The New Dark Age

British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah was cleared last week by a UK tribunal of misconduct charges, related to social media posts, that could have seen him removed from medical practice.

The case was initiated by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a fanatical pro-Israel lobby group that seeks to use abusive legal procedures to intimidate and silence critics of Israel. But more disturbing still, the case was taken up by the General Medical Council (GMC), the regulatory authority overseeing the medical profession.

Had the case been successful, Abu Sittah would have been struck off on the entirely spurious basis that he is antisemitic and a supporter of terrorism. Hundreds of patients who depend on his world-renowned reconstructive surgery skills would have been denied treatment from him as a result.

The three-person panel of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service, which cleared him, dismissed all the allegations. It concluded that the UKLFI and the GMC had “cherrypicked” and misrepresented two posts on X and an article published in Arabic, and failed to provide accurate translations of Abu Sittah’s arguments.

Ian Comfort, chair of the panel, said the tribunal could find nothing antisemitic or that supported terrorism or violence.

Afterwards, Abu Sittah correctly described UKLFI’s goal as “trying to destroy my life”.

The surgeon has been a focus of the Israel lobby’s vilification efforts, in large part, because he has been such a prominent and vocal advocate for Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza. He volunteered right at the start of Israel’s barbarous assault on the enclave, performing surgery on Palestinians who had been maimed by US-supplied bombs dropped by Israel. He was among the first to tell the world that what we were witnessing was a genocide.

His testimony has been shared with the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity.

A recent film, A State of Passion, documents Abu Sittah’s extraordinary work:

The attacks on Abu Sittah began almost immediately. By April 2024, Germany had issued a Schengen-wide travel ban, preventing him from entering most European countries to attend conferences and offer his eye-witness testimony of what was happening in Gaza. The German authorities justified the ban on the grounds that his statements – accurately pointing out that Israel was attacking hospitals and committing genocide – threatened public order.

Human Rights Watch and legal groups condemned these moves as an attempt to silence a witness to the genocide. After a protracted legal struggle, the German courts overturned what was clearly a politically inspired ban.

There are several points to make about the latest example of pro-Israel apologists (in this case, UKLFI) and the British establishment (in this case, the GMC) trying to crush opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians in general and its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in particular:

1. UK Lawyers for Israel, the group that initiated the case against Abu Sittah, is not a disinterested party, and it is not, as it claims, seeking to tackle antisemitism through legal actions. Remember, it was the UKLFI that pressured a London hospital in February 2023 to take down plates painted by children in Gaza that were being displayed in a corridor. The group claimed the artwork would be “offensive” to Jewish patients. If the pressure campaign achieved anything, it was actually to stoke antisemitism – by creating the false impression that Jews, rather than fanatical apologists for Israel like UKLFI, were opposed to Palestinian children’s artwork being seen.

Again, it was UK Lawyers for Israel that sent threatening legal letters to organisations around the country planning to stage events in solidarity with Palestinians, including a film festival, a kite-making workshop, and a music concert, even when there was precisely no evidence that any of the events were in breach of the law. In several cases, organisers cancelled their events out of fear of the legal repercussions.

Extraordinarily, UKLFI enjoys charitable status in Britain despite being not only a nakedly political organisation but one furthering the aims of a foreign state. With the height of chutzpah, the lobby group has repeatedly reported other charities to the Charity Commission – including the Citizens Advice Bureau, War on Want and Medical Aid for Palestinians – and demanded that their charitable status be revoked, supposedly for engaging in political activity.

Belatedly, the Charity Commission and the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) have begun investigations into UKLFI. A complaint to the SRA argues that the pro-Israel lobby group is engaged in “intimidation dressed up as law”, something the Abu Sittah ruling confirms once again.

Don’t expect any action from either regulatory body, even though these should be open-and-shut cases against the UKLFI. As well as hounding charities and vilifying Palestinian solidarity activism, the group justifies Israeli war crimes and has invited to the UK a far-right Israeli group, Regavim, that uses lawfare in Israel to silence opposition to illegal expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians.

The UKLFI barely hides the fact that it is an extremist pro-Israel advocacy group that wishes to weaponise phoney antisemitism allegations to intimidate and silence Palestinians and solidarity activists. Its lawyers need to be investigated for their role in facilitating genocide.

2. UK Lawyers for Israel and other pro-Israel lobby groups are clearly exposing the fact that the British legal system is ripe for abuse by those with deep pockets. Their tactic of choice is what is know in the US as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP. The purpose is not to win a case – usually such cases are unwinnable – but to create a hostile legal environment, burdening the accused with having to mount a time-consuming and expensive legal defence. Groups with shadowy backers are well positioned to bring these cases because cost for them is no object. The UK has done far too little to stop SLAPPs.

