Illegal police raid on my home won’t stop me covering Gaza

When will the police stop harassing pro-Palestine journalists?

Met police commissioner Mark Rowley leaves a COBRA meeting on Gaza. (Photo: Karl Edler / Alamy)

The metropolitan police carried out a dawn raid on my home in London last October. They asked me to identify all computers and phones in the house that I use as a journalist. Believe it or not, they actually stated this was so they could protect my rights.

In the course of a search lasting several hours, they seized seven items, packing them up in evidence boxes and taking them away. I was not arrested or charged with any crime.

Last month Mark Lucraft KC, the Old Bailey’s most senior judge, ruled that the warrants the “counter-terror” police used in the raid were unlawful.

In his ruling Judge Lucraft wrote that he was “very troubled by the way in which the search warrant was drafted, approved and granted where items were to be seized from a journalist”.

The judge also denied the metropolitan police’s request for a production order, a legal power to compel journalists to hand over documents. Such rulings are very hard to obtain, especially because they could endanger sources and journalistic material.

The police were asking the court for a retrospective legitimisation of their unlawful raid. But Judge Lucraft denied that request, writing: “Any warrant seeking material in the hands of a journalist requires extremely careful handling.”

My barrister Jude Bunting KC submitted to the court that they “would be hard-pressed to find a more obviously unlawful order than the one made in this case.”

‘The process is the punishment’

Despite the court ruling, police confirmed in statements later issued to the press that “the investigation into the alleged offences remains ongoing.”

This is a reference to the fact that, on the day of the raid, the police revealedthe existence of a criminal investigation into my social media postings – one which had been ongoing since October 2023 – for suspected offences under the Sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006).

I call on the police to now drop this investigation.

In light of the ruling last month, it is difficult to imagine them going forward with actually charging me for my social media posts. If they were going to, why haven’t they done so at any point since they first launched this investigation 20 months ago?

But the reality is that I just don’t know. Until the investigation is dropped, there’s a possibility that I could still be charged. So until then I will have to think twice before posting on X/Twitter or any other social media platform.

And that, in my view, is part of the intended chilling effect of such weaponised police investigations against journalists and activists focused on Palestine.

While there is an active criminal investigation, most lawyers would advise their clients to not speak to the press.

Thankfully, I did not have that issue with my fantastic solicitor Tayab Ali, who’s been part of the Palestine solidarity movement for decades and understands that public support is a vital aspect of winning inherently political cases.

But there’s no doubt that the common refrain among activists right now that “the process is the punishment” gets to the heart of the truth.

Even if you are lucky enough to have a well-funded legal team (as I was, thanks to the backing of the National Union of Journalists), dealing with legal proceedings and preparing your case is extremely taxing.

It eats into time, resources and mental wellbeing in a way that is difficult to anticipate until it actually happens to you.

Sabotage

Fortunately, I understood what I was up against. In my book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, I documented how pro-Israel groups within Labour (who have intimate ties to the Israeli embassy in London) played a crucial role in purging the then-opposition party from the popular mass movement that spontaneously formed in 2015 to back pro-Palestinian socialist Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party.

This successful campaign of sabotage not only stopped Corbyn from becoming prime minister in 2017 and 2019, but ultimately, in 2020, also led to the purging of Corbyn himself from Labour.

The primary weapon used by the Israel lobby and its allies in this war against the Corbynite movement was a vociferous and unrelenting campaign of fraudulent anti-Semitism allegations.

In this way, anti-Semitism was weaponised by the Zionist movement against both the left and against the Palestine solidarity movement in particular.

Since Israel’s genocide began in Gaza in 2023, this fraudulent campaign has only continued and escalated all over the West. But now, the stakes are higher than losing one’s membership of a political party.

It seems likely that, for many of the arrests and raids currently taking place against journalists and activists, that they have been triggered in the first place by complaints issued to police by pro-Israel groups.

In this way, the “counter-terror” police have been weaponised against the Palestine solidarity movement, and against journalists who report critically and accurately on Israel.

‘Counter extremism think tank’

Police documents obtained by my lawyers referred to their investigations into my X/Twitter posts being triggered by “a public complaint” and by “a UK-based counter extremism think tank who expressed concern”.

In neither case was the identity of the complainant revealed, but as a reporter who has exposed the dirty dealings of the Israel lobby for 15 years now, I suspect the “think tank” in question, whoever it was, has a pro-Israel bias.

“Anti-Semitism” is the allegation often being used against solidarity activists all over the UK who are being raided, arrested and in some cases even charged with various “offences” in response to their campaigns against the genocide.

Some of the activists I’ve spoken to about this are too afraid of potential repercussions to even be quoted in an article. The various charges have in some cases been “racially aggravated” – weaponised anti-Semitism with a potential criminal record.

That is why my legal victory is important. I hope that this can be the start of turning back the tide of police repression that threatens us today.

It is important that journalists stick together and defend the principle of protecting our sources. Journalism is not a crime.

Originally published by Declassified UK.