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Credit: X / @Pal_action
Pro-Palestinian protesters launched a spate of anti-Israel vandalism attacks on buildings around the UK to mark the 107th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
Palestine Action stole two busts of Israel’s first president from Manchester University and daubed campus buildings, along with a research centre and a Jewish charity office elsewhere, with red paint. Police are treating at least one of the attacks as a hate crime.
In London, Palestine Action sprayed the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, on Hampstead High Street, with red paint, claiming it was “funded by wealth made from manufacturing Israeli weapons” and therefore fitted the group’s wider ambition to “dismantle Zionism”.
The building is also home to The British Friends of the Jaffa Institute, a registered charity working to advance education and alleviate poverty and sickness in Jaffa, Israel.
Meanwhile in Cambridge, Palestine Action collaborated with students to spray the university’s Institute of Manufacturing and Senate House with red paint.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign organised a “die-in” at Downing Street, where demonstrators lay on the ground to commemorate Palestinians killed in the conflict with Israel, before marching to the US embassy to demand an immediate arms embargo.
Labour Against Anti-Semitism, a group of predominantly Jewish party members, has written to Sir Keir Starmer to voice concerns that Labour policies have ushered anti-Semitism onto British streets, making Jews feel “unsafe and unwelcome”.
The group criticised the Prime Minister for “setting the tone” by permitting regular “hateful marches” and the “anti-Semitic hate-filled demonstration” outside a Jewish community centre in Finchley, north London, on Oct 27.
It said: “Once again, you need to put actions to your words and reassure the Jewish community that contemporary anti-Semitism, under the guise of humanitarian anti-Zionism, will not be tolerated.
“It is not good enough to promise that schoolchildren will learn about the Holocaust when you are allowing Jewish children to be bullied on our streets.”
Palestine Action protesters seized the two busts of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, from a glass cabinet at the University of Manchester on Saturday, the 107th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
Arthur Balfour, then the foreign secretary, outlined plans to form “a national home for the Jewish people” in a letter to Lord Rothschild, which was endorsed and published by the government on Nov 2 1917.
The group claimed Weizmann had “lobbied Balfour into assisting the Zionist colonisation of Palestine” when they both lived in Manchester at the start of the 20th century.
In a video it published, a pair of masked and hooded individuals attacked the glass cabinet housing the busts with mallets before loading the sculptures into their bags. A caption accuses Weizmann of securing the Balfour Declaration, which the group called a “British pledge” that set in motion the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.
In a statement, the group said: “From the Balfour Declaration to today, the UK remains an active participant in the colonisation, genocide and occupation of Palestine.
“On behalf of Britain, Balfour promised away the land of Palestine – which he never had the right to do. After the declaration until the Nakba in 1948, British soldiers killed, arrested and raped Palestinians.
“During their colonial mandate, the British introduced home demolitions as collective punishment to repress Palestinian resistance and burnt down many indigenous villages. During this time, Weizmann was president of the World Zionist Organisation.”
In London, the Metropolitan Police said it was treating the attack in Hampstead High Street as a hate crime.
Detective Chief Inspector Paul Ridley said: “I know that incidents like this cause significant concern in the community. I want to offer my full reassurance that this incident will be robustly investigated. We have been clear that we have zero tolerance for hate crime.”
Palestine Action also took responsibility for targeting a Jewish charity’s office in Hendon, north-west London, spraying the Jewish National Fund building with red paint overnight.
The Jewish National Fund is described by the UK’s Charity Commission as an organisation “raising funds for environmental and humanitarian causes in Israel”, spending £16.43 million on charitable activities last year.
In Cambridge, Palestine Action objected to Balfour’s Cambridge University education and a portrait of the former foreign secretary, which had hung in Trinity College until recently.
In a statement, it said: “Our university’s complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians runs deep. The criminology department at Cambridge University helps train ‘Israeli’ police and military; the Department of Material Science partners with ‘Israeli’ arms companies to produce armoured vehicles; Rolls-Royce operates out of the Institute for Manufacturing (IFM).
“We must challenge complicity wherever we see it, so today we showed the world the true colours of these institutes of death – blood on the institution’s walls for blood on the institution’s hands.”
“The pride they take in perpetrating genocide, boasting about their links to manufacturers of death, cannot continue. Shame on the IFM, shame on the Department of Material Science, shame on Cambridge University.”
On Saturday, the group called on its followers to “smash, paint and occupy” Rolls-Royce buildings.
