The judge in a trial of anti-genocide activists this week told the jury that it was none of their business whether he would impose terrorism sentences for the criminal damage charges they faced.
Claire Hinchcliffe is the mother of ‘Filton 24’ activist Zoe Rogers – who was acquitted for the second time in May 2026. She reported that jurors had heard about the sentencing of Rogers’s co-defendants on as terrorists — subject to longer sentences and decades-long restrictions even after their release — after they were convicted of criminal damage.
The judge in that trial had ordered lawyers and press to keep silent about the likely terror sentence during the trial. So the jury in this week’s trial sent the judge a note to ask whether he was planning to do the same. The judge’s response? ‘Not your concern’:
Filton — Sick farce
No doubt appalled at such a response, the jury refused to convict. The state machine is likely to demand a retrial, as they did with Zoe Rogers and her comrades.
The May trial was not the first instance of judges — some closely aligned with the intelligence services — trying to prevent jurors knowing the full facts and law applicable to the case. Peaceful demonstrators have been arrested and prosecuted simply for holding signs informing jurors — entirely correctly — that they have a legal right to acquit no matter what they judge and prosecution say.
And Filton lawyer Rajiv Menon is fighting contempt of court charges for telling jurors that point of law and the activists’ motives to resist genocide through their actions against an Israeli arms factory.
English law is a sick farce. ‘Friend of genocide’ home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s court failures in the Filton trial and the persecution of Jewish activist Tony Greenstein mean that Burnham’s supposed intention to bin his predecessor’s plan to scrap jury trials for most people is unlikely to survive. Juries are likely to have humanity and conscience — and that gets in the way of the UK state’s determination to protect genocidal Israel.
The first barrister in British history to face prosecution for a closing speech – in this case delivered to a jury during a Palestine Action trial – has described how he missed making a last visit to see his father to fight the case.
“It is very tough,” Rajiv Menon, a leading human rights barrister, told The Observer. “I’ve tried not to talk about the personal stuff too much but this will be with me for the rest of my life.”
Menon is accused of encouraging the jury in the case of six protesters who broke into the UK factory of the Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in August 2024 to ignore the judge’s directions and deliver a verdict according to their conscience.
The trial resulted in the acquittal of his client, Charlotte Head, 30, and five others on charges of aggravated burglary although the jury was unable to reach verdicts on charges of criminal damage. They later faced re-trial and were convicted.
Menon found out he was being referred to the high court for contempt in February, while he was on holiday with his 24-year-old son in Vietnam.
“I was due to go from there to India to see my father… I clearly had to lawyer up, I had to come back to the country and I did,” he said. “On 20 May, my father died. I never saw him again and it’s a direct result of these senior judges going after me. I will never forgive them for that, ever.”
He is fighting the case against him in the court of appeal but later this year faces a trial, without a jury, in front of a high court judge that could result in a jail sentence and the end of his career. He is believed to be the first British barrister to face such charges over a closing speech.
Menon, 62, is an experienced KC, who has defended many political activists and appeared at the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the Hillsborough inquests and the Grenfell Tower inquiry. He lives with his wife in east London and has two adult children.
One of the key accusations against him is that he used the principle of “jury equity” during his closing speech to tell the jury at Woolwich Crown Court that they could act according to their consciences, despite a ruling from the judge to prevent him doing so.
In his referral, Mr Justice Johnson accepted that Menon did not use the phrase “jury equity” in his speech but said he “informed the jury, in detail, of the principle”.
He also complained that Menon invited the jury to disregard his direction that they should put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza to one side, and that the role of Elbit Systems UK in supplying weapons to Israel was not relevant.
Menon said that his speech quoted a plaque displayed at the Old Bailey which celebrates a case from 1670 that established, as it says, the “right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions”. The case, he said, was often referenced in closing arguments by other barristers.
“I discussed it with my team, and I spoke to other lawyers about it because it’s not in the interests of any defendant that their barrister tries to flout judicial rulings. Why would anybody with their right mind do that?” he said.
“I was trying to do the very opposite. The whole point was to try to construct a speech that was compliant with his rulings and the conclusion that I reached at the end of those various discussions was that I was not going to say anything about jury equity to the jury, and I didn’t.
“I kept on reinforcing in my speech, I’m not inviting you to disregard the judge’s rulings. On the contrary, I’m asking you the very opposite – I’m asking you to follow the judge’s rulings, and the very first ruling he’s given you is that you are the sole judges of the facts,” Menon said.
Other senior barristers have come out in support of Menon. Kirsty Brimelow KC, chair of the Bar Council, has followed the proceedings against him “with concern” and said: “A barrister has a duty to represent their clients fearlessly and judge-instigated contempt proceedings risk a chilling effect on the profession.”
Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, told The Observer that while the case was polarising, there had been “significant departures from procedure” in the way it had been handled.
“That has led to concerns about whether this is about the politics of the subject matter of the trial, rather than the core principles of how a barrister represents his client,” Karmy-Jones said.
“There is also now uncertainty over the status of the long-standing principle that a jury may act according to their conscience, and how that may be used in a defence speech. The consequence is that people at the criminal bar have become scared of what they can and can’t say.”
The judge could have referred Menon to the attorney general or the Bar Standards Board, as in previous cases, but instead made a referral for a trial in the high court.
