A dangerous and morally bankrupt campaign is currently underway in Britain to decriminalise Hamas, the Islamist group responsible for some of the worst atrocities of modern times, including the pogrom of 7 October 2023, which led to the current war in Gaza. A UK legal firm, Riverway Law, is representing Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’s head of international affairs, in a bid to overturn the group’s proscription as a terrorist organisation. Their case argues that the UK government’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act (2000) violates the rights of Hamas members and supporters to freedom of speech and assembly.

 The submission claims:

For more than a century, the British State has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine. Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Resistance Movement or “Hamas”) is an organised resistance movement that exercises the right of the Palestinian people to resist Zionism and the colonisation, occupation, apartheid and genocide carried out in its name. 

But Hamas’s “resistance” to Zionism is not legitimate. While Palestinians have a right to self-determination, it is both absurd and self-defeating to predicate this upon denying Jewish people their equal right to self-determination. What Hamas is “resisting” is the idea that Jewish people should be allowed to be self-governing. Rather, Hamas believes that Jewish people in Palestine must be subjugated under Islamic rule.