Original Article: https://ghadakarmi.substack.com/p/the-martyrdom-of-tony-greenstein
The persecution of the British anti-fascist, anti-Zionist campaigner, Tony Greenstein, is more than a personal trial for him and his supporters. It is a lesson in how Israel works to defeat the Palestinians at every turn.
Greenstein has a long history of outspoken, fearless opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. His support for the Palestine cause has been equally bold and vehement. Given that position, it was only a matter of time before the Zionists got to him. He will stand trial at Kingston Crown Court in London for the second time in eight months, charged under the Terrorism Act. Anything more absurd and unjust can hardly be imagined.
He was born in Liverpool, the son of an orthodox Jewish family, who grew up to be an atheist and activist for left-wing causes. A founder member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the 1980s, he has long viewed Zionism as a racist, Jewish supremacist ideology which he has fought against most of his life.
As an activist for the Palestine cause, he soon attracted the attention of the Zionists in Britain and their backers in government. They consistently accused him of ‘antisemitism’ – which is the same as anti-Zionism in their lexicon. In 2018, he was driven to sue the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British pro-Israel charity, for libel along these lines. The same charge of antisemitism got him expelled from the British Labour Party, and most recently from the Green Party.
But the most devastating accusation he has faced is the charge of terrorism. It started after October 7, 2023, when anti-Hamas hysteria was at its height in Israel and the western world. Police broke into Greenstein’s home in Brighton in late December 2023 and arrested him for supporting Hamas. This was on the basis of a tweet he previously posted saying he backed the Palestinian group’s resistance against the Israeli army.
At a time when Hamas has been demonised beyond reason in Israel and all over the West, Greenstein had committed an unforgivable crime. Hamas’s military wing was first proscribed in Britain in 2001 under the Terrorism Act of 2000. Its political wing was proscribed in 2021, after which it became prohibited to show even the slightest support for the organisation. In 2025 I myself was interrogated under caution by the police after I gave a talk at a literary festival in Lewes, a town in the south of England. I had tried to explain what Hamas was in simple factual terms to clarify matters for the audience. It didn’t help me, but at least I was spared the charge of terrorism.
Not so for Tony Greenstein, who is being prosecuted under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, 2000. If convicted, he faces up to 14 years in prison. Meanwhile, his life has been difficult, de-banked without explanation by five banks since 2024. No bank will take him on, and he has been forced into the cash economy. He now lives under the shadow of possible prosecution at the forthcoming four-day trial at Kingston Crown Court.
That this decent, principled man will be in the dock for expressing his verbal support for the Palestinian right to resist genocide is a travesty of justice. But, at its basis it represents the success of a pernicious Israeli policy of presenting Palestinian resistance against oppression as a form of terrorism.
This conflation began in the 1970s when terrorism changed its definition from being a method of using violence to attain political ends to an identity. You were a terrorist if you were Muslim, or Arab, but especially Palestinian. The idea inexorably grew that ‘Islamic terrorism’ was a threat to western civilisation and its values. You were a threat by virtue of simply existing as a Muslim.
Israel played a key role in transferring these ideas to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli oppression, in which Palestinian fighters were presented as mindless ‘terrorists’, intent on destroying Israel for unknown, psychotic reasons of their own. The plane hijackings in the early 1970s were another example of mysterious evil. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), established in 1967 and recognised by the world community, was dubbed a terrorist organisation by Israel. The twinning of terrorism with the Palestine struggle reached its apex on 7 October 2023 and has increased exponentially ever since. Thus, according to this conflation, Gaza’s population, including small children, are all terrorists and it justifies their murder.
Criminalising Palestinian solidarity as supporting terrorism is a triumph of Israeli framing. Israel has made terrorism the central issue in its dealings with the Palestinians. As terrorists, they have no right of resistance, no right to protection against attack, and do not deserve the right to self-determination. Who would support the creation of a terrorist state inside their borders? The extensive ramifications of this framing would form the subject of a separate article.
An eager western world has accepted Israel’s framing, and hence the punitive acts against all forms of Palestinians solidarity in Europe and the US. In this context, the trial of Tony Greenstein is not only about one man and his fight for justice. More importantly, it is about ensuring the defeat of a pernicious Israeli campaign to discredit the right of Palestinians to resist their Zionist occupier, and the unhindered right of decent people everywhere to support them in that righteous struggle.
The court in Tone Greenstein’s trial must put an end to his ordeal, set aside Israel’s chicanery, and act with justice and honour.