Pro-Palestinian activists under the banner of Palestine Action have been waging what it’s not too much of an exaggeration to call a war against companies and institutions in this country that are seen to support Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In one attack last summer at a Bristol facility owned by the British subsidiary of the Israeli defence company Elbit, a van was used to smash through fencing before activists laid about the building with sledgehammers, and two police officers and a security guard were injured in the ruckus.

In dozens of ‘actions’, these activists have caused millions of pounds worth of damage to companies that supply equipment not just or even mainly to Israel, but to the British armed forces.

Of all the times to be trying to cripple the UK defence industry, now feels like a particularly crass one. Many people are coming around to that reliable bogeyman of the left, the military-industrial complex. Of course it’s easy to deplore corporations making profits selling instruments of death and destruction – but instruments of death and destruction come in handy when you’ve got a megalomaniac threatening the European order from the east. People across the political spectrum now seem to agree that, with crazycakes in the White House showing every sign of taking orders from Moscow and Nato on the verge of collapse, Europe needs to rearm fast – and that defending Ukraine to the best of our abilities by sending weapons is in the interests of us all.

This isn’t the place to relitigate the Israel-Palestine question. But, to steelman the position of these activists, we can concede that you don’t have to be a woke loony or a vicious antisemite to find Israel’s response to the atrocities of 7 October open to reproach; that a large body of respectable opinion – NGOs, heads of state, international bodies, human rights lawyers – holds that the huge civilian death toll in the assault on Gaza amounts to collective punishment, and that there is evidence of war crimes having been committed. If you take that position, as these activists undoubtedly do, you might want to do something in protest. That will be your right. But how you go about it matters too.

You might, for instance, wish to raise awareness of the cause by shinning up Elizabeth Tower with a Palestinian flag. In doing so you will undoubtedly make yourself a giant pain in the teeth for the parliamentary authorities, a spectacle for tourists, a focus of ground-level solidarity protests and so on. Fair enough. You probably spend a night or two cooling your heels in a police cell as a result, which is also fair enough: the laws of trespass aren’t suspended just because you think you’re acting on behalf of a higher moral authority. Lots of righteous protest movements through history, and the odd unrighteous one, have involved their participants getting arrested, and expecting to.

But a campaign of criminal damage against arms companies and industrialists who make spare parts for military equipment or financial institutions that lend to them is a slightly different case. In the first place, it’s a stretch to suppose that the enthusiasts of Palestine Action – the ones so far charged were artists, musicians and a former social worker – will have an infallible grasp on the complexities of military supply chains and reliable information on their confidential dealings. Elbit UK for instance, having an Israeli parent company, has predictably been a favourite target of attacks – not just the company, but even the property firm that leases it its factories (having declined to evict Elbit from their property they had their buildings attacked 14 times). It’s claimed by Palestine Action that Elbit UK supplies drones to Israel; but Elbit says that is plain wrong, and that the terms of its export licence prohibit it. Meanwhile Elbit makes night-vision goggles for UK special forces and radar systems for our navy.

How much thuggery and violence does the conviction of your own righteousness licence?

In the second, it’s reasonable to suppose that even where one of these companies does have a connection to the supply of arms to Israel, that is very far from all that it does. An attack on Martin-Baker, which makes ejector seats for planes (not in themselves, you’d think, a weapon of mass destruction) was justified on the grounds that the ejector seats are used in Israel’s F-35s. But the company reportedly supplies 81 different countries with kit. Palestine Action says that their mission is ‘to rid Britain of Israeli weapons factories’, but their actions suggest a wider and more indiscriminate target list.

The Sunday Times, which conducted a recent investigation into Palestine Action, reports that the group has taken 158 ‘actions’, aka outbursts of vandalism, against defence contractors or engineering firms, 72 against banks and financial services companies, 50 against property firms, 15 against insurance companies, nine against government buildings and seven against universities. Among the many companies and institutions attacked, most are those whose main business is something much other than supporting Israel’s action in Gaza.

And even if we accept that these activists are infallibly well-informed about the specific sins of their targets, even if we accept that such hindrance as they can effect to these companies’ ability to support Israel outweighs the damage they do to those companies’ positive effects in the world… how much thuggery and violence does the conviction of your own righteousness licence?

Does it make it permissible to terrorise civilian employees by breaking into their offices and smashing the place up with sledgehammers or harassing them? Ah, but they deserve it: they’re complicit. It bears pointing out that complicity in atrocity is the implicit defence mounted for Israel’s campaign of destruction in the Gaza Strip. Arriving at the conviction that Israel is wicked does not legitimise behaving like hooligans at best and domestic terrorists at worst. Knock it off, eh?