How Palestine Became the Left’s Omnicause

Palestine Action being proscribed as a terrorist organization will not force the British left to abandon their Gaza obsession

Socialist vandals Palestine Action have gotten their comeuppance by being proscribed as a terrorist organization, after breaking into RAF Brize Norton base in Oxfordshire and defacing two military planes with spray-paint. The Labour government’s planned ban prompted a predictable march, replete with Palestine flags, Socialist Worker Party placards, and genocidal chants of “From the River, to the Sea”. The group has fundraised over £113,000 via Crowd Justice for legal representation to fight proscription, and instructed Gareth Peirce, a solicitor who defended Guantanamo Bay detainees, to represent them.

Palestine Action was cofounded in 2020 by ex-Extinction Rebellion organizer Richard Barnard and Palestine Solidarity Campaign activist Huda Ammori. The latter, born to Palestinian and Iraqi immigrants in Bolton, joined the Labour party at her mother’s insistence in 2016, and left after the expulsion of former leader Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism in 2019.

These crooks in keffiyehs have a history of causing criminal damage during “direct action” publicity stunts. In August 2024, five members were imprisoned for setting off pyrotechnics and smoke bombs in Thales defense factory in Glasgow, causing £1,130,783 in damages. They have repeatedly targeted the Bristol branch of the Israeli defense company Elbit Systems: using a prison van to ram the entrance and destroy equipment. Jewish-owned business Instro Precision in Stamford Hill was also attacked, with Palestine Action accusing the owners of being the “London-based landlords of Elbit’s weapons factory”. In June 2024, Palestine Action smashed the windows of Barclays bank in Broadmead; and threw red paint at Aviva’s Bristol headquarters in January 2025. This was based on accusations by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that Barclays is “bankrolling Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians”.

The last President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel used the analogy of a greengrocer to explain the all-pervasive ideological strongarming in the Soviet Union. The shopkeeper who puts a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign amidst his carrots and onions, despite his disinterest in Marxism and contempt for centrally planned poverty, is actually telling the authorities, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”, and signaling his subservience to socialist dogma to protect what little he has from being destroyed. After their branch was defaced, Barclays issued a statement, denying it invests in Elbit, and saying “we recognise the profound human suffering caused by this conflict … and we urge governments and the international community to work together to find a lasting, peaceful solution.”

Such intimidation tactics mean their punishment is long overdue. But imminent proscription didn’t stop Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South from posting “We are all Palestine Action” on X. Indeed, Sultana does resemble a demented leftist obsessed with shrieking in the streets when Israel vaporizes Jihadists. But she doesn’t speak for the rest of us, who are more concerned with how our cities, high-streets, and public services are in disarray after decades of mass migration and economic mismanagement, than with a foreign war in a land in which we’ll never set foot.

What objection does she have to the proscription? Sultana is not committed to free speech in principle, given she voted to criminalize silent prayer and consensual conversations in “buffer zones” around abortion clinics, in 2022. Nor is she worried about the misapplication of the term “terrorist” by the state, to punish political opponents. She fearmongers about a phantom “far right”, while expressing no concern over Prevent repeatedly letting Islamists evade detection. She goes as far to declare, “the enemy of the working class travels by private jet, not migrant dinghy” (a dangerous lie, given people-smugglers advertise British women on social media as ripe for predation, and illegal migrants are joining Pakistani rape gangs after crossing from France in small boats). Sultana just wants her preferred activist causes to receive more cover.

Sultana is practicing classic Marcusean repressive tolerance: an “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left”. It is invulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because Islamo-leftists don’t extend to their political opponents an equal and universal moral courtesy. They see them only as an impediment to utopia, an enemy to be crushed. But brazen support for criminal damage and intimidation by a member of Parliament shows just how tensions have escalated to this existential point. Palestine has become the issue to lift the veil on these irreconcilable divisions.

