A British Jewish pro-Palestine activist has been cleared of allegations of inviting support for Hamas after a jury acquitted him over social media posts made following the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Tony Greenstein, 72, from Brighton, was found not guilty at Kingston Crown Court of one count of inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organisation.
The charge related to three social media posts in which Greenstein expressed support for what he described as a “Palestinian uprising” while also commenting on the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel in 2023.
After just over two hours of deliberations, the jury returned a unanimous not guilty verdict.
Greenstein, whose father was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, told the court that although he believed the October 7 attack was “justified”, he did not support Hamas.
Speaking to supporters outside the court, Greestein explained how he felt compelled to speak out against Zionism, Israel the the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000.
“We have a government which pursues support for genocide at the very same time as it prosecutes those who are opposed to genocide, whether it’s Palestine Action, the Filton 25, The Barclay Five, and myself. And these prosecutions for terrorism of people who are not terrorists are increasingly being seen through by juries. The judge was not happy. If there’d been a judge only trial as David Lammy would have liked that I would have been convicted without a doubt. But the jury of 12 men and women decided that I was not a terrorist and that terrorism is not opposition to genocide in Gaza. And
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay updated on the latest news and updates from around the Muslim world!
“I stood here as a Jewish person and I made it clear to the jury that my opposition to Zionism was because I was Jewish and Zionism is in the tradition of the Nazis who persecuted Jews. We have to take out from this because there are many other people who are still on trial, the Filton 25, we have to defend each and every one of them because opposing genocide is not a crime, supplying arms to Israel to perpetrate a genocide is a crime and that is a nature of our judicial system. They prosecute the wrong people. Under the current UK terrorism act, the so-called definition of terrorism would have made the French Partisans and also the Warsaw ghetto resistance also into terrorists if the government had so desired. It’s an act of repression and it’s used against Muslims in this country. The terrorism act has to go.”
“The Gaza ghetto uprising”
The court heard that one of Greenstein’s social media posts stated: “Please share. Full support for the Gaza ghetto uprising.”
Jurors were also shown links to Greenstein’s blog, including a passage which the prosecution alleged amounted to an invitation to support Hamas.
It read: “The time to fight is now. Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack on the Zionist enemy.”
Hamas are a Palestinian armed group which has ruled over Gaza since 2007. The group has fought multiple wars against Israel and was proscribed as a terror organisation by the UK in 2001.
Greenstein rejected the prosecution’s interpretation of his words, arguing that describing Hamas as deserving “congratulations” was a figure of speech.
He described the assertion that his posts amounted to inviting support for Hamas as “absurd.”
Giving evidence on Thursday, Greenstein spoke extensively about the situation facing Palestinians and described Gaza as “a cage in which people lived.”
He told the court that Palestinians had been “locked up” for 57 years and accused the “ruling class in this country” of turning “a blind eye to genocide.”
“When a colonial power holds another people down, they have the right to resist,” he said.
Judge’s reaction
Judge Sarah Plaschkes KC warned Greenstein against turning the proceedings into a “political forum” and told him that the jury was “not concerned with events in the Middle East.”
Greenstein nevertheless sought to explain the context in which he had made his comments, describing Gaza as a “human prison.”
“Imagine you could not escape 25 miles north of here and five miles wide, and imagine having to live there and not being allowed out,” he told the court.
The jury also heard that Greenstein had written extensively on his blog criticising Hamas on many other occassions.
His blog contains more than 3,500 posts, including articles titled “Hamas does its best to make Palestinian lives a misery”, while another urged those with “illusions” about Hamas to “think again.”
The defence argued that these writings demonstrated that Greenstein was not a supporter of Hamas, despite his comments allegedly praising aspects of the October 7 attack.
The context and ongoing controversy
The Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killed around 1,200 people, while 251 others were taken hostage. Israel subsequently launched a genocidal military assault on Gaza which collectively punished the entire Palestinian population of the besieged strip.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military operations since the start of the war. The United Nations has previously said that the ministry’s figures have generally been considered reliable.
Greenstein’s acquittal comes amid continued controversy over the use of terrorism legislation against activists and individuals accused of allegedly expressing support for proscribed organisations in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation on 5 July 2025 under the Terrorism Act 2000, following a government decision announced after a series of increasingly disruptive direct actions, including an incident at RAF Brize Norton in which activists damaged military aircraft.
The government argued that the group’s campaign of serious property damage and alleged willingness to use violence had crossed the legal threshold into terrorism.
The decision was highly controversial because Palestine Action was primarily known as a direct-action protest group targeting companies and institutions linked to Israel’s arms industry, rather than an armed organisation targeting civilians.
Critics, including Amnesty International and Liberty, argued that existing criminal laws were sufficient to prosecute alleged criminal damage and that using terrorism legislation risked criminalising political protest, freedom of expression and association. The decision also effectively made membership of, or certain expressions of support for, Palestine Action criminal offences punishable by up to 14 years in prison, lumping a direct action group in Britain alongside violent armed extremist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
