Exclusive: judge lifts Met’s protest ban bail condition on Greenstein

Jewish pro-Palestine protester succeeds in lifting ‘disproportionate’ bail ban

Tony Greenstein, the left-wing Jewish supporter of Palestinian rights and freedom who has been repeatedly arrested for standing up for justice, has succeeded today in a court bid to lift a ban on attending pro-Palestine protests.

The Met tried unsuccessfully to contest Greenstein’s application, but the magistrate agreed that a bail condition imposed on Greenstein – after police arrested Greenstein for making a speech outside the residence of Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli comparing the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide of Jews, which was apparently ‘provocative’ to the single Zionist demonstrator present (Richard Millett, who sued Jeremy Corbyn for describing him as ‘disruptive’ and ‘abusive’, before dropping the case) – banning him from attending any pro-Palestine demonstrations anywhere in London, was disproportionate.

Greenstein is now free to attend as he wishes, except for a ban on going into the Camden area of London where the residence of far-right Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely is situated – which he has not contested as he does not plan to attend protests there.

At the time of his arrest in early October, Greenstein was one of a number of Jewish protesters at a demo outside Hotovely’s residence who compared Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in the Gaza open-air prison to the actions of the nazis – a comparison that the Israeli press have also made:

Hotovely, a far-right figure described by Israeli paper Haaretz as ‘the ugly, extremist face of Israel’, attempted to justify Israel’s flattening of Gaza and mass killing of civilians during an interview on LBC:

She went on to claim that the IDF was killing children because Hamas was parading them ‘in front of every place the IDF soldiers were getting’. Israel has killed as many as two hundred thousand people in Gaza so far, mostly children and women, and is engaged in an extermination campaign to starve and bomb almost two million Gazan Palestinians out of Gaza or out of existence. Israel’s military-intelligence machine has been exposed using civilians, including its own, as human shields. The UK state has slavishly supported Israel and last week the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that describing the slaughter of Palestinians as genocide ‘undermined the seriousness of the term’.

Brighton-based Greenstein was also arrested last December, after a raid on his home in which police seized his electronic devices, for a single tweet supporting Palestinian armed resistance. He has opened a fundraiser for his legal defence if he is charged, or to sue the Met Police if he is not.

A familiar face at pro-Palestine protests in the south of England, demonstrators in London can now look out for Mr Greenstein again.

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