I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to read the now-infamous application to ‘de-proscribe’ Hamas. This is the application lodged by a British law firm last week to remove Hamas from the UK government’s list of banned organisations under the Terrorism Act. The lawyers have asked home secretary Yvette Cooper to make it legal to openly support Hamas in the UK, given that the act makes expressing support for any proscribed organisation a criminal offence.
I was driven to read the application in full after seeing a bizarre interview on Talk earlier this week with one of the lawyers involved, barrister Franck Magennis. He seemed affronted when the presenter asked him how he sleeps at night. A perfectly reasonable question, given that Magennis acknowledged it was his decision to represent Hamas, an organisation responsible for the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas is not a client he was professionally obliged to take on.
In response, Magennis accused the presenter of putting ‘a target on [his] back’ by falsely conflating him and his client. He even suggested that the presenter ‘may receive a call from the police’. (It is worth noting that, on 7 October 2023, Magennis changed his profile picture on X to a bulldozer crashing through a border fence and tweeted ‘Victory to the intifada’, although this has since been deleted.)
As a criminal lawyer who defends just about anybody, I know a bit of what this barrister is talking about. I am not a murderer because I defend murderers. Everyone should be entitled to legal representation. If the Nazi leadership could rely on Britain’s top legal brains during the Nuremberg trials, then there is no reason, in principle, why Hamas should not avail themselves of the best and brightest, either. So I decided to take the application seriously, and read it in good faith.
It turns out the ‘application’ spouts Hamas propaganda from the very first line. It reads: ‘For more than a century, the British state has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine.’ This is hardly the impartial, objective language of the courtroom. It takes Hamas’s warped view of history and repeats it unquestioningly. It refers to Israel, quoting a former British governor of Palestine, as a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’. It casts Israel as illegitimate, claiming that requiring Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist would be an ‘unreasonable demand’. In other words, Hamas should be entitled to continue to fight for the eradication of the only democracy in the Middle East and the world’s only Jewish State. It refers to Israel in quotation marks, to ‘signal that it is a colonial term, reflective of a racist attempt to impose an ethno-exclusionary state on a pluralistic and ethnically diverse population’. These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear from a batshit student in a sixth-form common room, rather than a lawyer in a courtroom.
It gets worse. The application claims that Hamas presents no ‘threat to Britain or British citizens’. Really? I guess the lawyers involved simply don’t know the names Jake Marlowe, or Lianne, Yahel and Noiya Sharabi, nor any of the other 18 British nationals murdered on 7 October 2023.
The application then goes on to provide an account of 7 October which is straight from the Hamas playbook. It says that it ‘marked a moment, albeit brief, where Palestinians reclaimed territories that had been seized from them during the Nakba of 1948’. It then goes on to regurgitate Hamas’s blatantly false claim that it ‘targeted the Israeli military sites and sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers to pressure the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails’.
This is grotesque. The application makes no mention of Hamas’s rape and murder of innocent civilians. This is particularly galling when the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report only recently set out in black and white the rabid, indiscriminate nature of the violence committed that day. The report concluded what many could already see: that the attacks were meticulously planned to inflict maximum harm on civilians. To simply restate Hamas’s absurd claim that 7 October was targeted at the Israeli military, in light of overwhelming contrary evidence, is appalling.
Nor does the application mention the recorded phone calls in which Hamas fighters can be heard celebrating murdering Jews because they were Jews. Not because they were soldiers. Not even because they were Israeli. But because they were Jews. Hamas’s genocidal anti-Semitism is completely sidestepped here.
The application’s central point is that the definition of a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act is very broad and could equally apply to any group that uses force to achieve its objectives. It is right that the definition is broad, but this merely reflects the fact that proscribing an organisation inevitably involves an element of politics. There are political reasons why Hamas, an Islamist death cult, is proscribed and, say, the government of Ukraine – which is resorting to violence to resist an unlawful invasion – is not. It is right that the law allows elected representatives to use their judgement as to which groups to proscribe.
The attempt to decriminalise Hamas is no ordinary legal application. It is an appalling screed. It shows what happens when lawyers abandon objectivity and weaponise the law for political ends – in this case, for an extremely reactionary, bigoted politics.
It is considered bad form for lawyers to criticise other lawyers for their legal work, but I think this warrants making an exception. That Talk interviewer asked a pertinent question. I, too, have no idea how they can sleep at night.
Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.