That procedure was found to be unlawful and, after the second trial, it was referred to the crown court. Menon’s lawyers say that is also unlawful and he will not receive a fair trial. That appeal is expected to be heard this autumn. Should it fail, he will face a trial in the crown court which could see him sent to jail.
Menon said: “As a criminal defence lawyer, I don’t want to be a defendant, and I don’t want to be a museum specimen. Every time I walk into court now, someone will point at me and that’s not what I want. I don’t want this spotlight at all.
“I just want to get on with the day job and I’m trying to do that. It’s not easy. I have to tell every defendant who wants to instruct me, ‘Oh, by the way, I might be in prison by the time your trial comes up.’ I mean, who wants to go through that?”
Menon continues to receive emails of support from both lawyers and non-lawyers. “That’s the one thing throughout this whole horrible mess that I’ve had to endure for the last seven months that is keeping me going, the huge support that I’ve received not only from my friends and colleagues but from the profession and the community much more widely.”
Five Palestine Action activists who vandalised a Barclays branch in Burnley will not be sentenced as terrorists, a judge has ruled.
Dubbed the Barclays five, Brendon O’Hagan, 28; Amanda Kelly, 31; Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31; Mohammed Malik, 28; and Alma Yaniv, 70, were all found guilty in June of causing damage exceeding £200,000, after breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire in August 2024.
The group targeted the site in protest at Barclays because it held shares in the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems.
Judge Altham, the recorder of Preston, ruled on Friday that while the damage was substantial, it was not of the size of other attacks or against a sensitive property, such as an arms company, as has happened in previous Palestine Action incidents, and thus did not meet the high threshold for a terrorist sentencing.
All five will still be sentenced next month for criminal damage, but will face shorter jail terms as a result of the ruling.
After the five activists were found guilty in June, the trial judge, Philip Parry, told the prosecution and the defence he intended to consider a “terrorist connection” to the offending. It is understood this was a result of new information coming to light during the trial.
Neither the five activists nor the jury that found them guilty of criminal charges were aware that the case would be considered as terrorism until after they were found guilty.
During the hearings that took place at Preston crown court on Friday, legal representatives for the activists stated that four of them, excluding Yaniv, had admitted to being members of Palestine Action during the trial, but that this was irrelevant, because Palestine Action was not proscribed as a terrorist group until a year after the act of vandalism.
In a statement put out by the five after the ruling, the group said they were “extremely relieved that the court has seen sense” but said a terrorism sentencing “should never have been an option” and accused the state of “attempting to equate property damage to the Israeli war machine with terrorism”.
They said: “A terrorism sentence would not only aggravate our sentence significantly, it would mean we would be imprisoned as terrorists and subject to notification requirements for 15-plus years upon release. Those requirements include notifying police of any new address, bank account, phone number, email address, relationship and more. If we failed to do so, even by accident, we would face an additional five years in prison.
“The proscription of Palestine Action, the arrests of over 3,500 people under the Terrorism Act for holding signs and the sentencing of direct action activists as terrorists, are all tools being used by the state to protect the Israeli weapons industry and continue its role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
“The use of counter-terror powers against direct action for Palestine came after extensive lobbying by the Israeli government, Elbit Systems, pro-Israel lobby groups and politicians with vested interests.”
It was reported in October 2024 that Barclays had sold all its Elbit shares. The bank had previously said it held them only in relation to client-driven transactions, being neither an investor nor shareholder in the arms company.
Commenting on the ruling, Kerry Moscogiuri, the chief executive of Amnesty International UK, said: “The fact that the defendants in today’s case were not sentenced as terrorists is welcome. No one should be treated more harshly under the law because their crimes were part of a protest against genocide or any other issue, and the misuse of terrorism powers in this way should never have even been considered.
“We now need to see the proscription against Palestine Action lifted and an end to the misuse of sweeping counter-terror powers against direct action protesters. The government should begin the process of reversing the years of attacks on our right to protest, one of the most effective tools we have to hold our leaders to account.”
Tony Greenstein’s trial at Kingston Crown Court has ended in a spectacular own goal for Sussex Zionist complainants and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), as a jury of seven men and five women took just two hours and eleven minutes to clear the 72-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist writer and activist. The verdict left an openly hostile judge furious and the unfortunate CPS humiliated.
Greenstein, a veteran socialist, author, and founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was charged under Section 12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000 with inviting support for a proscribed organisation following three social media posts published on 7 October 2023. Facing up to 14 years in prison for describing the breakout from the Strip as a “Gaza ghetto uprising”, Greenstein delivered a blistering closing defence to the jury that resulted in spontaneous applause echoing from the packed public gallery.
The Crown’s party political analogy
The CPS, represented by Kate Temple-Mabe, who was bound by the cab rank principle to present the state’s case, attempted to convince the jury that by linking to his blog and stating Greenstein was criminally inviting the public to support Hamas:
whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well-planned and audacious attack
The prosecution tried to simplify their case by equating Palestinian anti-colonial resistance to a British party political analogy. The Crown argued that if an individual dislikes Party A more than Party B, knocking on doors for Party B makes them a supporter of Party B, no matter what their past ideological leanings. Under this logic, the prosecution claimed that praising the tactical efficiency of the October 7th military offensive constituted an endorsement for Hamas.
