Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
South London Liberal Synagogue
Saturday 28 February 2026¹

Trigger warning: this sermon is going to argue that Palestine Action should never have been proscribed, and that Jewish values mean we should, in general, try to cope with the existence of activism whether or not we agree with it.

If you are the sort of person who, having read such a sermon, is immediately going to run crying to the Movement for Progressive Judaism ethics committee to complain that a rabbi has a mind of their own, just don’t read it and instead click here for something more on your level.

As always, this constitutes my own view and does not purport to represent anybody else. This sermon is not an expression of support for Palestine Action, but makes a broader point about tolerance, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. See you in Strasbourg.

1. I’m very grateful to Rabbi Nathan for inviting me this morning. I hope he won’t regret it by the time I finish speaking.
2. Those of us who made the perhaps unwise decision to look at the news this morning will have been filled with dread – albeit familiar dread – on learning of another round of hostilities between Israel and Iran. And I’m going to come to that.
3. But first, as a Liberal rabbi at the cutting edge of 21st-century Judaism, I’d like to begin by taking you back to Oxfordshire around 250 years ago.
4. In 1776, a group calling themselves “the Regulators” went roving round the Thames valley, threatening farmers with serious bodily harm, destroying mills and stealing grain.² Similar groups did the same thing up and down the country, at frequent intervals throughout the late eighteenth century.³
5. Mainstream historians tend to label the Regulators as a mob, or as lawless rioters.⁴ They were simply a mass of out-of-control, working-class⁵ thugs, unhappy with their lot and so spitefully and greedily ruining the lives of those who produced the country’s wealth. ‘The peasants are revolting.’⁶
6. One suspects that, if the Home Office had existed in 1776,⁷ it might have proscribed the Regulators and their fellow groups as terrorist organisations: after all, they engaged in action that “involve[d] serious damage to property” which was “designed to … intimidate … a section of the public”, and they did so “for the purpose of advancing a political … or ideological cause”. Seems like a straightforward case falling within section 1 of the Terrorism Act.
7. But… there’s always a but… there is another view. The 1970s historian E P Thompson sees the Regulators (who were predominantly women)⁸ not as a mob but as engaging in “highly-complex … direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives”.⁹ They were not just unruly oiks. Rather, they carefully selected their targets¹⁰ as being those farmers and millers who engaged in exploitative pricing of vital foodstuffs.¹¹ Moreover, they did everything they could to minimise damage – even paying what they considered a fair rate for the food that they seized, and making sure to return sacks that they had emptied of corn.¹²
8. E P Thompson stops short of endorsing the Regulators’ tactics. He accepts that these groups were sometimes violent and perhaps motivated by revenge.¹³ Yet he resists the popular narrative that they were an anarchic mob with no interest except going round smashing stuff. They were motivated by a “moral economy” and “passionately-held notions of the common weal”.¹⁴
9. I suspect that if he were still alive today,¹⁵ Thompson might make the same comments about Palestine Action. There is no doubt that Palestine Action is an organisation that engages in the unlawful use of force. As the High Court said in its judgment earlier this month, “restraint […is] emphatically not the hallmark[] of Palestine Action’s campaign[ing]”. The group, wrote the presiding judge, Dame Victoria Sharp, who herself happens to be Jewish, “is not engaged in any exercise of persuasion, or at least not the type of persuasion that is consistent with democratic values and the rule of law”.¹⁶
10. But… there’s always a but… that wasn’t, legally, sufficient justification for the Home Secretary to label Palestine Action a terrorist organisation and ban any and all expressions of support for it. (To say nothing of Miles Pickering, who, campaigning against traditional forms of animation being overtaken by AI, was mistakenly arrested after wearing a T-shirt that said “Plasticine Action”.)¹⁷
11. Palestine Action’s campaign is broad and has involved serious acts of lawbreaking. Yet to put them on a par with other groups that have been proscribed¹⁸ – the IRA, Isis and other household names dripping with blood – has an air of unreality about it. The particular act of lawbreaking which resulted in the ban involved what the government described as the endangerment of “[t]he UK’s defence enterprise”.¹⁹ Yet what this actually comprised was, in the Court’s words, “damag[ing] two military planes with spray-paint”.²⁰ Criminal, no doubt. Puerile, certainly. But terrorism? Meh.
