On December 20th, I was woken up at 7 a.m. by the sound of my doorbell ringing. There were two police officers at the door.

I have been informed that I am being arrested on suspicion of committing an offense under Section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 of the United Kingdom.

The relevant section of the law states: “A person commits an offense if (a) he or she expresses an opinion or belief that supports a proscribed organization and (b) in doing so he or she is careless as to whether a person is directed towards whom the expression is intended.” “The aim is to encourage people to support a banned organization.”

The officers explained to me that my alleged crime was committed by an individual tweet I posted about Hamas on November 15th.

Since I had just gone to bed and was somewhat sleepy, all I could initially say was that my arrest was “Orwellian” and that we were clearly living in a dystopia now. I found it difficult to accept that in the 21st century UK I was being arrested not for something I had done, but for expressing an opinion.

I wrote the tweet in question in response to a Zionist who lured people online by saying “support Hamas”, which has long been considered a terrorist organization in the UK, and was arrested as a result.

This person identified himself only as James and said to me:

“Just tweet it
I support Hamas!’
3 words are enough to tweet and then we will know where you stand.”

I refused to take the bait and replied, “I support the Palestinians, that’s enough,” before saying, “And I support Hamas against the Israeli army.”

Looking back, I believe that, especially for a social media platform like X, this was a carefully calibrated and accurate expression of my genuine opinion.

That day I did not say, “I support Hamas politically,” for the simple reason that such a statement would not be true.

As a Jewish atheist, socialist and secularist, I obviously do not support Hamas or any other Islamist or religious group. However, that does not mean that I do not respect and admire the resistance that Hamas is putting up against Israel’s genocidal army.

I have often criticized Hamas in the past. For example, in February 2011, in one Article In my personal blog entitled “The Lousy Hamas Government,” I criticized the group for its initial refusal to support the Egyptian people’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak. Over the years, I have also written articles and blog posts criticizing the group for its use of torture, its support of the two-state solution, its oppression of women, and attacks on secular Palestinian youth demanding their freedom. My blog entry The title “We Support the Palestinian People of Gaza, Not Hamas” was published almost 15 years ago, in 2009. I have also written extensively about how Hamas was a creation of the Israeli state – an important fact that the West tends to forget today.

Despite all this, I explained to my police interrogator, I actually support Hamas’s resistance to the Israeli military. Because when it comes to resisting Israel’s murderous war against the Palestinians in Gaza, I would support the devil himself – just as I would have supported the Polish Home Army’s resistance to the Nazis in World War II, despite their anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, my experience of being arrested simply for expressing a pro-Palestinian opinion online is far from unique. In recent months, British police have redoubled their long-standing efforts to suppress free speech on Palestine by equating any expression of support for the Palestinians with support for Hamas. Mick Napier, the founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was arrested a few days before me for a similar “offense”.

This is because since the start of Israel’s recent war on Gaza and the public protests against it, there has been unprecedented political pressure on the police to keep an eye on pro-Palestinian voices and, if necessary, to silence and sanction them.

These renewed efforts to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and speech were far from subtle.

For example, the BBC, the voice of the British establishment, casually stated in a news report in October that the country’s widespread pro-Palestinian demonstrations were in fact “pro-Hamas” (the corporation had to retract this assessment after a public backlash). ) and Interior Minister Suella Braverman defined them as “hate marches” in which “sick” anti-Semites took part.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made his own feelings clear when he announced during a visit to a Jewish school in London that the government had given police “all the tools, powers and guidance” needed to police these pro-Palestinian protests, adding added: “Anti-Semitism will not exist.”

Finally, Braverman went a step too far and accused London’s Metropolitan Police of favoring pro-Palestinian protesters, forcing Sunak to fire them.

All of this was an extension of the British political and media establishment’s longstanding efforts to portray anti-Zionism and support for Palestinians as anti-Semitic in order to protect Israel and advance Britain’s imperial foreign policy agenda.

To this end, the campaign, falsely dubbed the “Campaign against Anti-Semitism,” even suggested that repeated pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London had forced British Jews to “leave their homes,” “remove their Star of David necklaces and hide their yarmulkes.” This is despite the fact that the Jewish bloc was consistently over 1,000 strong at recent demonstrations in London.

I have personally taken part in many such demonstrations in recent months and have seen firsthand how warmly Jewish people are welcomed into these spaces. At one protest, a group of Muslim women even chanted “Judaism yes, Zionism no.”

Today the British government, with the full support of the Labor opposition under Keir Starmer and much of the British mainstream media, is attempting to use anti-Semitic smears to legitimize its relentless attacks on the most basic democratic freedoms of Britons. All Jews support Israel, they argue, so any criticism of the “Jewish state,” including criticism of its genocidal war on Gaza, is inherently anti-Semitic. Of course they are not pro-Palestinian protesters, but this argument, which implies that all Jews support Israel’s policy of starving Palestinian civilians, bombing hospitals and slaughtering children just because they are Jewish, is truly anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, many Jews who are vocally critical of Israel and its war on Gaza are either ignored and erased by the media and political class, or, as in my case, subjected to bogus persecution and prosecution. The same is true in Germany, where anti-Zionist Jews face state repression because they do not agree with the narrative that Israel is the embodiment of what it means to be Jewish.

What made my arrest possible for a tweet in support of the Palestinian resistance was Hamas’ status as a banned terrorist organization.

The British state designated Hamas’ military wing as a terrorist organization in 2001 and extended that ban to the group’s political wing in 2021.

In its policy paper on the issue, the British government justified this decision by saying that Hamas had “carried out indiscriminate rocket or mortar attacks and raids against Israeli targets.” “During the conflict in May 2021, over 4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel,” it said, “killing civilians, including two Israeli children.”

These reasons are of course ridiculous and only serve to expose the hypocrisy of the British state. If firing unguided rockets at an occupying army that has state-of-the-art defense systems and killing a handful of civilians is enough to brand Hamas a “terrorist” organization, then Israel has dropped tons of explosives on a besieged population and who murdered around 24,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, within three months is undoubtedly also a terrorist organization and should be outlawed as a terrorist organization. But those who unconditionally support Israel and its attacks on the Palestinians will not find police officers on their doorstep.

The British state is seeking to criminalize all support and solidarity with the Palestinians and is attacking our right to freedom of expression as enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, just to ensure that Israel can continue with its blatant actions Violations of international law.

Over the past three months, the Israeli military has bombed refugee camps, hospitals and schools. It killed more than 100 journalists, many in targeted attacks alongside their extended families, and shot worshipers shielding themselves in a church. The total siege of the Gaza Strip and the relentless bombardment of civilian infrastructure have led to the collapse of the health system and famine.

I will find out on March 20th whether the police will charge me with a crime. Whatever happens, however, I will not let it stop me from speaking out against Israel’s atrocities and supporting the Palestinian struggle for liberation and dignity. As Palestinians in Gaza face a genocidal war, their supporters in Britain and elsewhere in the West face an attack on their right to freedom of expression. But we will not give up our fight – for a free Palestine and a truly democratic Britain.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.