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REPORT ON THE 2021 DECISION TO PROSCRIBE HAMAS

BY

PROFESSOR AVI SHLAIM FBA

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A. INSTRUCTIONS

1. I have been instructed by Riverway Law to provide a report on matters within my expertise in support of the application to the British Home Secretary to deproscribe Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (‘Hamas’).

2. The purpose of this report is to explore the political climate within which the then Home Secretary Priti Patel decided to proscribe Hamas.

B. QUALIFICATIONS

3. I was born in Baghdad on 31 October 1945 to a Jewish family. I have dual nationality, British and Israeli. I went to school in Israel and I served in the Israel Defence Forces (“IDF”) between 1964 and 1966.

4. I received three degrees from British universities: a BA in History from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1969; an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics in 1970; and a PhD from the University of Reading where I remained a lecturer and reader in Politics from 1970 through to 1987.

5. From 1987 through to 2011, I was a Reader and then Professor of International Relations and a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. I served two three-year terms as Director of Graduate Studies in International Relations.

6. I am an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College and an Emeritus Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford. I was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and was awarded a British Academy Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2017.

7. I am a historian, my academic expertise is mainly on the international relations of the Middle East, and my principal research interest is the Arab-Israeli conflict.

8. My books on the Middle East include

• Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988);

• War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995);

• Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007); and

• Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009);

• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (first edition 2000; updated second edition 2014).

9. My most recently published book is Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023). This book was awarded the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2024.

10. I have co-edited the following books: The Cold War and the Middle East (1997); The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, second edition 2007); and The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (2012).

11. I have published a large number of scholarly articles and countless newspaper articles. I am also a frequent contributor to newspapers and a commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs.

12. In order to provide more comprehensive details, I attach both my short form curriculum vitae and my long form curriculum vitae.

C. TERRORISM LAWS, THE UK PROSCRIPTION OF HAMAS AND PROSCRIPTION OF NGOS IN ISRAEL

13. On November 26th, 2021, the former Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that Hamas was to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK.¹ The military wing of the group was proscribed back in March 2001. Twenty years on, she extended this ban to the political wing by arguing, unconvincingly, that the distinction between the two wings was no longer tenable. The truth of the matter is that the distinction was tenable in 2001 and it is still tenable today. What is more, it is a crucial distinction that even the British government recognised as late as June 2020 when then Minister James Brokenshire stated that there was a “clear distinction between Hamas’s political and military wings” with the government’s aim being “to proscribe only those parts of Hamas which are directly concerned in terrorism.²” In February 2021, Lord Ahmad responded to a parliamentary question that the government was “supportive of Hamas-Fatah reconciliation attempts.”³ The line was repeated by then Foreign Secretary James Cleverly the following month.⁴ Just four days before Ms Patel's announcement, Mr Cleverly reiterated the long-standing British government line when asked about the distinction: “Hamas' military wing has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK since 2001 and the UK maintains a no contact policy with Hamas in its entirety.”⁵

14. Ms Patel’s announcement came soon after Benny Gantz, Israel's defence minister, designated six Palestinian human rights and social services NGOs as terrorist organisations.⁶ This designation came close on the heels of the decision by the International Criminal Court to launch a full-scale investigation of war crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. Gantz was IDF’s chief of staff during its assault on Gaza in in July 2014 in which 2,251 Palestinians were killed of whom 1,462 were civilians. The civilian casualties included 551 children.⁷ This made Gantz a prime suspect in the ICC’s war crimes probe launched in March of 2021. Hamas agreed to cooperate with the ICC investigation; Israel refused.

15. Some of the Palestinian organisations placed on Israel's terrorist list cooperated with the ICC investigation. Although the evidence produced by Israel was judged inadequate by the European Union and the US government, the terrorism label achieved its goal of stigmatising the NGOs, curbing their ability to raise funds, and disrupting their operations. The Israeli move was widely condemned as an attack on human rights. The British Home Secretary was not among the protesters.

16. At a deeper level, the shift in British policy was a product of the close ties between Israel and the Conservative Party. Israel and its powerful lobby had been pressing the British government on this issue for some time. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urged Boris Johnson to outlaw the whole of Hamas when he met with him earlier that month at the UN climate conference in Glasgow.⁸ Indeed, on the very date that Ms Patel announced her intention to proscribe Hamas, the then Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs Yair Lapid stated that the move was ”the conclusion of an intimate and successful dialogue between Israel and the United Kingdom led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the security services, and our Embassy in London led by Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, and we thank the British government for their fruitful cooperation on this issue as well.”⁹

¹⁰

17. Ms Patel shared with Boris Johnson a Manichean view of the Middle East struggle in which Israel represents the forces of light and Palestinian Hamas the forces of darkness. The reality is slightly more complicated.

