Dan Hodges’s latest Mail column is less an argument than a charge sheet. The headline declares it all: “Palestine Action IS a terror group”. Not “the government says”, not “critics argue”, but a definitive pronouncement. Hodges appoints himself judge, jury, and executioner in the case against Palestine Action. A campaign group whose “crime” has been to target, with paint, hammers, and disruption, the infrastructure of Israel’s arms trade in Britain.
He builds his case in the familiar way. Start with a colourful defendant: an elderly OBE-holder in Cornwall, a descendant of Waterloo cavalry, “traumatised” by the police removing her handbag. Then pivot to the law: the Terrorism Act, drafted in the authoritarian heyday of New Labour, broad enough to cover almost any act of dissent that embarrasses the state. Finally, rehearse the formula: damage to property, intent to influence government, ideological cause. Here we have the letter of the statute recited as if it were holy writ.
But what Hodges never pauses to ask is the central question: what is terrorism? And who gets to define it?
The Stretchable Word
“Terrorism” in Hodges’s telling is infinitely expandable. Throwing red paint at an Elbit factory is equated with blowing up a train. Breaking into an office is set alongside 9/11. He waves away those who note the absurdity of the comparison: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas. No matter, he says: “That’s not the point.” But it is the point. The whole rhetorical trick of the “terror” label is to erase distinctions of scale, context, and politics.
If Palestine Action are “terrorists”, then so were the suffragettes who bombed post boxes and smashed windows. So were the dockers who wrecked scab-run equipment. So were the Chartists who marched on Newport. The Mail of their day called them much worse.
The Real Violence
Hodges insists Palestine Action “engaged in deliberate acts of violence against British defence contractors and the British military.” Violence against buildings, that is. Meanwhile the same arms firms supply drones and bullets that reduce Palestinians in Gaza to ash. The distinction is obvious, but Hodges erases it. A broken window in Shenstone is treated as a greater offence than 61,000 Palestinians killed in 18 months of Israeli bombardment.
The violence that matters in the Mail’s world is never the structural violence of apartheid, bombing, or blockade. It is the “trauma” of a retired magistrate losing her handbag for an evening.
The Class Card
Hodges then shifts to his favourite theme: class resentment. Palestine Action’s supporters, he sneers, are “predominantly white, liberal and affluent.” This is a man writing in a paper that defends the landed gentry, oligarch donors, and billionaire tax exiles. Yet here he discovers his inner class warrior. The real outrage, he suggests, is that middle-class people think they can break the law for principle’s sake.
But the argument collapses under its own weight. Which side, after all, has the weight of class power? Is it pensioners chaining themselves to a factory gate? Or is it Elbit Systems, embedded in the global arms economy, backed by the state and subsidised by British taxpayers?
A False Equivalence
Hodges’s nastiest move is the comparison game. Teachers supporting Palestine Action? Well, once upon a time a teacher joined ISIS. Priests among the protesters? Well, there was once a priest in the IRA. This is guilt by the most ludicrous association. It would be like saying that because a banker once joined the BNP, all financiers are fascists.
The logic is rotten, but it serves its function: to blur lines, to equate solidarity with terrorism, to criminalise dissent.
The Inversion
In the end Hodges admits it. “The issue isn’t Gaza. Or even the terror threat. It’s about whether class now gives you a get-out-of-jail free card.” There it is: Gaza – the mass killing, the war crimes, the ongoing siege – isn’t the issue. The issue is whether Deborah Hinton of Cornwall gets to keep her OBE. This is the grotesque inversion: Palestinian death is reduced to background noise, while British protest becomes the scandal.
The Political Function
Hodges’s column is not about informing readers. It is about shoring up the logic of proscription, the tightening of the protest laws, and the criminalisation of solidarity. It tells Mail readers: these are not campaigners, not human beings, but terrorists. And once the label sticks, any treatment is permitted.
But the deeper truth is that Hodges is terrified. Not of “terrorism,” but of the fact that ordinary people – yes, middle-class, working-class, pensioners, priests – are refusing to be cowed. That they see the connection between British arms firms and Gaza’s rubble. That they are willing to risk prison to make that connection visible.
