If anti-Israel agitators wish to avoid being described as terrorists, they might begin by ceasing to terrorise ordinary people. The smashing of the Gail’s branch in Archway, north London, red paint flung across its walls, slogans sprayed beside its door, is the latest instalment in a now familiar pattern: vandalism presented as virtue, intimidation dressed up as solidarity. The activists call it protest, but let’s call it by its real name: menace.

To vandalise Gail’s in the name of Gaza is a deliberate effort to intimidate and must be treated as such

To vandalise Gail’s in the name of Gaza is a deliberate effort to intimidate and must be treated as such

The branch’s windows were broken twice within a single week. Slogans reading “Reject corporate Zionism” and “Boycott” were sprayed across the frontage, an anarchist symbol scrawled beside the entrance. Staff arrived at dawn to clear shattered glass from the pavement while police opened a hate crime investigation. That sequence of events is not persuasion in any recognisable democratic sense, but coercion, carried out by people who operate under cover of darkness and disappear before they can be held accountable. Thugs.

It is at least on brand: this sort of violence and intimidation sits uncomfortably close to the political culture these activists claim to romanticise. For much of the past eight decades, the most visible export of Palestinians has been violence: hijackings, bombings, suicide attacks, knife assaults, rockets. They perfected many of these techniques which we now all have to experience. People can argue endlessly about history, borders, mandates and missed opportunities. That argument has been running for decades and will continue to do so. What has been far more visible to the outside world is the method that has so often defined Palestinian militancy over the past seventy-eight years: hijackings, bombings, shootings, stabbings, rockets,........

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