12. We must not allow the bad behaviour of particular individuals to make us doubt the reasonableness of their underlying cause. As William Ellery Channing said: “The great interests of humanity do not lose their claims on us because sometimes injudiciously maintained. We ought to blame extravagance, but we ought also to remember that very often it is the indifference of the many … which hurries the few who cleave to it into excess.”²¹
13. Much like the Regulators of 1776, Palestine Action is not merely a mob of plebs roaming round the country causing damage for the sake of it. It is motivated by “passionately-held notions” of how Britain should support the Palestinian people, whether or not one agrees with them. And it carefully tailors its tactics, whether or not one agrees with them.
14. It so happens that I don’t agree with Palestine Action’s tactics. Just as “a person can express support for a united Ireland without expressing support for the IRA”,²² I, personally, support Palestinian statehood without supporting Palestine Action. Yet if we’re going to start criminalising things just because I don’t support them, let’s start with, I don’t know, split infinitives.
15. Grammatical errors are actually what made me decide to address this topic today. Specifically, a grammatical error in today’s Torah reading. We read a reference to כׇּל־חַכְמֵי־לֵב אֲשֶׁר מִלֵּאתִיו רוּחַ חׇכְמָה: all those who are wise of heart, I have filled him with the spirit of wisdom.²³ Spot it? The clause starts off plural (all those) and ends with him in the singular.
16. The Torah commentary Shir Ma’on comes up with a fascinating explanation for this inconsistency.²⁴ Everyone, it says, has their own mind and their own views. ‘Two Jews, three opinions.’²⁵ But when it came to the construction of the tabernacle – the task on which these wise of heart individuals were being instructed – that wasn’t going to work. On a building project, especially a holy one, the builders need to operate as a completely united team. “If each wise person [tried] to make the vessels of the tabernacle according to their own interpretation,” Shir Ma’on points out, it would all end up as a mess.
17. So, just this once, God worked a miracle, zapped all of the artisans, and made them agree with each other. They started out plural, but supernaturally became of one, singular, mind.
18. If we accept the idea that God has the power to zap us and make us agree when necessary, it follows rather elegantly that, when we disagree, our disagreement takes place with God’s consent.
19. Getting the fine dimensions of the tabernacle right was a task important enough that Divinely-enforced conformity was felt necessary. But I’m not sensing any Divinely-enforced conformity when it comes to Israel-Palestine. British society is deeply divided over the issue; the Jewish community is deeply divided over the issue.
20. And the lesson of today’s Torah portion is: that’s okay. If God thought that it was problematic for us to disagree about Gaza, God would arrange for us all to agree. God hasn’t done so, ergo it’s fine for us to differ each from the other.
21. I’d prefer it if people didn’t express themselves through spray-paint and smashed glass,²⁶ but I’d also prefer it if pensioners²⁷ weren’t being arrested in their hundreds for placidly holding placards.²⁸ I’d rather pro-Palestine voices refrained from labelling all of their critics as genocidal maniacs, but then again I’d also rather pro-Israel voices refrained from labelling all of their critics as antisemitic terrorist sympathisers.
22. There are lots of things I’d prefer, but, crucially, I don’t have the power to enforce my preferences on other people. Nor does The Jewish News,²⁹ nor the Campaign Against Antisemitism,³⁰ nor the Home Secretary. Only God has the power to impose conformity on groups of human beings, and God, on this particular occasion, wisely chose to stay well out of it.
23. Terrorism – actual terrorism – is brutal, savage and inhuman. A ban on true terrorism does not impose conformity. If anything, it encourages diversity of thought, because, without fear of being murdered for their beliefs, people are much freer to express themselves.
24. Which is where Iran comes into it. Iran is an intensely cruel regime whose defining characteristic is enforced conformity. The violence it metes out to those who dissent, to say nothing of the nuclear threat with which it menaces other countries, is terrorism. State-sponsored terrorism, but terrorism nonetheless. The sole intent is to force everybody, citizen and foreigner alike, to think and act the same.
25. As the present conflict continues over the coming days, uppermost in our thoughts must be safety for all people. For Israelis, safety means the ability to go about their daily lives without the fear of missile strike. For Iranians, safety means the chance finally to install a democratic government – a government which doesn’t treat as cannon fodder those who refuse to conform.
26. As the Regulators taught us as far back as 1776, and as Iranian protesters have taught us in recent months and years, direct action is not, or at least not necessarily, brutal, savage or inhuman. It is itself expressive activity.
