On 12 January 2026 at Kingston Crown Court, Free Speech on Palestine Will Be on Trial

Jail UK Starmer & The Real Criminals! Rally At UK Consulate in San Francisco To Demand Hands Off Tony Greenstein

Platform Films Interview & Feature

Tony Greenstein’s first speech

At the Old Bailey on January 31 I appeared before Dame Parmjit Kaur "Bobbie" Cheema-Grubb, the first ever Asian High Court Judge. In the case before me she granted bail to a young man accused of sharing ISIS propaganda despite the Prosecution’s objection, albeit with very strict bail conditions. I guess she must count as some kind of liberal given that the Court of Appeal today under Lady Justice Sue Carr is an extremely reactionary court.

Dame Parmjit Kaur "Bobbie" Cheema-Grubb

Today’s Court of Appeal is perhaps the most reactionary since Lord Denning retired in 1982. Denning said of the Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4, all of whom were innocent and cleared, that

We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get them released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied.... It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned.

Tony Greenstein's 2nd speech at his Old Bailey hearing on 31 January 2025

My barrister made the case for having the trial at the Old Bailey, because, having joint custody of an autistic son, I had good reasons for being in reach of Brighton easily. Lady Grubb however decided that judicial convenience should come before my needs.

I arrived at the court at 9 am to meet my legal team only to find they were not there. I went out again to what became a large demonstration outside. After going in again at 10.00 I came out around 11.30 to find that the demonstration had grown and I made a second, shorter speech explaining what had happened.

Chanting at on 31 January 2025 at the demonstration outside the Old Bailey

There is a case management hearing on June 6 and a timetable for the serving of evidence, a defence and similar matters.

However none of this should obscure the politics behind the trial and the determination, first of the previous government and now this one to criminalise anyone sympathising with the Palestinian resistance.

I am charged with inviting support for a proscribed organisation, Hamas. It is an easily provable lie. I support the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s genocide and obviously that includes Hamas.

In 1982, UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 affirmed the legitimacy of the struggle for independence and liberation from foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle. This resolution openly recognized the right to use force against foreign illegal occupation.

Chris Williamson on Tony Greenstein's prosecution

Article 1(4) of the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions (1977) classifies conflicts in which peoples are fighting against alien occupation and racist regimes as armed conflicts. Individuals engaging in such “fighting,” if captured, should be afforded the status of prisoners of war, meaning their fighting is legitimate.

For further elucidation see Do Palestinians have the right to resist, and what are the limits? by Ihsan Adel of Law for Palestine. But you don’t need to go to the law books to know that the right to resist an occupation of one’s territory is an inalienable right of any oppressed people. That Israel has been declared to be in an illegal occupation of Gaza by the International Court of Justice is sufficient in itself.

All nations have the right to resist occupation. Would anyone deny that the French, Poles and Czechs had the right to resist Nazi occupation during the war? The Nazis also termed their opponents ‘terrorists’. Even Starmer and his fool of a Foreign Secretary Lammy might understand that.

Why then is there any equivocation over the rights of the Palestinians to resist a military occupation. How is it that the Palestinians are terrorists whilst the Ukrainians are freedom fighters? There is but one explanation and that is imperialism and its racist twin. Racism is part of the DNA of the British state but that is no reason to accept it.

The description of Hamas as a ‘terrorist’ organisation is also racist. It demonises Palestinians in a way that isn’t applied to Europeans. It assumes that they have lesser rights than the French because they aren’t White. Israel has no right whatsoever to be occupying an inch of Palestinian land, including I would add 1948 Palestine.

The irony is that it was Israel that played a major part in bringing Hamas into existence because it saw them as a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism. See Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It, the Washington Post’s How Israel helped create Hamas and the Wall Street Journal’s How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas. Those who call Hamas ‘terrorists’ indulge in the purest hypocrisy.

Israel was following the United States example. It birthed ISIS from al-Qaeda in Iraq as a means of dividing the Iraqi Resistance on ethnic lines. The US also helped create Al Qaeda and the Taliban in order to fight the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the late 1980’s.

As Jonathan Cook so ably demonstrated in ‘Thirty years of Middle East lies just keep coming back to bite us’

The West’s 'war on terror' was built on a series of deceptions to persuade us that our leaders were crushing Islamist extremism. In truth, they were nourishing it’.