The prosecution also leaned heavily on online exchanges, including a reply to Peter Tatchell where Greenstein argued that October 7th was not the time or place to criticise Hamas for LGBT issues while bombs were raining down on Gaza.
Judicial interference and Greenstein’s excluded evidence
Throughout the trial, defence barrister Lawrence McNulty pushed back against the judge’s interference and did so in a way that made the jury highly aware of how the bench was attempting to steer the case. McNulty eventually stood down so Greenstein could address the jury directly in person, while solicitor Zafar Iqbal remained in court to instruct him.
The tension between the bench and defence reached a flashpoint before police witnesses were questioned. Clearly nervous about where the defence might lead and seeking to control the narrative from the outset, Judge Sarah Plaschkes KC demanded to know in advance what line of questioning McNulty intended to pursue with the police. McNulty pushed back immediately, asking the judge whether she planned to micromanage the defence. He even offered to hand over a full list of his questions if the bench formally compelled him to do so, a demand Plaschkes ultimately refused. As the standoff threatened to turn into a complete stalemate, the jury was eventually brought back into the courtroom, where McNulty proceeded to ask the officer just a single question: getting the police to confirm that the transcript from Greenstein’s second interview was so short that it had obviously been heavily redacted.
The jurors were asked to leave the courtroom quite frequently so that Judge Plaschkes could attempt to impose limits on the defence team, which they consistently managed to get around. Significant context was actively kept from the jury. Large sections of Greenstein’s voluntary police interview transcripts were excluded, and over half of the controversial blog post was omitted from the prosecution’s extracts. Furthermore, dozens of historical articles attacking Hamas across the 3,500 posts on Greenstein’s platform — including pieces written by guest bloggers as well as mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and Haaretz that he regularly published — were ruled inadmissible as evidence to the court or jury.
Greenstein pointed out the huge gaps in what the jury was permitted to see, noting that had any of the posts on his platform expressed praise or support for Hamas, the Crown would have rushed to include every single one of them. Instead, because his site served as an open forum documenting decades of trenchant opposition to religious fundamentalism by both himself and contributing writers, those articles were deliberately kept out of evidence to bolster the state’s fragile prosecution. Greenstein and his legal team made sure the jury became aware of this censorship, a revelation that decisively turned the room against the heavy-handed approach of the judge and prosecution.
Judge Plaschkes repeatedly halted Greenstein’s evidence when he sought to provide historical context, warning him against treating the court as a “political forum” and claiming the jury was “not concerned with events in the Middle East”. Greenstein rebuked the bench directly, retorting that turning a blind eye to genocide is the exact problem with the ruling class in Britain. As the judge attempted to silence him further, Greenstein fired back that he was talking about human rights, including her own.
Plaschkes went on to direct the jury to disregard the excluded blog posts and strictly instructed them to ignore Greenstein’s mentions of the 14-year sentence hanging over him. At one point during the trial, Greenstein remarked directly to the bench that it felt as though the prosecution had two people working for it, implying that the judge was ganging up with the prosecution.
Tony Greenstein’s closing address
Giving evidence, Greenstein described Gaza as a cage and a human prison where Palestinians had been locked up for 57 years, asking the jury to imagine living under an inescapable blockade with poisoned water and power cuts. He insisted that when a colonial power holds another people down, those people have the right to resist.
Addressing the jury directly in his closing speech, Greenstein dismantled the Crown’s party political analogy:
The prosecution used an analogy of supporting party A and not party B. This analogy is not sufficient for the context of colonial occupation. I support occupied people, but I have never supported Hamas. Kemi Badenoch might support Andy Burnham if he cuts benefits, but nobody would then accuse Badenoch of supporting Labour.
Greenstein anchored his anti-Zionism in his family history and Jewish heritage. He recounted how his family fled Poland while most relatives were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp, and recalled how his father, Rabbi Solomon Greenstein, stood at Cable Street in 1936 against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Raised as a religious Zionist who celebrated the 1967 war, Greenstein became an anti-Zionist in 1969 after researching the Nakba for a school debate.
Greenstein drew chilling parallels between historical and contemporary fascist rhetoric, pointing out how Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and Nazi architect Heinrich Himmler both used identical dehumanising language by referring to human beings as animals to justify mass slaughter.
In an impassioned section of his address, Greenstein confronted the jury directly with the realities of the ongoing genocide:
If the devil exists, it is amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza. It is amongst those who deliberately starve children to death, those who bomb tents and burn children alive, and those who call Palestinians “human animals”.
Explaining his use of the phrase “Gaza ghetto uprising”, Greenstein invoked Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When Edelman died in 2009, he was accorded a state funeral with full military honours in Poland, yet he remained despised and boycotted by the Israeli establishment because he was a lifelong anti-Zionist who explicitly stated that Gazans were being treated just like Jews were in Warsaw, addressing Palestinian fighters as fellow partisans. Greenstein warned the jury that Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 is written so broadly that it would have criminalised the Warsaw uprising itself, remarking that it is wide enough to drive a coach and horses through.
Turning to the state’s targeting of Palestine Action, Greenstein drew a direct historical comparison with the Suffragettes. He stressed that the Suffragettes engaged in far more violent direct action — not just smashing windows, but setting off bombs — yet today they are universally celebrated as having been on the right side of history. He told the jury that future generations will view Palestine Action in exactly the same way. He contrasted this with the grotesque abuse of counter-terror legislation, pointing out that while roughly 200 people were arrested for terrorism in 2024, that figure rocketed to 3,000 in 2025, with the average terror suspect now being a 50-something white woman.
