Unanimous acquittal of Tony Greenstein affirms supporting Palestinian liberation is not a crime

Kingston — CAGE welcomes today's unanimous not guilty verdict for Tony Greenstein, delivered by a jury at Kingston Crown Court in under two hours.

Greenstein, a 72-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist writer and activist, faced prosecution under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 over three tweets posted on 7 October 2023 linking to his own blog. The Crown's case turned on a single, contested proposition: that supporting the “Gaza Ghetto Uprising”, amounted in law to inviting support for Hamas.

Greenstein delivered his own closing speech to the jury. His central argument went to the heart of the case against him: that supporting an act of resistance against a colonial power is not the same as inviting support for a proscribed organisation. It is a distinction the jury, deliberating for under two hours, plainly accepted.

The disproportion of the case was stark. Greenstein's home was raided and his devices seized, and he lived without them for three years while the case dragged through the system. For three tweets and a blog post, the state exposed him to a potential sentence of up to fourteen years and spent three years and untold public money attempting to secure a conviction. No such scrutiny is applied to speech in support of Israel's actions in Gaza. The message from the CPS was unambiguous: support for Palestinian life and liberation will be treated as a matter for the courts, while support for the state carrying out a genocide will not.

Following the verdict, Tony Greenstein told CAGE:

“It must be a great disappointment to the Jewish Chronicle who highlighted the prosecution case, always in quotes of course, that the jury has once again found someone involved in Palestine solidarity to be innocent. Which is of course why Lammy and Starmer want to get rid of juries, because we know ordinary men and women do not support the genocide in Palestine.”

“The terrorism act is not about terrorism - it’s about terrorising people in this country and stopping them from supporting national liberation and resistance movements. It’s an absurd act - it’s an act of repression against Muslims in this country, it is not about terrorism. Those who introduced the act were the very ones who were responsible for terrorism.”

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE International, said: 

"Despite efforts by the police and the prosecution to intimidate and suppress voices against Israel's genocide in Gaza, the jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict in record time.They saw through the politics being peddled through the courts and rightly rejected it. 

It will come as no surprise when calls by the British Security State to restrict jury trials grow. The public are waking up to the true nature of the Terrorism Act 2000: an expansion of arbitrary state power that erodes our fundamental rights.

Today was a victory for freedom of speech and the right to dissent - and a reminder in the most uncertain terms to the State that its days of hiding behind terrorism laws are over. These laws must be abolished now."

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