18. Reactions to Ms Patel’s announcement were predictably polarised. A Hamas official said that it showed “absolute bias towards the Israeli occupation and is a submission to Israeli blackmail and dictations”.¹¹ He accused the UK of supporting “the aggressors at the expense of the victims”. The Board of Deputies of British Jews warmly welcomed the move.¹² In the Israeli media the British decision was hailed as a triumph for Israeli diplomacy.

19. In the parliamentary debate that followed, Alyn Smith from the Scottish National Party expressed concern that a “full impact assessment” had not been produced for the Order as no, or no significant, impact on the private, charitable, voluntary or public sector was foreseen.¹³ Mr smyth questioned the logic of this considering how engrained Hamas was in the fabric of Gazan society, it being the civil administration in the area.

20. Priti Patel needed no prompting to do Israel's bidding. In August 2017, as Secretary of State for International Development, she went on a freelance trip to Israel accompanied by Lord Polak, president of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). She had previously served as an officer for the CFI’S Parliamentary group between 2011 and 2014.¹⁴ While pretending to be on a private holiday, Ms Patel held a series of secret meetings with high-ranking Israeli officials, including the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the then Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Yuval Rotem, and the former Israeli permanent representative to the United Nations Gilad Erdan. The meeting with Erdan was particularly significant given he went on to head anti-BDS efforts in Israel.¹⁵ Upon her return she asked her officials to explore the possibility of diverting some of the foreign aid budget to enable the Israeli army to carry out humanitarian work.¹⁶ This was intended for the military field hospital she had visited on her trip in the occupied Golan Heights.¹⁷ She was fired by Theresa May for lying about the nature and purpose of her visit.

21. Lord Polak, Patel’s companion on this now infamous trip, is worth a closer look. On entering the House of Lords in 2015, having served as CFI director for more than 25 years, he declared: “The Prime Minister [David Cameron] has given me a once in a lifetime opportunity...which will enable me to continue to advocate for Israel.”¹⁸ In 2022 he boasted again that he had been personally instructed by Cameron to “stand up for Israel.”¹⁹ His sense of “standing up for Israel” can be gleaned from the CFI’s relationship to Elbit Systems, the Israeli arms manufacturer. In 2012, Lt. Gen Applegate, Elbit’s chairman, boasted to undercover reporters from the Times that he had used ‘discreet’ Israeli lobbying links with the CFI to have access to “anyone from the Prime Minister down” and to secure £500m for Elbit.²⁰

22. In 2019, Conservative Baroness Sayeeda Warsi commented on Twitter that in light of how Ms Patel had been forced to resign over unofficial meetings with Israeli officials two years earlier, her then appointment as Home Secretary which placed her in charge of national security was “a disturbing appointment at a critical time for the Middle East”²¹. Ms Patel’s decision to proscribe Hamas in furtherance of Israeli policy regardless of the facts suggests that Baroness Warsi’s warning should have been heeded.

23. Close contact with Israeli officials and lobbyists for Israel in the UK as well as her own right-wing worldview left Ms Patel eager to swallow Israel’s narrative about Hamas. This narrative is utterly distorted and blatantly self-serving. Here, however, are some of the relevant facts.

D. BACKGROUND TO HAMAS AND VIOLENCE

24. Hamas emerged in 1988, at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Originally, it had a dual purpose of carrying out an armed struggle against Israel and delivering social welfare programmes.

25. Its Charter defined historic Palestine, including present-day Israel, as an exclusively Islamic land and ruled out any permanent peace with the Jewish state. It is a little-known fact that despite Hamas’s hostility towards Israel, and the crude anti-Semitic language of its Charter regarding Jews as a people, Israel helped the Islamic organisation in its early stages, seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular nationalism of the PLO.²²

26. Tacit Israeli support for Hamas ended when its military wing—the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades—began to wage armed struggle against the occupation. Initially, this took the form of firing rockets from the Gaza Strip on Israeli towns and civilian centres. In the public eye, however, Hamas became associated with the suicide bombings it carried out inside Israel.

27. This deliberate targeting of civilians was despicable and deplorable. It amounted to the use of force against civilians for political purposes—the very definition of terrorism. Yet the term “suicide bombing” came to stand in the public eye as a particularly horrific form of warfare. Suicide bombings are in the end a means of delivering bombs to their target. Judged solely by lethal outcome, they are no more horrific than a one-tonne bomb dropped by an Israeli F-16 warplane on a residential apartment block in Gaza.

28. Regardless of the means of delivery, killing civilians is wrong. Period. In 2004, the political leadership of Hamas made a strategic decision to end suicide bombings—not because they were morally wrong but because they were counterproductive.²³

E. THE POLITICAL LEGITIMACY OF HAMAS

29. Following Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, Hamas began to engage in the internal Palestinian political process, running against the mainstream Fatah party which dominated the Palestinian Authority. From its seat in Ramallah, the PA’s ruled both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fatah was widely perceived as corrupt and inefficient and as a sub-contractor for Israeli security in the occupied territories. Hamas, by contrast, had a reputation for probity in public life as well a record of real resistance to the Israeli occupation.

