Opinion...

The penalty for disagreeing with UK government policy on Palestine is 14 Years in prison

December 27, 2025

 Middle East Monitor

 

Protesters called for “an end to the occupation and a halt to arms sales to Israel” during the national march organized in London by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London, United Kingdom on November 29, 2025. [Raşid Necati Aslım – Anadolu Agency

by Tony Greenstein

On 5 January I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court charged with an offence under Section12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty if found guilty is 14 years in gaol. There are others due to follow me.

You might be forgiven for thinking that my ‘offence’ was preparing a bomb intended for the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was disagreeing with government policy and received opinion.

I was arrested on 20 December 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 Israeli Defence Forces.

The anti-terrorism police are reminiscent of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) in George Orwell’s 1984, who spent their time hunting down “thought crime.” Britain’s equivalent of seized my electronic devices – computers, laptop, mobile phone etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, the police justified their retention by saying that they provided a ‘highly relevant insight’ into my mind.

The aim of Orwell’s Thought Police was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring 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 on The Guardian, The Observer and The Times amongst other papers and 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…


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(This) 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.

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.

The fact that Hamas was freely elected as the government of Gaza in 2006 is irrelevant. By opposing Israel militarily they have become ‘terrorists’.

I have been charged ‘inviting support for a proscribed organisation’. By posting a blog Full Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising I was inviting support for Hamas as an organisation.

I have posted many articles opposing the politics and practices of Hamas including an article condemning torture by Hamas and its attacks on NGOs in Gaza.

However I support resistance to the Israeli occupation, whoever is 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 unlawful occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The justification for the proscription is that.

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 2 Israeli children, were killed as a result.

Presumably Israel using snipers to deliberately target children isn’t terrorism. Over 20,000 children have been killed by Israel since October 7 but what is that compared to two Israeli children? The racist hypocrisy of the British government is exposed for what it is.

Overseas doctors operating in Gaza during the genocide have all testified that Palestinian children are being targeted. Why? Because children are seen as the future of the Palestinian people.

At a conference of pre-military yeshivas on 7 March 2024, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of the Bnei Moshe yeshiva in Jaffa explained that Palestinian children should be killed because they are the future generation of Palestinian fighters. Mali spoke about how in the case of Gaza, they shouldn’t leave “a soul” 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.

This is the same argument that Himmler made about exterminating Jewish children. At Posnan on 6 October 1943 he told SS Generals:

“For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men… 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 per cent 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 what Starmer and our rulers believe constitutes the ‘right to self defence’.

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

What Blair and Straw did with the passing in 2000 of the Terrorism Act was to make it a crime to support a national liberation or anti-colonial movement that is seeking to free itself from colonial domination or occupation, when the British government is friendly with the occupying power.

If the Terrorism Act had been in force during the era of Apartheid in South Africa then the ANC would have been classified as a ‘terrorist’ group.

When I gave my support to the 7 October attack I wasn’t 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 was that of the Polish Home Army. In 1944 its officers told Jewish servicemen in Britain that when they went into battle then they would be shot in the back. Their slogan 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 6 April 1944 in a debate initiated by Tom Driberg MP.

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


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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 ICJ 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”.

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. 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. Thus in order to bring a criminal prosecution against the government permission first has to be sought from that government!

Speaking of the corruption of the government’s law officers it was necessary in my case that the Attorney General approve my prosecution as being ‘in the public interest’. Because Richard Hermer is on record as saying that ‘I have dear family members currently serving in the IDF’ he chose to delegate the task to the Solicitor General, Sarah Sackman, who gave the go ahead.

And who is Sarah Sackman if not a dedicated Zionist, who was Vice-Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement from 2015 to 2024. The JLM waged 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.’ I imagine they are very pleased that one of her first tasks as Solicitor General was to approve the prosecution of a leading Jewish anti-Zionist. In the process she accused me of ‘anti-Semitism’ terming me ‘problematic’.

Since Sackman is supposed to act in a quasi-judicial role it beggars belief that she didn’t think there was a conflict of interest.

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

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