WeeklyWorker

18.12.2025
Right to protest being steadily eroded

Opposing genocide is no crime

Britain supports Israeli genocide in Gaza in deeds, if not in words. Disagreeing with that complicity risks arrest under counter-terrorism laws and a draconian prison sentence, writes Tony Greenstein

On January 5 I will go on trial at Kingston crown court, charged with an offence under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty, if found guilty, is 14 years in gaol.

You might be forgiven for thinking that my alleged offence was preparing a bomb, which I intended to deposit outside the Israeli embassy, an Elbit arms factory or war criminal Keir Starmer’s house. In fact I was arrested on December 20 2023 by counter-terrorism police in a dawn raid under the Terrorism Act 2000. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet, one month previously, saying that I supported the Palestinian resistance against the Israel Defence Forces.

The anti-terrorism police today is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, when the “Thought Police” (Thinkpol) spent their time hunting down and punishing “thought crime”. Britain’s equivalent of Thinkpol seized all my electronic devices - computers, mobile phone, external hard drives, etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, DC Beckford justified their retention by saying that they provided a “highly relevant insight” into my mind.

The aim of the Thought Police in 1984 was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring that citizens police their own minds. In his ‘expert witness statement’ in the ‘Case for the deproscription of Hamas’, Jonathan Cook - a journalist who has worked for The Guardian, The Observer, The Times and The International Herald Tribune, amongst other papers, and was a recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011, wrote:

Over the past several months, I have been watching with growing professional alarm - and personal trepidation - what I can only describe as a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of a number of journalists in the UK. The journalists who have been targeted share one thing in common: they report and comment on Israel’s actions in Gaza from a critical perspective that judges those actions to be genocidal ... They also criticise the British government as being complicit in that genocide.

The investigation by the police of these journalists has been justified under an expansive interpretation of both section 12 of the 2000 Terrorism Act and sections 1 and 2 of the 2006 Terrorism Act. These laws tightly restrict commentary about Hamas and other Palestinian organisations the UK government has proscribed. That proscription applies not only to Hamas’s military wing, which is committed to armed resistance against Israeli colonisation, but Hamas’s political wing, which is the elected government of Gaza.

I now find myself in a situation where, for the first time in my 36-year professional career, I am no longer sure what by law I can write or say in my capacity as a journalist on an issue of major international importance. I now live with the fear that, by writing critically about events in Gaza, I risk a dawn raid by counter-terrorism police on my home in front of my children, the confiscation of the electronic devices I rely on for my work, and my possible arrest, leading potentially to terrorism charges being laid against me.1

The aim of the Thought Police in 1984 and that of counter-terror police operations in Britain today is to eliminate any independent thought, dissent or questioning of British foreign policy in Gaza and its complicity in the genocide. The fact that Hamas was freely elected as the government of Gaza in 2006 is irrelevant. By opposing Israel militarily, they have become ‘terrorists’.

Initially I was bailed under suspicion of having committed an offence under section 12(1a) of the Terrorism Act, which makes it an offence to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” (ie, Hamas).2

A year later I was charged under section 12, which makes it an offence to “invite support for a proscribed organisation”. It is alleged that, by posting a blog entitled ‘Full support for the Gaza ghetto uprising’, I was inviting support for Hamas as an organisation.3 This is untrue. I have posted many articles opposing the politics and practices of Hamas. Examples include an article condemning torture by Hamas4 or its attacks on NGOs in Gaza.5

However, I support resistance to the Zionist occupation, whoever is leading or participating in it. The proscription of Hamas as a “terrorist” organisation, when it has never operated outside Palestine, demonstrates that, contrary to its official position, in practice the British government supports Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Hypocrisy

The justification for the proscription is that “Hamas commits and participates in terrorism. Hamas has used indiscriminate rocket or mortar attacks, and raids against Israeli targets. During the May 2021 conflict, over 4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel. Civilians, including two Israeli children, were killed as a result.”6

Presumably the use of snipers by Israel to deliberately kill children is not terrorism. Over 20,000 children have been killed by Israel since October 7, but what is that compared to two Israeli children? Here the racist hypocrisy of the British government is exposed for what it is.

Hamas rockets are unguided and therefore the killing of Israeli children is not deliberate, whereas Israel has deliberately targeted children, as overseas doctors operating in Gaza during the current genocide have testified.7 Why are Palestinian children targeted? Because children are seen as the future of the Palestinian people, avengers of the deaths of their parents and loved ones.

Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of the Bnei Moshe pre-military yeshiva in Jaffa advocated the murder of Palestinian children and spoke about how, in the case of Gaza, not “a soul” should be left alive there:

Today’s terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists ... It’s not only the 14 or 16-year-old boy, the 20 or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you, but also the future generation. There’s really no difference.8

The Israeli police recommended that he should not be prosecuted for incitement. If an Arab had said the same about Jews, then they would be facing a long stretch in gaol.

This is the same argument that Himmler made about exterminating Jewish children. At Posnan on October 6 1943 he told SS generals: “For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men - in other words, killing them or having them killed - and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren.”

In a poll conducted by Pennsylvania University, 47% of respondents said that the Israeli army should kill all the inhabitants of any city they conquer. This rose to over 60% when asked whether they believe there is a “current incarnation of Amalek” - the tribe that god said the ancient Hebrews had to wipe out. This is the state that Starmer and our rulers believe has the “right to self-defence”.9

In July 2024 the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was illegal.10 By saying that armed resistance to that occupation is ‘terrorist’, the British government is therefore supporting the occupation, despite claiming to support a two-state solution.

