Palestine Action, the group who specialise in daubing red paint on the buildings of companies of whom they disapprove, has suffered several blows in the past month.

On 16 January 2021 they  posted on Twitter that their donation link (Stripe) had been “temporarily disabled”.  On 8 January 2021 they reported that Mailchimp, the marketing automation platform, had disabled their account.  On 4 December 2020 they tweeted that Paypal had become “the latest capitalists” to block their account.

Palestine Action has gained notoriety by damaging the UK premises of the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems – splashing buildings in paint,  smashing windows and locking out workers.  They have also daubed paint and graffiti on various offices of LaSalle, who they claim are Elbit’s landlords.

UKLFI had written to Paypal and Stripe in November 2020, alerting them that Palestine Action was acting in breach of their community guidelines.

Paypal’s “Acceptable Use Policy” states that its users  “ may not use the PayPal service for activities that  violate any law, statute, ordinance or regulation.”

Stripe’s service agreement states that its customers must “ use the Services in a lawful manner, and must obey all laws, rules, and regulations (“Laws”) applicable to your use of the Services and to Transactions.”

 Palestine Action has now switched to a new donations platform, Donorbox, but it remains to be seen how long this will last.

In November 2020 Palestine Action was  blocked by GoFundMe, Open Collective, and Shopify, following letters from UKLFI to these three organisations, pointing out that Palestine Action was in breach of their terms of business.

Palestine Action had been fundraising using GoFundMe, and subsequently using Open Collective.  They had been using Shopify to sell a  “Paint Elbit Red Spray Pack” consisting of stencils and red spray paint.

In the meantime, despite Palestine Action’s best paint throwing efforts, Elbit has secured several multi-million dollar  contracts.   These include a $166 million contract for the Royal Navy Future Naval Training Program announced on 11 Jan 2021  and a $24 million contract from the Dutch Ministry of Defence to supply the Royal Netherlands Army with new vehicular tactical computers, announced on  6 January 2021.