Abu Sittah is the latest example of someone having to deal with one of these pro-Israel SLAPPs. Only last month the Campaign Against Antisemitism, another pro-Israel lobby group dedicated to weaponising antisemitism, had a private prosecution contemptuously thrown out of court. Judge Michael Snow called the CAA’s antisemitism case against comedian Reginald D Hunter “abusive” and “vexatious”. He added that the pro-Israel lobby group had “intentionally” withheld information to mislead the court. In a further humiliation, he instructed the group to append his ruling to any future legal applications it makes – presumably to warn judges in advance that it is a bad-faith actor.

The ever-more repressive climate in the UK may have led the CAA to assume that there are no limits on what can be done to silence critics of Israel. We are not quite there – yet. However, it was notable that the British press mostly ignored the ruling, even though it lifted the lid on the ugly, lawfare manoeuvrings of the Israel lobby.

By contrast, the media lost no time whipping up a moral panic at a decision last month by the police quietly to drop an investigation into punk band Bob Vylan over it leading a chant at Glastonbury of “Death, death to the IDF” – a reference to Israel’s genocidal army in Gaza. The media was filled with dire warnings of a supposed antisemitism crisis provoked by this chant against genocide.

And who did the media choose to raise the alarm? Step forward the usual pro-Israel lobby groups, including the CAA just moments after it had been thoroughly discredited by a district court judge.

3. This hostile legal environment only works because it is backed by the British establishment.

The involvement of the General Medical Council in the case against Abu Sittah is further proof that professional regulatory authorities are either wilfully colluding in these malicious SLAPPs or are grossly incompetent in weighing the evidence presented to them by thoroughly untrustworthy lawfare groups such as UK Lawyers for Israel. The GMC did not bring the case against Abu Sittah because it was deserved. It advanced a political cause because, like UKLFI, it prioritises support for Israel.

Meanwhile, media outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian continue to treat malicious lobby groups such as UK Lawyers for Israel and the Campaign Against Antisemitism as credible sources for antisemitism claims, even after they have been repeatedly discredited by their own legal actions.

The Guardian quotes a spokesperson for UK Lawyers for Israel stating – in flagrant denial of the tribunal ruling – that: “It is shocking that the tribunal has found it acceptable for doctors to commemorate acts of violence and pay tribute to terrorists.”

The paper is colluding in the UKLFI’s dissembling. The court did not find it acceptable to “pay tribute to terrorists”. It found UK Lawyers for Israel and the GMC to be peddling disinformation against a British citizen in the service of a foreign state. That is the real story, once again utterly missing from the coverage.

Moreover, why does the Guardian fail to provide context in its report of the Abu Sittah ruling that the UKLFI is currently under investigation for using precisely the kind of lawfare tactics for which it has just been rebuked by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service. Is that not highly relevant?

This is very much a pattern with the media. This week the papers leapt on another supposed “antisemitism” story. They reported that a visit to a Bristol school by a local “Jewish MP”, Damien Egan, was cancelled last September because of “pro-Palestinian” sentiment among teachers and parents. The articles all falsely suggested that Egan’s cancelled visit was evidence of antisemitic pressure from pro-Palestinian groups. The implication – an entirely racist and inciteful one – is that being pro-Palestinian, or even anti-genocide, equates to discriminating against Jews.

17h

Predictably, the Guardian is stoking the outrage machine over a Bristol school cancelling a visit by local Labour MP Damien Egan. Like other media, the paper is duping readers by suggesting this is evidence of “antisemitism”. Egan is Jewish.

In fact, the cancellation has nothing to do with Egan’s Jewishness.

The visit was called off after…

In fact, the visit was cancelled because of deep community disquiet about Egan, who is vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, has been on an Israeli-sponsored trip to Israel during the genocide, and takes money from pro-Israel lobbyists like Sir Trevor Chinn. Understandably, parents and teachers do not want an MP so openly supportive of Israel, while it is committing a genocide, to be lecturing their children on “democratic values”.

Blocking Egan from having an influence on impressionable young minds is neither antisemitic nor an assault on free speech – any more than it would be for a school to bar Andrew Tate from giving its pupils a sex-education talk. It is the right thing to do for a school that cares about its own professed values – of community and respect.

Keir Starmer’s government and British media commentators may be inured to their own deep-seated hypocrisy, but there are plenty of sections of the British populace that wish to take stand for a basic moral code, and who think democracies should not be supporting genocide.

It is time we stopped making moral outcasts of doctors and teachers for their principles and compassion, and started turning our fire instead on MPs, the establishment media, bodies like the GMC and pro-Israel lobby groups like UK Lawyers for Israel that are working so hard to destroy what little remains of liberal democratic values.