Tony Greenstein, the veteran Jewish anti-Zionist activist, has been acquitted of inviting support for Hamas in a case that placed Britain’s terrorism laws and the limits of political speech under intense scrutiny.
Greenstein, 72, faced a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 over social media posts published on 7 October 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Prosecutors argued that his references to a “Gaza ghetto uprising” amounted to an invitation to support Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.
Greenstein denied that interpretation throughout the trial at Kingston Crown Court. He argued that his posts expressed support for Palestinian resistance to occupation rather than support for Hamas itself.
In his closing speech to the jury, Greenstein stressed that Hamas was not named in the three posts at the centre of the case. “The prosecution invite you to supply the name yourselves — because I did not supply it,” he said.
He also explained why he had used the phrase “Gaza Ghetto Uprising”. Greenstein drew a comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, describing it as one of the proudest moments in Jewish history. He said he had used the term “ghetto” deliberately to describe Gaza and argued that his support was for an uprising against what he regarded as oppression, rather than for Hamas as an organisation.
A further issue was the phrase “Please share”, which prosecutors treated as part of an invitation to support Hamas. Greenstein told the jury that, as a writer and blogger, he routinely used those words to encourage people to read and circulate his work. “Asking people to read what you have written is not asking them to support an organisation,” he argued.
The prosecution also relied heavily on Greenstein’s statement that “Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well-planned and audacious attack.” Greenstein maintained that this was not an endorsement of Hamas and pointed to his extensive history of publicly criticising the organisation. His closing speech listed articles with titles including “Hamas — Speaking with a Forked Tongue”, “The Lousy Hamas Government” and “Hamas Does Its Best to Make Palestinian Lives a Misery.”
He told the jury that the prosecution had to establish not simply that Hamas was proscribed, but that his words invited support for Hamas and that he knew this was what he was doing. “Three things. All three. Sure of each,” he said. He emphasised that the case was not about whether jurors agreed with his political views.
Greenstein also argued that supporting a particular action by an organisation did not necessarily amount to supporting the organisation itself. He pointed to his decades of political writing and asked the jury whether a Jewish secular socialist who had repeatedly criticised Hamas was a plausible “recruiting sergeant” for the Islamist movement.
In a particularly personal section of his address, Greenstein referred to his Jewish family history. He said his father’s family had come from Poland and that most of his relatives were murdered at Treblinka. He described the Holocaust as “the empty chairs at my family’s table” and said his opposition to Zionism had developed from his study of the history of Israel and Palestine.
Greenstein ended by making a direct appeal to the jury. He said they were not being asked to agree with his politics but to decide whether his words actually constituted an invitation to support Hamas. “If you are left in doubt as to whether I was genuinely inviting people to support a proscribed organisation, you must acquit,” he told them.
He concluded with a warning about the wider implications of the case. “Although I am on trial today,” he said, “it is really freedom of speech in this country that is on trial.”
The jury subsequently returned a not-guilty verdict in a case that highlights the difficult boundary between political expression, support for resistance movements and criminalised support for proscribed organisations.
For Greenstein’s supporters, the verdict represents an important victory for free expression. Critics, meanwhile, have argued that the case demonstrates the difficulty of applying terrorism legislation to political speech made online in the highly charged context of the Israel-Gaza war.
The verdict does not alter Hamas’s status as a proscribed organisation in Britain. But it does underline the importance of context, intention and the precise meaning of words when terrorism legislation is applied to political expression.
