We Also Broke Into an Airbase to Stop War Crimes. Thankfully, We Were Two Nice White Boys

In 2017, we did exactly what Palestine Action did last week: we broke into an airbase. Our actions were extremely similar to theirs, and so were our aims.

Most of the Royal Saudi Air Force is manufactured right here in the UK by Britain’s merchants of death, BAE Systems. Carrying flags bearing the words of Yemenis whose lives have been destroyed by UK-made weapons, we cut through fences at BAE Warton. We were caught by security just meters from Saudi-bound fighter jets.

In our case, these jets were being sent to Saudi Arabia to be used to create what the UN called “the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe” in Yemen. In Palestine Action’s case, British planes are being sent to Cyprus and then mysteriously disappearing over the Mediterranean sea – linked, many suspect, to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

There are a few key differences between our actions and theirs. Unlike Palestine Action, we were not attacked by the Israel lobby. We were not the victims of an obsessive Islamophobic police crackdown. We are both white. Woody is a Methodist reverend: shortly after security caught us, Woody loosened the scarf from his Cambridge theological college to reveal his dog collar. The security guards that had caught us literally went, “Oh shit!”

As a result of our social position and less politicised target, we have been treated completely differently to the members of Palestine Action. We were arrested carrying a list of the serial codes of fighter jets worth over £1bn and a prepared statement explaining our intent to disarm them. Our lawyers were worried it might be the highest-value case of intent to cause criminal damage in British legal history. Their fears were short-lived: the police couldn’t wait to rush Woody out of the station, and charged us with only low-level criminal damage. A court found us not guilty.

Things have been very different for Palestine Action. The Filton 18 were charged with non-terror offences yet treated like terrorists, denied bail and imprisoned without trial for between 15 and 19 months. 20-year-old Fatema Zainab Rajwani had to sleep in her cell with her hijab on, as counter-terror police would barge into it in the middle of the night to interrogate her. Emma Kamio, mother of Filton 18 member Ellie Kamio, was held for five days incommunicado under the Terrorism Act after her home was raided and her devices seized.

The reasons for this difference in treatment are manifold. First, there is the target. While there has been significant opposition to the Saudi destruction of Yemen, it has been nowhere near as widespread – or as effective – as public opposition to the Gaza genocide. Palestine Action has the public on its side – most people want the UK to stop arming Israel – and it knows it. The government is deeply threatened by. Then there is diplomatic pressure: while the Saudis may or may not have been upset about our actions, we know for a fact that Israel has been directly intervening in the trials of Palestine Action members. The Israelis are pushing at an open door: since our action in 2017, the Tory and now Labour governments have passed a series of laws designed to eradicate peaceful protest, handing the police greater powers to do so.

The government’s planned proscription of Palestine Action weaponises anti-terror legislation to repress a group that has been far too good at halting the flow of Israeli weapons and attracting attention to its cause. By condemning Palestine Action as terrorists, the government implicitly likens their spray-painting actions to, for example, bombings by the IRA. Yet Palestine Action has never used violence against people. Its members have exclusively damaged property, just like we did – just like all nonviolent direct action ever. Yet while most people would agree that harming a person is categorically different to spray-painting a plane, in the eyes of the state, property damage is just as important, often more important than harm to human beings.

You see it time and time again with police: the protesters damage a fence, the police attack the protesters, then are shocked when they are accused of starting a riot. You see it in the government’s insouciance when thousands of Gazans are slaughtered, and sudden leaping into action when their planes get a bit of red paint on them.

Palestine Action are terrorists in the same way that LGBTQ+ groups are in Russia: they aren’t, but the government hates them.

Sam is a Quaker. The Quakers, who have publicly opposed the proscription of Palestine Action, have undertaken nonviolent protests since the end of the English civil war in 1651. During the second world war, the Quakers co-founded Oxfam, breaking sanctions on Axis-occupied Greece to relieve the famine there. Quakers broke laws both sides of the Cold War, delivering medical supplies to both North and South Vietnam in the 60s.

Quakers have been breaking into UK military bases consistently since the 1960s. In 2013, our Quaker friend Sylvia Boyes was found guilty of blocking the entrance to the world’s largest arms fair in London. The judge applauded her motivations, saying he wanted to only give her a conditional sentence, but that her more than 60 convictions across over 40 other arrests for breaking into various military bases over several decades meant he unfortunately had to give her a small fine.

Despite their staunch commitment to nonviolent protest entirely comparable to Palestine Action’s, the Quakers have not been banned in the UK since the Act of Toleration was passed in 1689. It made no sense to the police, BAE Systems or the government that two nice white boys would break into an air base just to save a few hundred people in Yemen.

Unfortunately for Palestine Action, their actions make perfect sense: they fit the government’s racist conception of terrorism, and directly threaten its facilitation of the most flagrant atrocity in living memory.