He challenged the deep hypocrisy of the state and the architects of the counter-terror legislation. Greenstein pointed out the grim irony that Tony Blair and Jack Straw introduced the Terrorism Act 2000 while launching illegal imperialist wars across Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign invasions that directly bred Islamic State, destabilised the region, and brought blowback to the UK in the form of the 7/7 London bombings and the Manchester Arena attack. The very politicians who engineered modern terror legislation were the ones whose foreign policies brought terrorism to British soil.
He contrasted this with double standards in the establishment media, pointing out that mainstream figures like Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interviewed Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — the former leader of the proscribed Syrian militant group HTS (formerly the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda) who previously had a multi-million dollar CIA bounty on his head before becoming Syria’s president — without facing dawn raids or device seizures. He reminded the jury that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had once labelled Nelson Mandela a terrorist, noting that history always delivers its own verdict on such political classifications.
Citing John Stuart Mill, George Orwell’s maxim that liberty means telling people what they do not want to hear, and Benjamin Franklin’s warning on trading liberty for security, Greenstein likened the state’s prosecution to Idi Amin’s famous quip that freedom of speech exists, but not freedom after speech.
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Drawing his address to a close, Greenstein quoted Lord Devlin on trial by jury being the lamp that shows freedom lives, and cited the 1670 Bushell’s Case commemorated on the wall of the Old Bailey, which established the constitutional right of juries to acquit according to their conscience without judicial intimidation.
The verdict and the Streisand effect
As Greenstein finished his closing speech, a round of applause broke out across the public gallery.
Before allowing the jury to return with their verdict, Judge Plaschkes addressed the court. She warned the public gallery that anyone unable to remain completely silent when the verdict was delivered would be forced to leave immediately.
The judge also stated that she was initially minded to initiate contempt of court proceedings against Greenstein for raising wider political issues and advising the jury on conscience-based acquittals. She invited the Crown to make a formal contempt complaint, but when Temple-Mabe declined, Judge Plaschkes dropped the matter, remarking that on calm reflection Greenstein’s address amounted only to a rambling speech delivered by an old man. She added her belief that the jury would have reached its decision regardless of his closing remarks. The comment provoked gasps of disapproval across the packed public gallery.
When the unanimous not-guilty verdict was delivered, Greenstein grinned visibly and looked emotional as supporters in the gallery celebrated.
The entire prosecution stands as a clear demonstration of the Streisand effect. Zionist complainants in Sussex sought to criminalise Greenstein and silence anti-Zionist speech. Instead, all they achieved was to amplify Greenstein’s anti-Zionist analysis, his book Zionism During the Holocaust, and his platform onto a national stage. It exposed the sharp contrast where establishment journalists interview former proscribed al-Qaeda leaders without police interference, while anti-war activists face dawn raids and frozen bank accounts. Above all, it delivered a resounding defeat for the state with the fourth jury acquittal out of seven recent Section 12 terrorism prosecutions against pro-Palestine speech — reaffirming that ordinary juries refuse to treat political opposition to genocide as terrorism.
Outside the court, Greenstein addressed a crowd of supporters, declaring the acquittal a shared victory for Palestine and democratic rights in Britain. He affirmed that opposing genocide is not a crime, whereas supplying arms to Israel to perpetrate a genocide is, concluding that the movement stands on the right side of history.
Following the verdict, civil rights groups welcomed the outcome, with human rights organisation CAGE International releasing a statement affirming that the jury’s swift decision demonstrates that Palestinian liberation is not a crime.
And Greg Hadfield has the text of the closing speech that Tony Greenstein prepared for the end of his trial at Kingston Crown Court:
1. WHY I AM SPEAKING TO YOU MYSELF
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
First, a word about why I have chosen to address you in person rather than through my barrister, Lawrence McNulty. My decision implies no criticism of Lawrence. It is simply this: when my liberty is at stake, I wish to speak to you directly rather than through someone else. It is my words that are on that indictment. When someone is accused of meaning something he never meant, he should be the one to tell you what he meant.
I am not a barrister. I hope you will bear that in mind. However what I will do is speak from the heart. I am seventy-two years old. I have been arguing in public for more than fifty years, and this may be the most important half hour of argument in my life. The prosecution say that I invited people to support an Islamic group called Hamas while accepting that I didn’t support Hamas myself. Think about that for a moment. Why should I invite people to support a group that I don’t support and never have supported? It is illogical.
According to the Prosecution’s opening statement, although I did not mention Hamas by name in my X posts, my “reference to support for the ‘Gaza ghetto uprising’ — in that specific context, on that specific date — can only have meant support for Hamas”. In order to sustain their case the Prosecution fixated on one sentence in a blog of 10 pages, concerning the congratulation of Hamas for a well planned and audacious attack. In other words if you ever say anything about any group then you are a supporter if not a recruiting sergeant.
In fact my blog is cut off in the Bundle. At 1060 words. In fact it went on for some 1935 words, including a leading article from an Israeli paper, Ha’aretz and two contributions from American Jewish political scientist, Norman Finkelstein. That is in addition to 2000 words in the comments. Even on the one piece they produced they had to ensure that you didn’t see all of the evidence. Let alone produce uncut the 15 or so blogs that demonstrated that I didn’t support Hamas and never had.