30. In January 2006, after winning an absolute majority in a free and fair election, Hamas formed a new government. Israel refused to recognise a Hamas-led government. So did the United States and European Union. In theory they favoured democracy but when the people voted for the wrong bunch of politicians, Israel and its Western allies resorted to severe diplomatic and economic sanctions to undermine a democratically elected Palestinian government.

31. In March 2007, in a moment of statesmanship which held great promise, Hamas formed a national unity government together with its arch-rival Fatah. This government proposed direct talks with Israel on a long-term ceasefire of twenty or more years. Israel refused to negotiate, plotting instead to drive Hamas out of power and replace it with a collaborationist Fatah regime.

32. Details of the plot are contained in “The Palestine Papers”, the cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera and the Guardian. The papers include the minutes of the ultra-secret quadripartite “Gaza Security Committee”. The members of this committee were Israel, the United States, Egypt, and Fatah. Its aim was to undermine the national unity government, isolate and weaken Hamas, and prepare Fatah for military confrontation with Hamas. In short, the allies planned a coup d’état to overthrow Hamas.²⁴

33. Hamas pre-empted this coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007, driving out the pro-Fatah forces. Israel reacted by imposing a blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is still in force today after 17 years. The blockade caused the collapse of the economy, high unemployment, acute shortages of water, food, fuel, electricity, and medicines, and horrendous suffering by the overcrowded strip’s two million inhabitants. A blockade is a form of collective punishment which is proscribed by international law, yet the international community failed to call Israel to account.

F. THE UK AND ISRAEL

34. True friends do not indulge their friends’ addiction but try to wean them from it. Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, on the other hand, could hardly have been more indulgent. His partisanship extended to resisting all international attempts to call Israel to account for its acts of aggression and unlawful behaviour. He opposed, for example, the International Criminal Court investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.²⁵

35. In a letter to the Conservative Friends of Israel in April 2021, he said that while his government had respect for the independence of the court, it opposed this particular inquiry. “This investigation gives the impression of being a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the UK’s”, he wrote.²⁶ The perverse logic of the statement is that being a friend and ally of the United Kingdom places Israel above international law and beyond international scrutiny.

36. Priti Patel claimed that designating the whole of Hamas as a terrorist organisation was to be seen through a domestic prism: it helped protect Jews in this country. This is preposterous: Hamas exercises its right under international law to resist the Israeli occupation, the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. Fearmongering and criminalising the political wing of Hamas does not make British Jews any safer.

37. Hostilities between the military wing of Hamas and Israel make British Jews less safe rather than safer. In May of 2021, in a massively disproportionate use of force, Israel carried out an aerial bombardment of Gaza that resulted in the death of 256 Palestinians, including 66 children. The Security Community Trust, a charity concerned with the safety and security of Jews in the UK, recorded a “horrific surge” in racist attacks during that month which “surpassed anything we have seen before”. The CST noted that the spike in antisemitic incidents was fuelled by reactions to the escalation of violence between Israel and Gaza. This has been mirrored since October 7 with the CST reporting 1978 instances of Jewish hate in the first half of 2024 alone.²⁷

38. If the British government genuinely wants to make Jews in this country feel safer, it should stop blaming the Palestinian victims for their own misfortunes and adopt a more even-handed position. Rather than blaming the victims, it should urge its Israeli ally to respect international humanitarian law, to observe ceasefire agreements, to exercise restraint in the use of military force, and to talk to the political leadership of Hamas.

39. Priti Patel’s move in 2021 only served to expose the utter bankruptcy of the Conservative government’s policy towards Israel-Palestine. That government, as well as the current Labour government, claimed to support a two-state solution to the conflict. Yet despite repeated parliamentary votes in favour of recognising Palestine, they refused to budge. When he was foreign secretary Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that the Conservative government would recognise Palestine when the time was right. In June 2024 Keir Starmer delayed recognition stating it needed to be part of a ‘process’.²⁸ The time will never be right. Timing is just an excuse to procrastinate while continuing to appease Israel.

G. EXPERT OBLIGATIONS

40. I confirm that I have made clear which facts and matters referred to in this report are within my own knowledge and which are not. Those that are within my own knowledge I confirm to be true. The opinions I have expressed represent my true and complete professional opinions on the matters to which they refer.

41. I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought by anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.

42. I confirm that I have not received any remuneration for preparing this report.

Professor Avi Shlaim FBA

Oxford, the United Kingdom

1 December 2024