In the case of Hamas the justification for proscribing their political wing was not only paper thin but it is an incitement to genocide. Hamas is a political party as well as a guerrilla organisation. It has some 20,000 members who work in government, hospitals, schools etc. If its civilian members are classed as ‘terrorists’ then that is effectively justifying Israel’s bombing of those schools and hospitals. This is why Starmer, Biden and Scholtz are complicit in Israel’s genocide. They have laid the political basis for it.

The rationale, if one can call it that, for proscribing Hamas in 2019 was that:

Hamas IDQ was proscribed by the UK in March 2001. At the time it was HM government’s assessment that there was a sufficient distinction between the so called political and military wings of Hamas, such that they should be treated as different organisations, and that only the military wing was concerned in terrorism. The government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist organisation. [note that there is no explanation as to what this assessment consisted of – apart from increasing pressure from Zionist organisations to do so].

Hamas commits and participates in terrorism. 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. [by this calculation the thousands of deadly Israeli missiles which have killed thousands of Palestinian children must make Israel a terrorist state a thousand times over].

Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, frequently use incendiary balloons to launch attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. There was a spate of incendiary balloon attacks from Gaza during June and July 2021, causing fires in communities in southern Israel that resulted in serious damage to property. [so ‘serious damage to property’ is more important than a starvation siege on Gaza for 18 years, the deliberate shooting of unarmed civilians in the Great Return march etc? This ‘justification’ reeks of racist hypocrisy].

Hamas also prepares for acts of terrorism. One incident of preparatory activity is that Hamas recently launched summer camps in Gaza which focus on training groups, including minors, to fight. This is evidence of Hamas being responsible for running terrorist training camps in the region. In a press statement, Hamas described the aim of these camps as to “ignite the embers of Jihad in the liberation generation, cultivate Islamic values and prepare the expected victory army to liberate Palestine”. [Israel also has military training camps for its youth and don’t its fundamentalist messianic settlers cultivate genocidal values?

Rabbi Dov Lior, the spiritual mentor of Kahanist Police Minister Ben Gvir proclaimed that

‘There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them... A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."?

Does this not qualify to classify Israel as a terrorist state?]

Racism and corruption lie behind Tory/Labour support for Israel’s genocide. Hypocrisy runs like a red streak through the prosecution of Sarah Wilkinson, Natalie Strecker, Richard Medhurst and myself. It is based on a series of lies and half truths.

The irony is that if there is any group which I support in Gaza it is the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine not the Islamist Hamas. There is no reason why, as a Jewish atheist I should support an Islamic group. There are no articles on my blog which support Hamas politically, quite the contrary. But the CPS are bringing the prosecution in order to silence me and others not because we are ‘terrorist’ supporters. See for example:

We Support the Palestinian people of Gaza not Hamas 7.3.09.

PFLP Subject to Hamas Attacks 3.5.10.

Hamas - Speaking With a Forked Tongue 26.12.10.

Gaza Youth Demand Freedom 2.1.11.

The lousy Hamas government 15.2.11.

How Israel Created Hamas 31.12.11.

Hamas Pays the Price of Forced ‘Islamicisation’ and acting as a Policeman of Social Morality 17.4.13.

HAMAS - When Israel & Netanyahu Sang from a Different Songsheet 3.8.14.

Strange that: Netanyahu says ISIS = Hamas - Is Netanyahu a liar or is Netanyahu a liar?

Abbas and Hamas Abuse and Torture of Palestinians is a Gift to the Israeli Government 25.10.18.

My case will be heard before a judge and jury. We will see whether, as is often the case, the judge will act as a second prosecutor and rule out our defences. This has been par for the course with Palestine Action and climate activists’ trials.

I have no doubt that the state will do its best to secure a guilty verdict by fair means or foul. I understand that the decision to prosecute in this case went up to the Attorney General’s office. The Attorney General Richard Hermer is a Zionist. His deputy, Sarah Sackman MP is Vice-Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement which spearheaded the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign in the Labour Party under Corbyn. This is the corruption of government and our legal system.

Tony Greenstein

See Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States: Chris Hedges