The Ties That no Longer Bind
The civil society scape of antiracism in the UK needs to ask itself serious questions, argues Faisal Bodi. Specifically, can those who have supported the genocide of Palestinians be allowed to continue as partners in the movement?
The genocide in Gaza has opened our eyes to many things, not least the brutality of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. The savage amorality of Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, resistance attack by Palestinian factions underscored the zero sum, Zionist ideal of a Jewish national homeland to be preserved at all costs, even if that involved wiping out tens of thousands of civilians and the infrastructure they depend on to survive.
By its abominations, the beast has revealed its face. If there is a silver lining to be salvaged from the rubble left of Gaza, it is that it has forever punctured the myth of an embattled nation of persecuted people seeking refuge from oppression. Increasingly, Israel is a global pariah, shunned by nation states, civil society, businesses and ordinary people.
This new dynamic has huge implications for relationships between pro-Israel Jews and other minority communities in the West, particularly in the field of anti-racism work where the status quo ante-bellum was one of mutual cooperation in the pursuit of justice. Can and should we work with Zionists who support religio-racial supremacy abroad yet claim to fight for equality at home?
In exposing the savage religio-racial supremacist nature of Zionism, the slaughter in Gaza has drawn a line in the sand between activists who are genuinely committed to tackling racial inequality and those who effectively undermine it with their support for a genocide and an apartheid practising state.
Historically, since their immigration to the UK in large numbers from Nazi persecution in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Jews have played a leading role in the anti-racism movement. Their involvement was necessitated by the resurgence of long standing anti-Semitism in the UK, against the new community as it sought to establish roots, particularly in the East End of London where, in a now fabled confrontation in Cable Street, they organised to see off the threat posed by fascists led by Oswald Mosley. While the imperative of staving off anti-Semitism was their immediate aim, Jews were also instrumental in the wider fight against racism, finding common cause with the large numbers of immigrants arriving to the UK from the Commonwealth after the Second World War. Many were instrumental in bringing into force the Race Relations Act in the 1960’s, the first significant racial equality legislation to be enacted in the UK, offering legal protection against discrimination to immigrants and their descendants.
However, a schism between within Jewish activists within anti-racism movements slowly grew along the frontline regarding Zionism: one part saw Zionism as another racism that must be confronted; another strand developed that encompassed pro-Israel and supremacist voices based in Zionist thinking. This dysfunction within the British anti-racism movement can be charted back to the 1960s when across different western settings, the strategic and ideological alliance between groups within anti-racist and anti-colonial groups began to fray, after Israel’s seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The occupation laid bare the fundamentally racist nature of Zionist expansionism, exposing for the first time for this generation of anti-racist activists, the underlying tension between a racially supremacist and exclusivist ideology and the inclusivist, egalitarian demands of anti-racism. Leading global anti-racism campaigners such as Malcom X shone the spotlight on Zionism, highlighting what they saw as a colonial, and therefore, racist project. In 1975 the United Nations general assembly adopted Resolution 3379 determining “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Defiant Palestinian resistance, first from the PLO, then Hamas and Islamic Jihad, raised the profile of the Palestinian struggle, transforming it into a totemic, global anti-colonial cause celebre.
By the time the UN held its third world conference on racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001, the tension had already spilled out into open conflict, with Israel and Zionism squarely in the crosshairs of the global anti-racism movement. The NGO forum (in which Islamic Human Rights Commission participated) declared Zionism to be a form of racism, while an attempt to include similar language in the declaration only faltered after a walkout by the United States and Israel.
The genocide in Gaza, inspired as it is by a racial supremacist ideology, has refocussed attention on the nature of Zionism, leading people to question the virtue of partnering with people who support it or hold it as a belief. The macro picture ostensibly supports the view that Jews in Britain seem more animated than ever by the need to back Israel, despite its conspicuous barbarity. Since 7 October 2023, according for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, identification with Israel has increased with 75% of British Jews now feeling emotionally attached; 49% report being “very attached” (equivalent figures just before the October 7 attacks were 72% and 40%). And 45% say ‘support for Israel’ is “very important” to their Jewish identity, up from 38% in 2022. Charitable giving also reflects this strengthening affiliation, with 15% now prioritising Israel-focused charities compared to 5% in 2022, while support for UK Jewish charities has declined. These figures supposedly reflect the dominance that Zionist ideology exerts over British Jewry, an idea that Zionist institutions are loathe to see being challenged. Earlier this year, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a body that claims to be the main voice of British Jews, censured 36 of its members after they sent a joint letter to the Financial Times criticising Israel for its conduct in Gaza.