27. And when heartfelt expressive activity is dismissed as anarchic and amorphous rioting, the genuine emotions and passions that motivate the participants are left unrecognised. It’s dehumanising. And these are, after all, human beings we’re talking about.
28. This is a principle that runs through the Torah, through commentaries, through Georgian Oxfordshire, through contemporary Iran. And it is just as binding on modern Britain.
29. While many of Palestine Action’s tactics may be reprehensible – and the perpetrators can and should be prosecuted under the normal criminal law – the organisation’s misdeeds are not of “the level, scale and persistence that would justify … the very significant interference with [human] rights” flowing from proscription as terrorist.³¹ Human beings. Human rights.
30. This court ruling could be a huge opportunity for catharsis and learning for everyone in society. This could be the moment that we learn to disagree well: a chance for those who were baying for Palestine Action to be banned to recognise that its proven activities were maybe not as riotously evil as they had been led to believe; and a chance for Palestine Action to reflect on the bona fide fear that it has caused, and to consider how to pursue its agenda with equal passion but more gentleness.
31. I know, I know. That’s not going to happen. Most people aren’t going to pause and ponder. Most people are just going to carry on yelling either: “Genocidal maniac!” or: “Terrorist sympathiser!”, on autopilot, as if their life depends on it.
32. Oh well. Hopefully, though, here at least, we can draw a message of tolerance and understanding from today’s parashah. Sometimes we need to be on the same page. Much more often, though, diversity of opinion is our strength. This shul right now is a perfect example. You’re tolerating me standing here expressing my own personal views (for they are nothing more than that: I speak for nobody except myself). Even those of you who disagree – and I’m sure there are some – aren’t demanding that I be imprisoned or defrocked or thrown out.
33. Society needs people who feel passionately one way just as much as it needs people who feel passionately the other. Above all, society needs us to recognise that labelling passionate people as a mob – or as genocidal maniacs – dehumanises them. Let us do our very best to search for and understand the passions and motivations that drive each uniquely- and Divinely-created person. We pray for understanding. We pray for justice for the people of Gaza. We pray for democracy for the people of Iran. We pray for security for the people of Israel. And we pray for peace for the entire Middle East. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Exodus 27:20-28:12 ↩︎
2. E P Thompson, “The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century”, Past & Present 50 (1971), 76-136: 111-112, 114, 117. ↩︎
3. Ibid: 79. ↩︎
4. Ibid: 76-77. ↩︎
5. Ibid: 119. ↩︎
6. Not that anyone really cares, but this joke originated with L Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz (Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1904): 92. ↩︎
7. The Home Office was in fact founded six years later: R R Nelson, The Home Office, 1782-1801 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1969). ↩︎
8. Thompson, ibid: 115-116. ↩︎
9. Ibid: 78. ↩︎
10. Except in one case where they destroyed the wrong house and apologised profusely: ibid, 114. ↩︎
11. Ibid: 114, 119, 134. ↩︎
12. Ibid: 110, 113, 117. ↩︎
13. Ibid: 113. ↩︎
14. Ibid: 79. ↩︎
15. In actual fact, he hasn’t been since 1993. ↩︎
16. R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin) @[23] ↩︎
17. Robyn Vinter and Ben Quinn, “Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’”, The Guardian (18 August 2025). ↩︎
18. Terrorism Act 2000 sch 2 ↩︎
19. Ammori @[3] ↩︎
20. Ammori @[31] ↩︎
21. Memoir of William Ellery Channing with extracts from his correspondence and manuscripts vol 3 (Boston: W M Crosby and H P Nichols, 1850; 4th ed), 163. ↩︎
22. R v ABJ [2026] UKSC 8 @[60] ↩︎
23. A deliberately clunky translation of Exodus 28:3. ↩︎
24. Shir Ma’on to Exodus 28:3 ↩︎
25. I’m guessing that this joke does not originate with L Frank Baum. ↩︎
26. Ammori @[24] ↩︎
27. And members of Liberal Jewish congregations! ↩︎
28. Ben Quinn, “Half of arrests at Palestine Action ban protest were 60 or over, data shows“, The Guardian (10 August 2025). ↩︎
29. Daniel Sugarman, “If the government loses the Palestine Action fight, it will prove it cannot keep us safe“, The Jewish News (13 February 2026). ↩︎
30. Campaign Against Antisemitism, Twitter (13 February 2026). ↩︎
31. Ammori @[140] ↩︎