According to the Prosecution logic Kemi Badenoch supporting Starmer’s decision not to make British bases available for the war against Iran means she supports the Labour Party. It is like being told that the Pope has supported abortion by helping out women who have had abortion. The fact that you support one action of a group does not mean that you therefore support the group itself. That logic escapes the Prosecution, although it should be obvious that supporting one action of a group doesn’t mean supporting the group itself.
2. WHO I AM
Before I make my case, you are entitled to know a little of my background. Firstly I am a parent, with 4 children, 3 sons and a daughter. Although I am separated from my wife, Fiona she was in the public gallery yesterday with our 35 year old son, Daniel who is severely autistic. Fiona and myself are Daniel’s carers.
I went to Brighton Polytechnic in 1974 where I obtained an honours degree in Applied Sciences. In 1996 I obtained an MA in Colonial History from Birkbeck, London University and between 2000/2 I obtained a law degree from Sussex University and the following year a Legal Practice Certificate from the College of Law in Guildford. Apart from being a blogger I have written for, among other papers and web sites The Guardian, New Statesman, Tribune Magazine (Orwell), Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, Open Democracy and many others.
I was born in 1953, in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Holocaust had ended only eight years before. My father’s parents came to England from Poland and left the rest of the family behind. Nearly all of them died in the Holocaust in Treblinka extermination camp. My father mentioned it just once in his whole life. Just one sister, who jumped off a deportation train, is known to have survived. Over three million of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered.
My father was Rabbi Solomon Greenstein. In 1936 he stood at Cable Street, where the working people of the East End — Jews and dockers together — stopped Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts from marching through a Jewish neighbourhood. That is the house I was raised in. Not a house of quietism. A house where you stood in the road. So I am extremely aware of the trauma caused by the Holocaust. It is not history to me. It is the empty chairs at my family’s table. But what I have always fought against was those who used the murder of 6 million Jews in order to justify the murder and genocide of others. That is why authored Zionism During the Holocaust.
I was brought up as a religious Zionist. In 1967, when Israel captured what is now known as Gaza and the West Bank, I shared in the joy of fellow Jews. None of us knew then what horrors would be visited on the indigenous Palestinians who lived there. Then, at the King David School in Liverpool, I was asked to take part in a school debate on whether Zionism was Right or Wrong and because nobody else would take that side I agreed to play devil’s advocate. In the course of researching the topic I suddenly realised that I had grown up with a series of fabrications and lies. The refugees of 1948 had not left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab regimes. They had been expelled at the point of a gun, and after a series of massacres. The documents that proved it were classified and are still classified.
This was the pivotal moment of my life. From then on I became a Jewish anti-Zionist. And I learnt something my school had never taught me: that anti-Zionism had been the majority trend amongst Jews until the second world war. It is a Jewish tradition, as old as Zionism, and I stand in that tradition. Today 44% of young British Jews describe themselves as non- or anti-Zionist. We are not a curiosity. We are a tradition, coming back. And I have lived that tradition the way most of our Jewish ancestors did. For fifty years I have opposed fascist groups on the streets. Because racism and fascism led to the holocaust. I was also a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
I am a Jewish socialist. The Palestinian organisation whose politics I have supported for decades is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — secular, socialist, founded by a Christian Palestinian, George Habash. Hamas is an Islamist movement. Its full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement. Ask yourselves — is a Jewish secular socialist who has spent twenty years criticising political Islam and Hamas a plausible recruiting sergeant for it? And as you weigh that question, understand what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Someone who has spent fifty years fighting fascism on the streets of this country. I never imagined it could happen here in the mother country of democracy that I would be facing 14 years imprisonment for writing a blog and tweeting under the Terrorism Act 2000.
3. HOW THIS CASE CAME TO YOU
At half past six on 20th December a dozen counter-terror police raided my home, seized my electronic devices, and arrested me — on the basis of a single tweet posted a month previously. We live, ladies and gentlemen, in dystopian and Orwellian times. When I applied for the return of my devices, the officer in charge explained in a witness statement why they were keeping them. They needed, he said, to fully understand my “mind set and ideology” from my internet search history, and from how, “and indeed if”, I talk about Hamas with others away from the public domain. Is it really the job of the police to act as amateur psychologists, inquiring into people’s minds?
There might be a justification for all this if they thought I was going to set off an explosive device. But that is obviously not the case. It was the police themselves who gave me bail the same day, with three relatively trivial restrictions — which, on appeal, Westminster magistrates watered down further. Clearly, they did not think I was a terrorist. But the Terrorism Act has been creating a whole new category of terrorist. On the Home Office’s own figures, arrests under the Terrorism Acts have leapt in 2024 from around two hundred to more than three thousand in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase. And the profile of the average terrorist has changed too. It used to be a 31 year-old man. It is now more likely to be a 59 year-old woman. You may ask yourselves whether the word “terrorist” has quietly been given a new meaning — and whether I am standing in front of you because of it.
And when they interviewed me, I did not hide behind “no comment.” as my solicitor advised me. I answered every question for over an hour, and came back three months later, voluntarily, and did it again. When they asked me directly whether I supported Hamas against the Israeli army, I gave them an answer I will repeat again, because it is my whole case: “I would probably support the devil against the Israeli army. That doesn’t mean I support the devil in itself.”
