Palestine Action, labelling it a ‘terrorist organisation’ and making it a criminal offence to express support for the group. On the same day, dozens of MPs who had voted in favour of the proscription donned sashes in the Suffragette colours of purple, white and green and smiled in front of the news cameras to mark the anniversary of women receiving the vote. The irony wasn’t lost on everyone. The Labour peer Peter Hain pointed out that, compared to the Suffragettes’ extensive campaign of bombing and arson, ‘Palestine Action members spraying paint on military aircraft at Brize Norton seems positively moderate’. Over the following months, we saw scores of peaceful protesters holding signs that say ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ arrested in Parliament Square, a stone’s throw from the bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst. Reports put the total number of arrests to date at 3,500 and counting.

This conforms to a familiar pattern in the reception of direct action campaigns. First, the action is reviled by those in power and by ‘liberal’ opinion as immoral or irrational or both. Often the condemnation of the means is rhetorically decoupled from the evaluation of the end, which the critic may claim to share (as Martin Luther King ventriloquised the ‘white moderate’: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’). Then, if the action has any success, the critic tries to save face by insisting that this change was not brought about by the campaign but was going to happen anyway or was due to something else: suffrage was not the fruit of Suffragette militancy, it was a reward for women’s hard work during the First World War (in much the same way that concessions to striking workers can never be attributed to the strikes themselves). Finally, when the campaign has receded far enough into the past, it can at last be celebrated by all. Those who remain fiercely hostile to its inheritors in the present can look back on it as a source of pride. 

The liberal is not against direct action in principle, so long as it meets certain conditions; John Rawls allowed for ‘civil disobedience’ defined as law-breaking that is ‘public’, ‘non-violent’ and ‘conscientious’. But in practice it rarely seems to pass muster. The action is invariably condemned as ‘violent’ even if the violence has to be exaggerated or invented. Those making the charge often affect an inability to grasp the distinction between harming property and harming people, as though gripped by a sudden animism that invests windows and statues with sentience. Liberal opposition to ‘violence’ is at best highly selective, a strange species of pacifism that seems to apply solely to popular resistance to the powerful and never to the powerful themselves. 

Another common complaint is that where a given action causes inconvenience or annoyance (in some cases to presumptively innocent third parties as well as to those who hold power or bear blame), it becomes ineffective or ‘counterproductive’, since it will alienate the people it seeks to win over. Pankhurst herself addressed this objection in a 1913 speech in Hartford, Connecticut: ‘“How are they going to persuade people that they ought to have the vote by breaking their windows?” you say. Now, if you say that, it shows you do not understand the meaning of our revolution at all, and I want to show you that when damage is done to property it is not done in order to convert people to woman suffrage’. It is, rather, a political tool to ‘bring about a political situation, which can only be solved by giving women the vote.’ 

Pankhurst’s point is that to oppose direct action on the basis that it is an ineffective means of winning hearts and minds is to misunderstand — wilfully or otherwise — what kind of action this is. The objection construes direct action as an attempt to persuade and finds it wanting on those grounds. But what makes it ‘direct’ is precisely its attempt to bypass efforts to effect change via persuasion or negotiation, and instead to force the issue by making inaction more difficult than action, the status quo more difficult than change. To object to a strike because it will cause inconvenience or disruption is to object to the very idea of a strike, since the inconvenience or disruption is not incidental, but rather the central mechanism by which it seeks to have an effect. Rejecting direct action on this basis ends up simply refusing to recognise its existence — treating it as nothing more than a particular type of communicative act, a way to ‘make a point’. 

Yet Pankhurst’s speech also makes unusually explicit something in the essential nature of direct action which its liberal detractors might not be alone in finding troubling, and which its defenders often prefer to downplay. At bottom, the liberal charge is that direct action is a kind of thuggery: rather than attempting rational persuasion, it tries to get what it wants by force. Pankhurst does not dispute this. She is entirely unapologetic about it. Her reasoning is, above all, practical. What matters is results, and winning approval is often not the best way to get them: ‘if you really want to get anything done, it is not so much a matter of whether you alienate sympathy; sympathy is a very unsatisfactory thing if it is not practical sympathy.’ A better strategy is to make life sufficiently unpleasant for others that it is difficult for them to ignore your demands. To underline the point, Pankhurst offers an analogy: 

You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed. One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics. . . . Perhaps you now can understand why we women thought we must attack the thing that was of most value in modern life [i.e. property] in order to make these people wake up and realise that women wanted the vote, and that things were going to be very uncomfortable until women got the vote, because it is not by making people comfortable you get things in practical life, it is by making them uncomfortable. That is a homely truth that all of us have to learn.

There is something at once compelling and off-putting in Pankhurst’s no-nonsense defence of militancy — a kind of ‘might-makes-right’, ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ flavour that most on the left would find unappetising (Pankhurst herself was no leftist, and made no claim to be). It is only our approval of the goal, perhaps, that can make a phrase like ‘things were going to be very uncomfortable until women got the vote’ sound anything other than sinister. We might say that militancy is justified when the end is justified, and not otherwise. But the naive yet nagging worry here may be that there is no connective tissue, so to speak, between the correctness of the end and the means by which that end is pursued. It is disconnected from right or reason, a question of brute strength. So just as you can create a situation that can only be solved by giving women the vote, you can create one that can only be ‘solved’ by deporting immigrants. There is no guarantee — and perhaps no particular reason to expect — that ‘right’ will make ‘might’: that the good guys will win, that justice will prevail.

