How Fair Was It to Label Hamas Terrorists?

The decision has led to unspeakable consequences for the innocent

(LONDON, UK) - So Hamas have finally got around to appealing against the UK Government branding their political wing a terrorist organisation.

In their legal submission, they say "the proscription has hindered the group's ability to broker a political solution to the conflict, stifled conversations in securing a long-term political settlement, criminalised ordinary Palestinians residing in Gaza, and undermined the possibility of a peaceful settlement".

They also argue that being branded terrorists infringes fundamental rights and has a disproportionate impact on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and open debate and political expression, which makes sensible journalism and public discourse on Israel's actions in Palestine impossible.

Hamas’s submission also points out that Britain's Terrorism Act "covers all groups and organisations around the world that use violence to achieve political objectives, including the Israeli armed forces, the Ukrainian Army and, indeed, the British armed forces".

And it claims proscription obstructs humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip because any form of assistance can be labelled "terrorism" if it is "seen as supporting a group that has been labelled a terrorist organisation".

On the other hand, proscribing Hamas was a clever move because it makes it so much easier for Israel’s stooges at Westminster to avoid having to explain that regime's far worse war crimes and crimes against humanity.

We have to thank Priti Patel who, while International Development Secretary, was so taken-in by Zionist claptrap and so adoring of Israel that, in 2017, she reportedly had around a dozen meetings with Israeli politicians and organisations during a family holiday in Israel without telling the Foreign Office, her civil servants or her boss Theresa May, and without government officials present. This was not only a middle finger to the Ministerial Code of Conduct but a gross breach of security.

She was also said to have tried persuading colleagues to send British taxpayers’ money as aid for an Israeli forces project in the Golan Heights.... and she actually visited the Golan. As everyone and his dog knows, the Golan Heights is Syrian territory stolen in 1967 by the Israelis who have illegally occupied it ever since. Touring it with the thieving occupation army was another serious diplomatic blunder.

Patel’s meetings are said to have been arranged by Lord Polak, an official of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s who joined the Conservative Friends of Israel in 1989, and served as its director for 26 years until appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for political service and made a life peer.

It’s difficult to see what political service Polak performed for anyone other than the Israeli regime.

Patel was forced to resign but later restored to favour and promoted to Home Secretary. She proscribed Hamas’s political wing in 2021 with hardly a murmur of opposition. There seemed no legitimate reason for doing so unless it was part of the UK/US/Israel axis aim to bring about coercive regime change. But would that be legal? Are the Palestinians to be denied self-determination and the right to choose their own government? Well, yes, so it seems.

What’s to fear from Hamas?

No one in the UK Government has properly explained, probably because no-one has bothered to sit down and shoot the breeze with them. Instead they eagerly welcome Netanyahu and his thugs with red-carpet hugs, handshakes and vows of affection and endless co-operation, and soak up the nonsense they talk.

And has anyone at Westminster bothered to read Hamas’s 2017 Charter? If so, did they notice Sections 16 and 20? They are reasonably in tune with international law while the Israeli government pursues policies that definitely are not.

16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts.

Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.

Under international law the correct way to deal with the threat posed by Hamas is (and always has been) by requiring Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and theft of Palestinian resources.

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), who claim to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, said of the genocide in Gaza: “We’re organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle.”

Here’s an extract from their no-nonsense statement on the hostilities in Palestine:

“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons.

Palestinians’ homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes orchards, and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment.

The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.”

The Zionists' Dalet Plan, or Plan D

It’s not just America’s complicity and Britain’s 110-years of betrayal that have brought us to this appalling situation. Plan D was the Zionists’ terror blueprint for their brutal takeover of the Palestinian homeland drawn up 77 years ago by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency, and relentlessly pursued by the Israeli regime to this day.

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed ahead of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there.

It’s a sign of the shoddy times we live in that the lawyers involved in the appeal case felt obliged to state that Hamas did not pay them or the experts who provided evidence for their submission, as it is illegal to receive funds from a group designated as a terrorist organisation.

Hopefully their appeal will skewer the Government’s utter hypocrisy and undying support for the real terrorists in the Holy Land. Priti Patel will have to reckon with the consequences of her actions in terms of the huge numbers of innocent lives lost or reduced to unimaginable misery.

I hasten to add that I am no supporter of Hamas. I support truth and justice, simple as that. And the Laws of Cricket.