And if the devil exists it exists amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza so that children have to endure amputations without the benefit of pain relief. The devil exists amongst those who deliberately starve children to death because they rationalise that those children will only grow up to be terrorists. It exists among those who bomb tent encampments and literally burn children and their parents alive. It exists amongst those who call Palestinians “human animals” the same phrase used by Himmler, the head of the SS about Jewish children in a speech on October 4, 1943 to senior SS Generals. In a situation where there is a conflict, you support the oppressed rather than the oppressor. That is not support for an organisation. That is a moral position — one, I might add, with a rather long Jewish pedigree.
4. WHAT YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO DECIDE
Her Honour will direct you on the law, and what she tells you about the law you must take from her, not from me. But you know by now what the prosecution must make you sure of, and it is worth setting out plainly, because everything I say from here on hangs from it. They must make you sure of three things. That Hamas was proscribed on 7 October 2023 — that is agreed, and always was. That my words in fact invited support for Hamas. And that I knew, at the time, that that is what I was doing. Three things. All three. Sure of each.
Now notice what is not on that list. It is not on that list whether you agree with my opinions about Israel and Palestine. It is not on that list whether you find those opinions congenial, or offensive — some of you may find that they are. And it is not on that list whether Hamas ought to be proscribed. That is the government’s decision. It is not mine, and it is not yours. The charge is not holding an opinion. The charge is inviting other people to support an organisation, Hamas. Those are two different things — and every single question in this trial lives in the distance between them. Hold on to that distinction, because I am now going to show you what I actually wrote.
5. WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE
This case hinges on three short posts and one article. That is the entire alleged crime. So let us read it — carefully, the way the prosecution hopes you won’t.
First. Hamas is not mentioned. Not in the first tweet. Not in the second nor the third. Not once. The prosecution invite you to supply the name yourselves — because I did not supply it. What I wrote was “the Gaza Ghetto Uprising.” And I chose the word ghetto deliberately, but not for the reason the prosecution imply.
Let me explain, for those of you who do not know the history. In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.
The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.
Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.
And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance. That is how widely this law is drawn — and it is worth remembering when you consider who it is now being pointed at. The definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000 is no definition at all. It has been widely criticised, both by the Supreme Court in Gul and also by the Independent Reviewer of terrorism David Anderson QC as he then was.
Second. “PLEASE SHARE.” The prosecution say those two words are the invitation. Members of the jury, I have written a blog for 18 years. “Please share” means: read my article, pass it on, argue with it. Asking people to read what you have written is not asking them to support an organisation. If it were, every writer in this country would be standing where I am standing. My purpose was not to invite support for anyone. If I had wanted people to support a particular group I would have said it. I often ask for support for things such as the Al Tafawk kindergarten in Jenin. Nothing in the wording suggests that. The posts were advertising my blog. That is what writers do. And here is what that “recruitment campaign” achieved. 56 views. 73 views. 58 views. Four shares between them. The prosecution’s case that this was an invitation to the public to support a proscribed organisation — is a fantasy that they have created out of nothing.
Third — the sentence the whole case rests on. “Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack.” Note the words: “whatever criticisms.” Those are not the words of a recruiter. A recruiter does not open with the criticisms of the thing he is recruiting for. Those are the words of someone who has spent fifteen years making those criticisms in public — and I will show you the receipts in a moment. And “well planned and audacious” — that is a description, not an endorsement. October 7 was well planned, and it was audacious. Israel had constructed a five billion dollar electronic fence, complete with drones, sensors and automatic machine guns, and it was breached in minutes. Retired generals said the same thing on television that week. Nobody raided their homes at dawn. As for “Hamas should be congratulated” it is so obviously a figure of speech, not meant literally, that I am surprised that the prosecutor doesn’t blush every time she argues this.
And I will tell you what else I wrote that day, in the same article and its comments. I wrote that the retribution of Israel would be bloody and savage. I wrote to a commenter: “Graham, believe you me, I am apprehensive of the days ahead and Israel’s potential for genocide.” Apprehensive. Those are not the words of someone celebrating. They are the words of someone who feared exactly what was coming — and who, you may think, has been proved catastrophically right.
But you would not have read the latter comment because the version of the blog in your Bundle is only half the original (1060 words as opposed to 1935 words). The comments underneath were another 2,000 words and they too were not in your bundle. Why? Because it is clear that the conversation didn’t mention anyone joining Hamas. Anyone with eyes to see would understand that the blog was not an invitation to join Hamas.
It takes a certain malevolence to read that into the blog. And let it be clear that support for an action of a proscribed group is not the same as support for the group itself. expressing an opinion or belief that is shared by or coincides with the aims of a proscribed organization is not the same thing as expressing support for the organization itself That is or should be common senses. It is also good law as in the case ABJ decided recently in the Supreme Court.
So ask yourself the only question that matters. Where, in any of this, is the invitation? Did I ask anyone to join anything? Did I ask for money? Did I ask a single human being to take a single action — other than to read an article? You may take those three posts and that article into your deliberation room and read them from beginning to end as many times as you like. You will not find it. It is not there.
