The Penalty For Disagreeing With the British Government’s Foreign Policy on Palestine is 14 Years in Prison
When UN Secretary General António Guterres said, in a speech to the UN Security Council, that the attack on October 7 ‘did not happen in a vacuum’ he was accused by Israel’s Ambassador of ‘justifying terrorism.’ Guterres was later banned from Israel.
Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, over 20 years before Hamas was formed. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in that time. ‘Mowing the lawn’ was Israel’s policy of pacification. Periodic massacres such as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, Pillars of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), the Great Return March (2018) and Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021) were carried out to remind the Palestinians who was boss.
The mere suggestion that Palestinians might enjoy the international law right of resistance was not even up for debate. Any resistance, peaceful or otherwise, was automatically classified as ‘terrorism’.
In October 2021 six Palestinian NGOs, such as Defence of Children – International and human rights group Al Haq, were declared‘terrorist’ groups. It was a logical next step to designatingUNWRA, which is charged with feeding and keeping alive Palestinian refugees as a terrorist organisation.
Israel has never provided any evidence when it has labelled an organisation as ‘terrorist’, yet the United States, often with British complicity, was prepared to back it up, at least initially.
Yet when it comes to Israel’s reign of terror over the West Bankthe Israeli government is silent. Its army and police are partners in that terror. Even peaceful resistance to its colonisation and ethnic cleansing is, in the eyes of the Israeli state, ‘terrorism’.
I support the right of the Palestinians to throw off the yoke of their oppressors in just the same way as I supported the right of the people of South Africa and Vietnam to do likewise. It is an international law right of an occupied and colonised people to resist their oppressors. UN General Assembly resolutions, such as 37/43 (1982), explicitly reaffirm the legitimacy of the struggle for liberation ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’.
Yet if you support the right of the Palestinians in Britain today to resist Zionist colonisation and oppression, you run the risk being accused of terrorism.
When the Terrorism Bill was debated in Parliament in December 1999, in response to an intervention by Douglas Hogg that those supporting the Kurdish opposition to Saddam Hussein could be charged with terrorist offences, the Home Secretary Jack Straw suggested that the idea people would be prosecuted for such activities was the product of a ‘fevered imagination.’
Straw responded to accusations that the widening of the definition of terrorism could encompass protest groups and international solidarity activities by saying that ‘the broadening of the Bill covers domestic terrorism.’ If a week is a long time in politics then 20 years is an eternity.
On 20 October 2023 I was arrested at 6.30 am at my home. My crime was posting a tweet one month before supporting the Palestinian resistance. My only response was ‘this is Orwellian’.
A dozen police officers had come to capture a dangerous terrorist. The same scenes have been re-enacted up and down the country against supporters of the Palestinians.
I was released under investigation. Eleven months later I was formally charged with inviting support for a proscribed organisation, Hamas, based on a blog I had published on October 7 and three subsequent tweets.
At the same time Britain supplies Israel with the arms and intelligence with which to carry out its genocide and ethnic cleansing. All Israel’s massacres are ‘self defence’ according to Keir Starmer and David Lammy.
The destruction of Palestinian society, its schools hospitals and universities, is acceptable. There is no genocide in the government’s eyes. This is from the same Keir Starmer who argued that the killing of 8,000 people at Srebenica was genocide.
Mowing down those queuing for food, starving children to death and attacking first aiders is acceptable. No amount of war crimes and massacres will change the position of our amoral government that violence is fine when perpetrated against unarmed Palestinian civilians. But if the people of Palestine lift so much as a finger against their occupiers then that is a new holocaust.
It matters not that the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Gaza unlawful in July 2024. In the eyes of the British government the Palestinians have no right to resist Israel’s occupation and siege. One wonders whether Starmer considers the French resistance to the Nazis in the same light. Our law is based on the same justifications that enabled the violence of the British Empire.