The pro-Palestinian coalition is a ragtag bunch — and I’m not just referring to their clothing. The watermelon emojis they wear represent the colors of the Palestinian flag, but also their constituent factions: black-bloc Antifa communists, expediently allied Islamists, and Malthusian climate cultists. The obsession with Gaza has strangled the Greens like Japanese knotweed. The party has officially condemned Israel’s defensive military action as “a genocide”, and incorporated a boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) strategy into its party platform. In May 2024, new Green councilor Mothin Ali declared his election victory a “win for the people of Gaza”, and vowed to “raise the voice of Gaza… raise the voice of Palestine”. The room then broke out into shouts of “Allahu Akbar” — which presumably means “recycling” in Arabic. Ali is now running to become deputy leader of the party.

Greta Thunberg, too, has joined pro-Palestine demonstrations at University of Stockholm. Since 20 October 2023, she has jumped aboard the Palestinian liberation bandwagon. The Swedish truant was deported from Israel this month, after the IDF intercepted a yacht that she and eleven other members of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition tried to sail across the Mediterranean. Before doing so, she refused the government’s offer to watch the footage from the October 7th massacre. It seems her pathological altruism only extends to one side. Thunberg claimed she had been “kidnapped”; but just like when German rail company Deutsche Bahn spoiled her photo-op by revealing she sat in first class, the vacuousness of her activism was exposed by photos showing her smiling while Israeli soldiers handed her water and sandwiches.

This shift in grift could be forecast from miles away. In 2019, Thunberg co-authored a piece explaining the motives for her truancy were to save the planet from “a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.” Thunberg’s copycat, Scarlett Westbrook penned an op-ed in the Independent, explaining Greta sailed to Gaza because “The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza is greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of 100 countries combined.”

Mary Harrington calls these overlapping obsessions the “Omnicause”: a set of seemingly incoherent positions on political topics — climate change, trans rights, Palestine — connected by their advancing the intersecting interests of aggrieved minorities. The full suite of fashionable beliefs is pejoratively labelled “the Current Thing”. They are presented as a coherent worldview to the emotionally incontinent by social-media algorithms and Instagram graphics, reducing complex issues to thought-stopping cliches and a few Canva slides.

But there is ideological connective tissue between these topics. This is why a handful of old-left Boomers still gather outside Parliament every week with banners and flags, demanding aid be allowed into the Gaza strip. “Third-Worldism” emerged as an internationalist doctrine after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged support for “wars of national liberation” abroad, in 1961. Frantz Fanon provided the ideological gunpowder in his Wretched of the Earth that same year, with Jean Paul-Sartre writing in the foreword that to “shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone … [to] destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.” Fanon proposed “Revolutionary socialism all together everywhere” as the sole solution to the supposed theft of largesse from the third-world by the first.

Hence the eyesore of a diagram that declares “Palestine is THE issue”:

The plight of Palestinians is window-dressing for revolutionary racial communism and the imperial designs that Islam has on the West. Jews code as white, because they are pale and the precursors of Christianity, Israel codes right-wing, because it has high GDP-per-capita, above-replacement birth-rates, a competent military, and ethnic and religious homogeneity. Britain is blamed for giving Israel its land; America is blamed for giving Israel its arms and aid. Its wealth, success, and self-confidence make its people, state, and allies the enemies of anti-white racists who cloak their grievances in post-colonial and critical race theory. Environmentalist misanthropes glue themselves to the coalition because America’s failed regime-change ventures in the Middle East concerned the security of global oil and gas supplies. Devious Islamist groups use both as useful idiots, and, thanks to mass migration, have a standing army of millions of Muslims in Europe for whom solidarity with the Ummah takes precedence over loyalty to their host nation.

Liberals will twist themselves into pretzels condemning the sentiment of this movement, while defending its right to protest. But why? They aren’t shy about their desire to ransack our traditions, deface our monuments, and cast lots for our belongings. Chants of “Intifada” are a promise to repeat the atrocities of October 7th in Britain. We shouldn’t have to put up with this. Hungary and Poland don’t have this problem, because they didn’t import it. Without laws that give it standing, and policies to provide it demographic and thereby democratic demand, we wouldn’t either.

If Palestine is the omnicause, then it can be our starting point for rewinding their whole revolution.