6. TWENTY YEARS OF MY OWN HEADLINES
The prosecution must also prove that I knew I was inviting support for Hamas. So let me show you what I have actually written about Hamas, over twenty years, under my own name. These are the titles of my articles:
We Support the Palestinian People of Gaza — not Hamas, March 2009.
Islamic Fascists Attack Children’s Summer Camp in Gaza, May 2010.
Hamas — Speaking with a Forked Tongue, December 2010.
The Lousy Hamas Government, February 2011.
Hamas Prevents Palestinian Students Studying Abroad, August 2011.
Hamas’s Attack on NGOs Resembles That of Israel, August 2011.
Hamas Pays the Price of Forced Islamicisation, April 2013.
How Israel Helped Create Hamas, July 2014.
Hamas Does Its Best to Make Palestinian Lives a Misery, February 2018.
Abbas and Hamas — Abuse and Torture of Palestinians, October 2018.
Ten years of headlines. I called them Islamic fascists. In print. In public. Under my own name. Do the titles of those blogs indicate support for Hamas? And these are only some of them. You can be sure that if my writings helped the prosecution in any way, they would have given them to you to read rather than objecting to them.
I have spent my political life supporting the secular, socialist tradition of Palestine. So when the prosecution tell you that on the morning of 7 October 2023 I woke up and decided to become a recruiter for the Islamic Resistance Movement, you are entitled to ask: on what planet?
7. WHY, THEN, AM I HERE? — ONE LAW FOR SOME
So if the words don’t say it, and the record contradicts it, you are entitled to ask the obvious question: why is this prosecution happening at all? Let me answer it with a comparison, and you may draw your own conclusions. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria — was a proscribed organisation in this country until October of last year. While it was still proscribed, and while its leader, who became Syria’s President, still had a ten million dollar bounty on his head, eminent British public figures — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, and Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP — travelled to Damascus to conduct a friendly, filmed interview with him. This is a regime whose forces have killed thousands of Christians, Druze and Alawites because of their religion. They came home and were effusive in their opinions about him, to audiences of hundreds of thousands. Nobody raided their homes at half past six in the morning. Nobody seized their devices to investigate their “mindset and ideology.” A decision was taken not to trouble them.
Now, when a law is implemented against certain people and not others, that goes against the first principle of the rule of law. Either laws are applicable to all, or to none. To apply them only to those whose opinions the government of the day disagrees with — that is the hallmark of a police state, not a democracy. And you do not have to take the point from me on trust, because the same double standard is written on a larger canvas. Parliament made genocide and war crimes offences under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Yet successive British governments have gone on supplying arms to what most of the world regard as a genocide in Gaza, and yet no minister has ever stood where I am standing.
This is not a new story. Nelson Mandela — whose statue stands today in Parliament Square, facing the Houses of Parliament — was described by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as a terrorist, and the movement he led as a terrorist movement. If this Act had been in force in those decades, that movement would have been proscribed — and anyone in Britain who wrote “we should congratulate them” would have been at risk of standing exactly where I am standing now. Mandela himself said: “The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements — and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism.”
Now let me be precise about what I am saying, because it is not what the prosecution may pretend I am saying. I am not comparing any organisation to Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not between organisations at all. It is between governments — then and now — and how easily they attach the word terrorist to whoever opposes the policy of the day. Today, Mandela is widely admired. The label of terrorism should be applied to those who are terrorists not those who are not.
8. THE STATE HAS ALWAYS PROSECUTED OPINIONS
Judges have always insisted that the trials before them are not political. They said it at the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912. Chief Prosecutor and Attorney General Sir Rufus Isaacs, emphasised that: “Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken.” That was also the view of the Judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, who handed out a sentence of 9 months to be served in the second division of prison, despite the plea of the jury for clemency. The Home Secretary immediately stepped in to have Pankhurst transferred to the First Division of prison — a division reserved for political prisoners. A century ago the state admitted what today it denies: that some prisoners were political.
And consider what this country has done, within my lifetime, with laws that prosecuted people for what they were and what they said. The law of blasphemous libel — repealed. The law of gross indecency, which criminalised sexual conduct between men and destroyed Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing was also repealed, and more than repealed: under the Alan Turing Law of 2017, every conviction was wiped out, as if it had never existed. Parliament itself has accepted that there are times when it has made mistakes, and the law of the day was wrong. The Editor of Gay News, Dennis Lemon, was the last person sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended in July 1977 for blasphemous libel for suggesting Jesus was gay. The Judge at his trial, Alan King Hamilton, stated that homosexuality was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. The judge at Oscar Wilde’s trial bemoaned the fact that he could only sentence him to 2 years in prison.
Judges have nearly always been the fiercest opponents of free speech. The reason is simple. As the Law Society Gazette pointed out on 25 June 2019, ‘Senior judges “most socially exclusive” of all professionals, 75% are Oxbridge educated and 65% having gone to private school.’ When the state prosecutes opinions, it always says it is prosecuting something else. And usually it eventually apologises, but usually too late.
Freedom of speech in this country was not granted to us from above, and it did not arrive with the European Convention. It was won through political struggle — at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where cavalry rode down women and children; by the Chartists at Newport who were brutally slaughtered for peacefully demanding democratic reforms in 1839. People died for the right I exercised on 7 October 2023: the right to publish an opinion the government doesn’t like.
