Woman found guilty of stealing part of 7 October hostage memorial

A woman has been found guilty of theft after taking part of a memorial to hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October and subsequently putting it in a bin.

Fiona Monro, 58, took a board containing the poster of one of the hostages from a Brighton memorial on 5 February 2024 – last week a jury unanimously found her guilty of theft in relation to that incident. The jury acquitted Monro of a second charge – that of criminal damage, relating to an episode the following week when Monro had written “pray for the 30,000 murdered Palestinians” across the hostage memorial, which was based in the city’s Palmeira Square.

As reported by Brighton and Hove News, the judge specifically rejected an attempt by Monro’s defence counsel to allow the jury to consider whether it was disproportionate to convict her, on the basis that she was exercising her right to express her political views. The judge responded saying that the trial was “a case of the state prosecuting the defendant for putting her views above those of others and causing them wholly unnecessary distress by so doing.”

Monro described the “large laminated board with a photograph of a hostage” as “highly inflammatory”, and said that “it certainly did not represent the Jewish community. I’m married to a Jewish man, it certainly didn’t represent our feelings.”

The Jewish man Munro is married to is longtime anti-Zionist campaigner Tony Greenstein, perhaps now best known for losing a defamation case against the Campaign Against Antisemitism after they called him a “notorious antisemite”.

Monro also claimed that she did not known that the photo on the poster board she had taken was that of Tzachi Idan, a relation of Adam Ma’anit, a Brighton resident and one of the organisers of the Palmeira Square memorial. She also tried to claim that one of the witnesses who saw her take the board, Magdalena de Laurans, had “entrapped” her by not objecting to her removing it.

The judge gave Monro an 18-month conditional discharge and ordered her to pay £1,200 prosecution costs.

Responding to the court’s decision, Heidi Bachram, one of the Palmeira Memorial organisers, said: “This crime was one out of 50 times the memorial was vandalised and it took two years to get justice. But it is possible to get a win. We cannot let hateful people get away with attacking us.”