Palestine Action Trial of the Shenstone 6– Update – The British State is Intent on Criminalising Opposition to Elbit’s Death Factory

‘This is not a political trial it is a criminal trial’ – so sing Judge and Prosecution in harmony

I promised in my last blog to provide an update on the trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court in which I’m charged, together with 5 others, with having in my possession ‘articles with intent to destroy or damage’ property belonging to Elbit.

Overwhelmed as I am by messages of support (see comments) the supporters of Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Israel's genocidalists are crossing their fingers in the hope I will be locked up!

I was informed by my barrister, Danielle Manson from Garden Court Chambers that the reason why I am the lead defendant is because of my blog of two years ago!  A rare honour indeed. No doubt I shall be cross-examined on every word and past participle.

There is one theme that Judge Chambers and Prosecutor Deborah Gould are agreed on and that is that this trial has nothing to do with politics.  It’s only about criminal conduct and criminal damage in particular.

If Chambers and Gould are to be believed, then 6 people, most of whom did not even know each other beforehand, conspired to engage in a spot of vandalism on the morning of March 9^th for no other reason than that they felt in a destructive mood. Quite why we didn’t focus on breaking a few windows nearer home or vandalizing a phone box is one of life’s mysteries.

Six members of the German Jewish Resistance Group in Nazi Germany Who in May 1942 set fire to Goebbel's Soviet Paradise Exhibition in Berlin's Lustgarten. They had broken the law and were beheaded. According to Judge and  Prosecutor in the trial, adherence to the law is a supreme value

There is therefore a deliberate attempt to exclude or play down the real reasons for what happened, i.e. the role of Elbit in manufacturing drones such as Hermes 450 which has been responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian civilians, to say nothing of its supply of drones to the Indian army for use in Kashmir and its supply of weaponry to the genocidal junta in Burma.

Herbert Baum - executed leader of the German Jewish anti-Nazi Baum Group - died under torture

Jo Wadsworth, the Blairite co-editor of the Brighton & Hove News published an article on the case today. No doubt she and the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle are salivating at the prospect of me being convicted!

Today the jury was whittled down from 18 to 12. It was thus only on the afternoon of the fourth day of trial that the Prosecution opened its case with lurid tales of conspiracies and plots. Factually she was all at sea despite copious amounts of information supplied by mobile phone companies on our whereabouts on the night of March 8/morning of March 9.

Thus I was supposed to have left Brighton at 5.30 when I picked up the van and arrived by 9.30. In fact I didn’t leave Brighton until about 7.30 and didn’t arrive until after midnight. Just a small point but it shows the sloppiness of the Prosecution despite the massive powers of search they have under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Demonstration March 29th outside Shenstone's factory in Walsall

Thus tomorrow (Friday) the trial begins proper as the Prosecution opens its case. However as Judge Chambers has other business, sentencing a rapist and murderer in the afternoon, there will only be a short session from 10.00-12.00. 

Thus ends the first week. The second week will consist of only 3 days because of Easter and the third week will be four days because of Easter Monday so this trial is likely to continue into the third week of April.

However this also gives people time to mobilize around the issues in the case, which is the right to take action against those who deliberately flout international human rights law in search of profit. Britain is signed up to the UN and European Human Rights Conventions but they are observed in the breach and a blind eye is turned to arms exports by Britain.

In June 2019 the Court of Appeal held that the government’s export of arms to Saudia Arabia to be unlawful. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss blithely ignored the ruling and proceeded regardless. It was all a ‘mistake’ she said.  Not a defence I suspect we will be able to use.

Tony Greenstein 

This blog has been legally vetted and there are a number of things I have been forced to omit for legal reasons which will become clear later