Benjamin Franklin warned: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” George Orwell — a man who knew something about both socialism and dystopia — put it in one sentence: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And if you want the alternative philosophy — the philosophy of this prosecution — it was stated with admirable honesty by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin: “There is freedom of speech — but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”
Ladies and gentlemen, you may think that sentence sums up a dawn raid over a tweet rather well. I was arrested, not for anything I did, but for what I said. This case is not about terrorism. It is about freedom of speech. This is why the government’s own Independent Reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson KC, was critical of the new terrorism laws. I quote from his 2014 Report on Terrorism Legislation :
a) To afford over-broad discretions to Ministers, prosecutors and police is undesirable in itself. As the Supreme Court maintained in R v Gul, 91 it leaves citizens in the dark and risks undermining the rule of law.
b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.
I have committed no violence. I have threatened no one. I have incited nobody. Nobody in this courtroom suggests otherwise. I wrote an article. And for that article, I face a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. Fourteen years. For three posts and a blog. Ask yourself what kind of country are we becoming to send a seventy-two-year-old Jewish grandfather — a carer — to prison for fourteen years over three tweets and a blog article?
9. YOU — THE LAMP THAT SHOWS THAT FREEDOM LIVES
Which brings me, finally, to you, members of the Jury. Let me be clear about what I am asking of you, and what I am not. I am not asking you to set aside the law. Her Honour will direct you on the law, and you should follow her directions. I am not asking you to agree with my politics. You may think I am wrong about everything I believe, and it would change nothing about your task.
The role of the Judge is concerned with the law. The role of juries is to ensure justice is done. That is why successive governments have slowly whittled away at the right to trial by jury. The previous Justice Secretary David Lammy wanted to abolish them for half of those who are now entitled to a jury. I have no doubt that although Andy Burnham has stopped these proposals they will return.
Because here is what the law itself gives you. You are the sole judges of the facts, of the context, and of the meaning of words. Not the prosecution. Not the police analyst who selected the phrases. Twelve ordinary people, precisely because ordinary people know what words mean. The prosecution does not get to dictate that “please share my article” means “support Hamas.” That question belongs to you, and to nobody else in this building.
That is not an accident of our constitution. It is the whole point of it. Lord Patrick Devlin — one of the greatest judges this country produced — said: “Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.” The jury, he said, is “an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just.”
Dame Heather Hallett, who sat on the Court of Appeal for 14 years, 2005–17, gave the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the role of the jury. She is Chair of the COVID Inquiry and previously of the inquiry into the terrorist atrocity on 7/7. She said: “A jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial.”
There is a plaque inside the entrance to the Old Bailey. It commemorates the most famous legal case of all — Bushell’s. The jury in 1670, refused to convict two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, for the crime of unlawful preaching. For that refusal the jurors were locked up for two nights without food, water, fire — or a chamber pot. They did not budge. And out of their stubbornness, in Bushell’s case, came the right that you now hold: the right of a jury to deliver its verdict according to its conscience and its convictions, and to answer to no one for it.
I am asking you to do something far more modest than those twelve did. I am asking you to read three posts and an article, in their full context, with your own common sense — and to answer honestly the only two questions in this case. Were those words an invitation to support Hamas? And was I, a Jewish socialist with twenty years of published criticism of Hamas, knowingly recruiting for them?
And understand that your answer will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war. Can it really be the law of England that any of them — that any of you — will be condemned to fourteen years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever you answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten. If you are left in doubt as to whether I was genuinely inviting people to support a proscribed organisation — you must acquit. That is not politics. That is the law.
10. FINALLY
I told you at the beginning what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Let me end with why it should matter to you. I was born eight years after the gates of the camps were opened. It was British soldiers who opened the gates at Belsen. Whatever quarrels I have had with British governments — and you have heard today that I have had many — I have never once doubted what that meant.
I do not say that to ask for your sympathy. I say it because my family’s history taught me one thing above all others. The moment that matters is never the loud one. It is the quiet one — when ordinary, decent people are asked to go along with something that does not sit right with them, and they do, because it is easier, because the language is technical, because someone in authority has assured them that it is necessary. I ask you to ensure that no one else goes through what I have experienced.
Not merely a case like this hanging over my head for 3 years, but the harassment that I have experienced from the State. Five times in the past two years I have been debanked for what is called ‘regulatory reasons’. First was Nationwide Bank which I had been with for a quarter of a century, then HSBC which closed an account my wife and I opened for our son, Daniel’s disability benefits. Then First Direct which I had been with 33 years, just 3 fewer than the bank itself existed. Then this year Santander and Kent Reliance building society.
It is clear that some agency of the state — the NCA most likely — fed false and malicious information to the banks and under money laundering legislation they are not allowed to tell me. Lord Lane, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1980 to 1992, put it best of all in a House of Lords debate on April 7 1989: “Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband — it creeps up insidiously, step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that it is gone.”
You are twelve ordinary people, and this is one of the quiet moments. You are not being asked to make a protest, or to change any law. You are being asked to look at three short messages and one article, and to answer, on your conscience: was that an invitation to support Hamas — and did I know that that was what I was doing? Although I am on trial today, it is really freedom of speech in this country that is on trial. The pretext for this attack is terrorism. However that is all it is. A pretext. I will finish with a quote from one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who said: “Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither.”
Thank you, members of the jury.