People will say that October 2023 was different in that Hamas committed many atrocities. There were undoubtedly some. No resistance organisation in history has been 100% pure. How can it be otherwise when the occupier, whether Israel, the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya is prepared to commit any atrocity and kill any number of people to maintain their rule?
It is instructive to look at what happened on October 7. Since then the Israeli state has engaged in atrocity propaganda warfare that outdoes anything that the British did in World War One.
The Israeli narrative of mass Hamas atrocities against babies was crucial in the justification of the genocide. It is now accepted that only one baby died, 10 month old Mila Cohen in Kibbutz Be’eri. She was neither beheaded nor mutilated. This did not stop the Daily Mail leading with ‘This was a holocaust pure and simple’.
On 8 October the Times of Israel described what happened in Kibbutz Re’im after a fight in which a Hamas militant killed a father and his partner. The mother of the surviving children told how
The terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder children.’
After the baby beheading stories were discredited Israel made claims of mass organised rapes. The main support for this came from the New York Times in Screams without words’ on 28 December 2023.
These stories too were quickly discredited. The Intercept published an extensive investigative report in February 2024 “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” which questioned the journalistic practices, the lack of forensic evidence, and the qualifications of freelancer Anat Schwartz who had previously ‘liked’ a tweet calling for Gaza to be turned into a slaughter house. YNet reported that Schwartz, along with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella, who was part of the NYT team, pressurised the photographer of the main alleged rape victim, Gail Abdush. The photographer recalled that ‘They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara.’
So flimsy was the story that even the NYT’s Daily podcast about the story was shelved because they couldn’t verify the original article.
The final evidence that the allegations were a hoax was the statement in Israel’s Ynet of Israeli prosecutor, Moran Gaz, that:
“In the end, we don’t have complainants. What was reported in the media compared to what will ultimately be established will look very different—either because the victims were murdered or because women who were raped are unwilling to come forward.
“We reached out to women’s rights organizations and requested cooperation. They told us no one had contacted them.
The British government purports not to support the annexation or occupation of the Palestine territories. Officially it is committed to a two state solution but in reality it is supports an Israeli government committed to a Greater Israel.
That is the only conclusion to be drawn from the fact that it has proscribed Hamas, which won the municipal elections in Gaza in 2005 and went on to win those to the Palestinian Legislative Assembly in 2006. In 2007 Israel imposed a siege of the territory that led to the break-out in October 2023.
Throughout this period the British government has treated the people of Gaza as terrorists. The British government’s ‘recognition’ of a non-existent Palestinian state is meaningless since it refuses to take any measures against Israel to prevent the continued building of settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s open breaches of the ceasefire agreement. Israel has made it clear that it intends to stay in Gaza permanently.
Those who oppose their policy will also be classified as ‘terrorists’. The proscription of Hamas is really the proscription of political debate which is opposed to the British government’s deceitful and hypocritical foreign policy. It has nothing to do with domestic terrorism that Jack Straw referred to during the passage of the Terrorism Act for the simple reason that Hamas has never operated in Britain.
The definition of terrorism in the 2000 Act could be applied equally to the Israeli Defence Forces since they have no lawful reason for ever having occupied Gaza in the first place. The definition of terrorism refers to actions ‘designed to influence the government’. The only legal government in Gaza is Hamas. The Israeli government has no legal claim to be that government.
In 2021 the political wing of Hamas was also proscribed. ‘The government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial’ read the justification. Hamas was described as ‘a complex but single terrorist organisation.’ No evidence was presented for this claim. If the British government had given in to pressure in the 1980s to proscribe the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein, there would have been no peace process or Good Friday agreement.
The proscription of Hamas’ political wing is a Charter for Genocide. It means that any doctor, nurse, teacher or lecturer is a legitimate target for murder because they are terrorists by definition. It means that Israel was justified in the bombing and shelling of hospitals and schools. By blurring the distinction between civilians and armed guerrillas Britain has become a party to Israel’s war crimes.
Tony Greenstein
Justice for Tony Greenstein 