RUTHFULLY YOURS

This time last year, a female pro-Palestine activist took a blade and a can of red spray paint to the 100-year-old painting of Lord Balfour in Trinity College, Cambridge. The perpetrator targeted the painting because Balfour was a signatory of the Balfour Declaration – the British Empire’s 1917 recognition of the aim to establish a Jewish state.

The crime was filmed and posted online for all to see. The perpetrator had a distinctive hairstyle (two plaits), as well as what looked like a £1,400 Mulberry backpack – something your average criminal usually doesn’t sport. She was also very clearly part of an outfit called Palestine Action, which claimed responsibility for the attack. With just a tiny bit of police work and some political will, uncovering the identity of the perpetrator would not have been a monumental task. And yet, a year after the historic painting was destroyed, Cambridgeshire Police have ended their ‘investigation’. They said only that they hoped new information may one day come to light.

Palestine Action seems to attack anything to do with Israel – including charities, banks, arms factories and even a bust of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. The group was founded in the UK in 2020 by Huda Ammori and serial activist Richard Barnard. A recent Sunday Times investigation found that, since then, it has claimed responsibility for 356 direct actions. It has ram-raided factories with vans, broken into offices and smashed up equipment.

Palestine Action has vowed to continue its violent behaviour. Just this week, three activists occupied part of the Allianz offices in central London and covered the windows in red paint. They scaled the building to unfurl a banner demanding that Allianz ‘drop Elbit’, an Israel-based defence contractor, as an insurance customer. Police stood around for hours, apparently helpless to do anything, until the protesters were finally brought down and arrested.

Also this week, in Manchester, two Palestine Action activists were arrested after climbing on to the Aviva office in the city centre. Again, they covered the building’s windows in paint, set off flares and waved Palestinian flags. Aviva, Palestine Action claims, also has links to Elbit.

Incredibly, some see the thuggish behaviour of Palestine Action as sexy and glamorous. On 7 October 2024, the anniversary of Hamas’s massacre, Vogue even wrote a soft-soap piece featuring one of its activists.

This is mad, isn’t it? As Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, tells me: ‘The failure of the police and criminal-justice system to deal robustly with the vandals of Palestine Action and other criminals is incomprehensible. If the British authorities do not get a grip, it will lead to a loss of confidence in the UK as a safe and civilised country to live, work and invest.’

We all know that if you have a car stolen or a house burgled, it’s almost impossible to get a copper to investigate. Now we are seeing vandalism by the likes of Palestine Action go practically unpunished. Meanwhile, other pro-Palestine protesters are able to engage in actual violence, often in front of the police, without facing any consequences. How lawless are we going to allow our society to become?

Most of the Palestine Action attacks – 148 of them – have been on the British arms industry. But it only works tangentially with Israel. And ordinary people are bearing the brunt of these stunts. Activists stand outside offices and factories on a weekly basis, spitting at staff, calling them ‘baby killers’ and taking photographs of them as they try to go to work.

Police are not doing enough to combat the pro-Palestine thugs running riot across the UK. They can vandalise and intimidate law-abiding citizens with little consequence. If this double standard continues, Britain will become a place where the worst actors know they can get away with anything.

Nicole Lampert is a national newspaper freelance journalist based in London. Follow her on X: @nicolelampert