What Tony Blair and Jack Straw did in passing the Terrorism Act 2000 was to make it a crime to support a national liberation or anti-colonial movement that is seeking freedom from colonial domination or occupation, when the British government supports the occupying power. If the Terrorism Act had been in force during the era of apartheid in South Africa then the African National Congress would undoubtedly have been classified as a ‘terrorist’ group.11

When I gave my support to the October 7 attack, I was not giving my support to Hamas as an organisation, despite the attempts of the Crown to pretend that this is what it amounted to. The example I gave to the police in an interview was that of the Polish Home Army (AK). In 1944 its officers told Jewish servicemen in Britain that when they went into battle they would be shot in the back. A slogan widely reported was that “Every Pole has two bullets - the first for a Jew and the second for a German”. (The problems that Jewish servicemen faced in the Polish forces stationed in this country were debated in the Commons on April 7 1944).12

I explained that, if I had been alive then, I would. of course, not have supported the AK as an organisation, but when they led the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 then I would have supported them against the Nazi occupiers.

Free speech

What is happening is a naked attempt to use the anti-terrorism laws in order to curtail free speech on Palestine. As John Dugard - an emeritus professor of law at the Universities of Leiden and Witwatersrand, and an ad-hoc judge of the International Court of Justice - wrote.

Terrorism is an emotive word that has no place in the assessment of the conduct of either a government or a resistance movement. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Few would today label members of the French resistance in World War II as ‘terrorist’ and most would have no hesitation in describing the Nazi forces as ‘terrorist’. Yet today most western states refrain from describing the acts of government forces as acts of terror, but have no hesitation in so describing the acts of resistance movements and other non-state actors.13

It is noticeable that one piece of legislation that has remained a dead letter is the International Criminal Court Act 2001 - section 52 of which renders assistance to the commission of genocide abroad an offence meriting a sentence of 30 years imprisonment.14 There is no doubt that in allowing the supply of arms to Israel and providing military help via the overflight of RAF planes, this government is guilty of having actively supported genocide.

Fortunately though, the permission of a member of the government, the attorney general, is required in order that a prosecution can be initiated. It is just as well that the position of the current attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, is dependent upon the goodwill of Keir Starmer, who appointed him.

And, speaking of the corruption of the government’s law officers, in my case it was necessary that the attorney general approved my prosecution as being “in the public interest”. Because Hermer is on record as saying “I have dear family members currently serving in the IDF”, he chose to delegate the task of approving my prosecution to the solicitor general at the time, Sarah Sackman, who gave the go-ahead.15

And who is Sarah Sackman if not a dedicated Zionist? She was vice-chair of the avidly pro-Zionist Jewish Labour Movement from 2015 to 202416 and it was the JLM that was a leading force in waging the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left. It is not surprising that, on her promotion to minister of state at the Ministry of Justice, the JLM wrote: “We’re so pleased for Sarah, our former vice-chair, and know she’ll be fantastic in this new position.”17 I imagine they are also very pleased that one of her first tasks as solicitor general was to approve the prosecution of myself, a leading Jewish anti-Zionist.

I am calling for the largest protest demonstration outside Kingston Crown Court on Monday January 5, to demonstrate the strength of feeling at the deployment of the Terrorist Act against those who support the Palestinians.

  1. www.hamascase.com/volume-ii/29_cook-ctpowers.↩︎

  2. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/12.↩︎

  3. azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/10/full-support-for-gaza-ghetto-uprising.html.↩︎

  4. azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/10/abbas-and-hamas-abuse-and-torture-of.html.↩︎

  5. azvsas.blogspot.com/2011/08/hamas-attack-on-ngos-resembles-that-of.html.↩︎

  6. www.gov.uk/government/publications/proscribed-terror-groups-or-organisations--2/proscribed-terrorist-groups-or-organisations-accessible-version.↩︎

  7. See, for example, www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/14/foreign-doctors-say-israel-systematically-targeting-gazas-children-report.↩︎

  8. ‘Israeli police recommend closing case against Yeshiva head who said all Gazans should be killed’ Haaretz June 18 2024 (archive.ph/Dy0g4).↩︎

  9. skwawkbox.org/2025/05/24/you-need-to-destroy-their-offspring-well-over-half-of-israelis-want-to-exterminate-palestinians.↩︎

  10. www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/experts-hail-icj-declaration-illegality-israels-presence-occupied.↩︎

  11. ‘Why Nelson Mandela was viewed as a “terrorist” by the US until 2008’: www.biography.com/activists/nelson-mandela-terrorist-reagan-thatcher (may 19 2020).↩︎

  12. hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1944-04-06/debates/1cfd5489-2c98-45d0-bf51-5a1c45669a18/PolishForcesGreatBritain(Anti-Semitism.↩︎

  13. J Dugard Britain Palestine Project: ‘The label of “terrorist”: a bid to discredit and silence opponents’: britainpalestineproject.org/the-label-of-terrorist-a-bid-to-discredit-and-silence-opponents.↩︎

  14. Section 52, ICCA: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/17/section/52.↩︎

  15. ‘Labour’s new justice secretary was accused of encouraging “mob rule” at pro-BDS protest’ Jewish Chronicle July 7 2024:

    archive.ph/2iZC5.↩︎

  16. She was a presenter at the 2024 Limmud Festival: events.limmud.org/limmud-festival-2024/programme/presenters/S.↩︎

  17. www.jewishnews.co.uk/finchey-and-golders-green-mp-sarah-sackman-becomes-courts-and-legal-services-minister.↩︎