The state is crushing the tenets of UK law to silence opponents of genocide

~ Tabitha Troughton ~

Dogs savaged children. Mothers howled with grief. Children screamed in pain. Among it all was the frantic wailing of ambulances, on their way to another massacre. All these things have been heard live in Gaza, but these sounds were recorded.

They were being played, according to numerous reports, by Israeli quadcopter drones, hovering over Gazan buildings and tents packed with people fleeing from endless bombing. If people emerged, lured out by the noises to help, the drone could shoot them.

Drones manufactured by Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems, in the Filton plant outside Bristol, had been the main target of four young UK activists found guilty of criminal damage earlier this month. And yet, instead of being sentenced for that offence, they can now be sentenced as terrorists. The jury were never told that the presiding judge had decided on this, secretly, in a pre-trial hearing, the year before. The press, and the defendants’ families, were muzzled.

Justice Johnson had ruled that there appeared to be a “terrorist connection”: the activists’ purpose could be to “damage property to be made available to the Israeli government and thereby influence the Israeli government”. Under Section 1 of the UK’s 2000 Terrorism Act, the definition of “terrorism” does indeed include “serious damage to property” “designed to influence” “the government” “of a country other than the United Kingdom”.

It is a patently absurd idea that a handful of activists could seek to “influence” the Israeli government, practically or morally, by expressing the UK public’s overwhelming revulsion at its sadistic genocidal horror.

Israel has long positioned itself as a “drone superpower” – using them to kill, maim and terrorise Palestinian civilians for years. Its innumerable drones are manufactured inside Israel as well as in China, Serbia, Morocco, India, and elsewhere. The Israeli military has just announced a new Israeli factory to supply it with “thousands of drones within two months”.

But reality is barely a defence. Outside the Filton defendants’ trial, nine people were arrested last month while holding signs declaring that  “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit according to their conscience” and “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth”. Inside, Justice Johnson had banned barristers from telling the jury this, and banned all mention of the defendants’ motivations. One of the barristers, Rajiv Menon KC, faced unprecedented contempt of court proceedings after his speech worked around these restrictions. This has now stalled, after an appeal, but may still get approval from the Attorney General.

So the dance goes on. The state continues its crushing of what the public fondly believe to be the tenets of UK law, as it does in the case of climate change protestors, to silence opponents of genocide.

A jury failed to convict Majid Freeman for supporting terrorism by, inter alia, reposting “a 2024 video clip from Middle East Eye that showed an Israeli soldier shooting an elderly Palestinian woman in Gaza, which the prosecution presented as evidence of his support for Hamas”. The court has ordered a retrial. Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, were convicted for “reportedly (leading) a group of people to lay flowers commemorating Palestinians killed in Gaza at the headquarters of the BBC”. They are appealing.

Meanwhile, on the streets, the unholy alliance between the UK’s far-right and pro-Israel fanatics continues to build. The small counter-protests against the Gaza genocide marches used to simply wave the Israeli flag. Now they are supplemented by almost equal numbers of Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses. Last year, Israeli flags waved at the last Tommy Robinson march, accompanying chants of “Who the fuck is Allah?”.

Robinson himself was officially invited to Israel, while a recent high profile anti-semitism rally outside Downing Street included Nigel Farage, the man who at school was merrily bullying fellow students by saying that “Hitler was right”.

Absurdity piles on absurdity. Metropolitan police chief, Mark Rowley, publicly accuses the vast, peaceful, London anti-genocide marches of “anti-semitism”, “with a deliberate ‘intent’ to assemble at, or march past, synagogues”; when the opposite is true. A man is arrested for setting fire to what the headlines describe as “a former synagogue”, when it fact it is being developed as a future mosque. An extreme mentally ill person attacks three people on one day; two of them are Jewish. Starmer calls it an “anti-semitic attack”; headlines in the press and the Crown Prosecution Service fail to mention the first victim, who was a Muslim.

And the four Filton defendants – Charlotte Head, 29; Samuel Corner, 23; Leona Kamio, 30; and Fatema Rajwani, 21 – have been sent back to prison by Justice Johnson, “provisionally” until 12 June to await judgement. The defendants, these potential “terrorists”, in fact rather lovely young people, have already spent 18 months locked up.

Meanwhile last week Israeli drones shot and killed a father in Lebanon, chased his 12 year old daughter as she tried to flee, and killed her too. Lebanon itself, bombed and shattered, is being turned into Gaza.