From two-tier policing to jury “equity," the Elbit acquittals reveal a society willing to bend justice to ideology and expose who will suffer first.
The verdict at Woolwich Crown Court isn’t controversial because the facts were unclear. It’s controversial because the facts were clear, undisputed and still excused.
In the early hours of August 6th, 2024, activists linked to Palestine Action rammed a repurposed prison van into the loading bay of Elbit Systems’ manufacturing facility in Filton, near Bristol. Six people in red jumpsuits poured inside and carried out a meticulously organised attack, smashing military equipment with sledgehammers and crowbars. The damage exceeded £1 million.
When police arrived, the violence escalated. A female sergeant was struck with a sledgehammer, while lying on the floor, suffering a fractured spine. The man responsible later claimed he did not intend to cause serious harm, perhaps under the innocent misapprehension that intent, or lack of, softens steel.
This week, those six activists, now referred to as the Filton 24, were acquitted by a jury of aggravated burglary. Several were found not guilty of violent disorder, while on the most serious charges, the jury failed to reach verdicts.
The outcome has already been hailed as a “monumental victory" by pro-Palestinian campaigners. Their reasoning is telling, because not once do they dispute what happened. There are no “allegedly" caveats, no challenges to the evidence. The defence did not deny the break-in, the destruction, or the violence. Instead, the argument is moral: it is not those who destroy Israeli weapons who are guilty, but those who deploy them.
The question placed before the jury, then, was not one of fact, but of permission.
Is breaking the law acceptable when the target is deemed evil? Is violence permissible when the victim is labelled a Zionist, and by increasingly lazy shorthand, a Jew? The former being the greatest evil of all in the eyes of those who committed these violent acts.
That framing was reinforced beyond the courtroom. While the jury deliberated, posters appeared on nearby lampposts and bus stops declaring: “The jury decide, not the judge." “Jury equity is when a jury acquits someone on moral grounds." “Jurors can give a not guilty verdict even when they believe a defendant has broken the law." Police removed them, they reappeared. The judge rightly warned jurors to ignore outside influence and return verdicts based solely on the evidence.
He was also right to say the posters should not be held against the defendants. They should instead be held against our institutions and the society which those institutions purport to represent and serve.
They should be held against a government that has repeatedly chosen caution over clarity and silence over leadership. Against parts of the media, including the BBC, that have deliberately softened language until criminality becomes “activism" and violence is reframed as “direct action." Who have amplified the lies and propaganda of terrorist organisations at every turn. Against education unions, cultural bodies and public authorities that have indulged the lie that ideology can excuse intimidation, hatred and physical harm.
For the past three years, these institutions have actively trained people to believe that violence is a legitimate response to perceived injustice, that threats are a form of protest, harassment is freedom of speech and that vandalism is virtue. The rule of law has been hollowed out, replaced by political expedience and fear of backlash. Two-tier policing is no longer whispered about, it is observed, lived and now openly internalised.
Clear rules that are meant to bind society together and protect minorities have been selectively enforced, if enforced at all and when law becomes optional, it is always minorities who pay the price first.
This verdict, delivered by a jury of our peers and how frightening a phrase that has now become, is not an anomaly, it is a mirror. It tells us exactly where our society now sits, not merely strained, but close to rupture. If not already in tatters, then certainly standing on ground so eroded that it can no longer bear weight.
Since October 7th 2023, since the massacre, rape, torture and kidnapping of over 1,500 innocent men, women and children in Israel, we have allowed a corrosive premise to take root: that violence is understandable if the cause is fashionable enough. That believing one has moral certainty can transmute criminal acts into heroic ones. That belief does not merely excuse crime, it sanctifies it.
The court heard the defendants “genuinely believed" their actions would help Gaza. Well then, that changes everything, doesn’t it?
I’m sure that Jihad al-Shamie believed the same thing when he stabbed a Jew to death on the streets of Manchester on our holiest day of the year. I assume Sajid and Naveed Akram felt similarly as they murdered fifteen innocent Jews on Bondi Beach. And I have no doubt that Yahya Sinwar honestly held that very same belief when he planned, authorised and carried out the greatest murder of Jews on any single day since the Holocaust.
Belief is not a defence, conviction is not conscience and violence does not become moral because a jury is persuaded to look away.
This verdict will be remembered not as an act of mercy, but as a moment of moral abdication. A line was crossed when violence was rewarded, intimidation excused and the rule of law bent to accommodate ideology.
Societies do not collapse all at once, they rot gradually, when laws become conditional, when fear governs enforcement and when juries are invited to replace justice with sentiment. When that happens, minorities are no longer protected by institutions, but exposed by them.
Today it was Jews, police officers and a lawful business, tomorrow it will be someone else. History is unambiguous on this point, when violence is legitimised in the name of conscience, it never remains selective for long.
The warning has been sounded, the law has been mocked, history tells us that what comes next is never a mystery.
Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.