‘Such is life’, you may say, and perhaps there is little more one can say here. The liberal’s stated preference is, of course, for rational persuasion: what the late Jürgen Habermas called the ‘unforced force of the better argument’. Now, it may well feel nicer to be convinced via an argument than to be picked up bodily or pulled along by the ear (although even this is not guaranteed: succumbing to the ‘unforced force’ of argument might sometimes be quite devastating; being picked up and carried along only mildly undignified). But this does not in itself show that there is any particularly strong connection between argumentative power or ‘force’ on the one hand and rightness on the other. Even Habermas did not try to claim that the world we inhabit is one in which good ideas and arguments reliably prevail over bad ones. For that, he had to invent a hypothetical ‘ideal speech situation’ in which the imbalances of power which obtain between people in the real world are imagined away. It’s not immediately obvious why we should expect reason or truth to triumph even under these artificial conditions — is the assumption that without those pesky power relations getting in the way, our rational faculties would detect truth or argumentative merit by default, just as our eyes can detect what is in front of us when our view is unobstructed? On what basis can we assume this? In any case, we are manifestly not in such a situation, and there is no particular reason for confidence that the arguments that persuade will generally be the better ones, still less that the ‘better argument’ has a chance in hell of persuading states and arms companies, when to be persuaded would contravene their interests. To advocate for ‘argument’ or ‘persuasion’ over direct action, in a world of guns, tanks and F-35s (or in a world of money, for that matter), is not to be against force, but merely to take the side of power. 

But perhaps the bigger worry here has to do less with direct action’s relationship to right than with the limits of its might. It would be one thing if it were possible to say unequivocally that direct action is strong where argument is weak. The trouble is that this is often far from obvious. While Pankhurst’s ‘argument of the broken window’ appeared to play a major role in securing her objective of votes for women, on many other occasions direct action fails to meet its aims, at least in the short term. And it is not clear what, other than wishful thinking, could ground the expectation that it will work in the longer run. Does the moral arc of the universe bend towards justice, as King believed? It might have looked that way for a brief moment in the second half of the twentieth century, but that appears to have been a trick of the light. Today the evidence of our senses seems to point ever more insistently in the other direction. 

It gets worse. One of the more common and visible consequences of direct action — at least in the short- or medium-term — is the backlash or the crackdown: an acceleration of reactionary and authoritarian modes of politics that both make the world worse and make resisting it more dangerous and costly. While the work of Palestine Action appears to have made some significant gains — its principal target, the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, has closed one of its factories and lost the business of several other companies — another of its effects has clearly been to intensify the criminalisation of protest, through new terrorism laws and other attacks on freedom of expression. In this sense, direct action quite plausibly is ‘counter-productive’. It may be true that there is a disclosive value in provoking the state to reveal its true colours — that resistance does not make things worse but rather shows how bad they really are — yet this is little consolation unless it leads to some real improvement or reckoning. 

Where does this leave us? If it turns out that nothing works, we might still think there is an expressive value in acts of resistance (although if that is all there is, then we might be forgiven for wanting to express ourselves in ways that don’t risk a fourteen-year jail term). But I think that, despite everything, there is something else, and that that something is best described through a subversion of the Thatcherite dictum that ‘there is no alternative’. The connotations of that line are usually conservative — deflecting and discrediting any challenge to the ruling consensus — but they might also capture the single strongest reason for resistance even in the face of apparent futility. For a world without resistance, without any brakes whatsoever on the actions of the powerful, would be unimaginably darker.

This insight suggests a certain way in which direct action might ‘work’ after all. It’s not that it will always succeed in securing its explicit aims, or even that it will succeed more often than it fails. Its efficacy might take other, less measurable forms. It may result in gains that are distinct from its stated objectives, cultivating new kinds of political consciousness, new bonds of solidarity, which can stretch far beyond their immediate circumstances, with implications that are impossible to predict. Arguably, though, its most crucial function is a negative one, registered in the things that do not happen which otherwise would or could have. Averted horrors and calamities are achievements that are definitionally invisible and unprovable. Yet their reality can be inferred from a cold-eyed view of the propensities of power. Those who represent the interests of the few — interests that stand in a fundamental antagonism with the majority of humanity — do not hold back from further violence out of mercy or goodwill. The limits of their ambition are no more than the limits of what they can get away with. And those limits are imposed by the resistance of the many, which is itself mostly potential or implicit, but which direct action brings spectacularly to the fore. Even if strikes tend to fail at least as often as they succeed, you only have to look at a workplace that’s un-unionised to see the gap between the absence and presence of resistance.

There is a further sense in which a world without resistance would be immeasurably worse than the one we know. That sense is not causal. It’s not about the effects of resistance but about its meaning, its diagnostic significance: what it tells us about the world and about ourselves. If an entire planet could watch an unfolding genocide and not blink or flinch, what would that say about this place and those who live there? This is exactly what some people in our own world have done. But many more have proven themselves unwilling or unable to stay silent. They have felt the impossibility of inaction. Whatever happens, this discloses a truth that can’t be overlooked. It tells us that our world still has a beating heart.