It is worth noting however that the work of IJPR and associated organisations like the Community Security Trust have been criticised for their research framing: in particular the framing of anti-Semitism in a way that reproduces racialised ‘logics’ that exclude dissenting Jewish voices on the issue of Zionism and Israel, as well as undermining the universality of anti-racism struggles including that related to Holocaust remembrance[1].
Whether you take on board the research or not, the choice facing the anti-racism movement broadly and Muslims and pro-Palestinian advocates more particularly is stark: can continued co-operation with organisations claiming to be anti-racist by virtue of ‘representing’ Jewish minorities or by virtue of research itself contested as regurgitating racist logic, be justified when those racialised logics at play are supremacist and currently justifying a genocide? The answer surely, is no?
To be fair, this “Israel First” approach that used anti-racism as a cover was very much in evidence even before the genocide, most markedly in the pro-Israel-led witch-hunt that brought down Jeremy Corbyn. The popular Labour ex-leader faced a relentless smear campaign targeting him and his party with accusations of anti-Semitism and designed to prevent a pro-Palestinian PM from being installed in 10 Downing Street. What was remarkable about this virulent, totally fraudulent campaign was that it attracted the involvement of no less than the then Chief Rabbi to warn against the “racist” threat posed by Corbyn’s Labour.
Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said that under Corbyn “a new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root” in Labour that jeopardised the safety of Britain’s Jewish community. Nothing could have been further from the truth. What Corbyn had in fact done was to reconfigure the Labour Party into a bottom-up member’s party in which the less corruptible rank and file set policy instead of a compromised leadership. Naturally, its stance on Palestine reflected grassroots views that threatened to upset the pro-Israel status-quo established in the political establishment.
But what was more disturbing about the Chief Rabbi’s intervention was that it tacitly endorsed Corbyn’s main rival, the leader of the Tories and incumbent PM Boris Johnson, a man who had contributed to the ratcheting up of xenophobic sentiment in the country by characterising Muslim women who wear the veil as “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”. Johnson had also previously also referred to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. What made it all the more extraordinary was that Mirvis had thrown his weight behind a political assassination attempt aiming to take down a politician with impeccable anti-racism credentials in order to facilitate the election of an unabashed xenophobe.
Weaponising anti-Semitism to ensure the election of an unrepentant racist effectively threw the targets of Johnson’s dog whistling under the bus in order to protect Israel from the prospect of a pro-Palestine PM in Britain. It told Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities that the Zionist Jewish commitment in the alliance against racism was contingent on their partners’ silence regarding the racism within. At the time, IHRC and partners in the Convivencia Alliance, criticised the Chief Rabbi, reminding him that “all minorities have a duty to stand and fight this growing menace together and not allow any single community to be put at risk with their political stance.”
The fierce reaction in some pro-Israel quarters to the recent decision of West Midlands police to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their team’s match against Aston Villa highlights this “Israel First” approach to community relations. Police announced the ban following a detailed risk assessment which included an analysis of the violence that has historically accompanied Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters on their travels, most notably in Amsterdam last year when fans cheered the genocide in Gaza and chanted insults against Arabs, as well as physically attacking residents. Notwithstanding that the police decision was supported by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group, and the UK football policing unit, in order to stave off a replay of what happened in the Dutch capital, Zionist activists went into overdrive accusing the authorities of appeasing anti-Semitism in “banning Jews”.
Leaving aside the now predicable conflation of Israelis with Jews in order to invoke the spectre of anti-Semitism, the reaction was revealing in that it again seemed to ignore the fears and feelings of other communities in the pursuit of a communal political self-interest. Aston Villa is named after and located in Aston, a very cosmopolitan ward in Britain’s second most populous city. Some 76% of its residents identify as BAME with a marginally lower number identifying as Muslim. In view of the shameful violence meted out to the Arab/Muslim residents of Amsterdam, it was perfectly reasonable to conclude that there was a high propensity for Maccabi fans to do the same in Birmingham.
The foremost priority of any governmental authority is to ensure the safety of citizens but when Birmingham officials tried to do that, they found themselves subjected to a media and political onslaught framed around anti-Semitism. The hysterical reaction, echoed by government ministers including the PM, Keir Starmer, betrayed an almost hostile indifference to the security of Muslims and other minorities in the interests of advancing a totally confected narrative (perhaps it is wishful thinking to expect anything less of a Prime Minister who climbed the greasy pole to power by fronting a pro-Israel led coup in the Labour Party). Ironically, the most vociferous opponents of the ban were the same people who have tirelessly campaigned to ban or limit the anti-genocide protests since October 7, 2023 because of the allegedly intimidatory impact they have on Jews who live or attend synagogues in their vicinity, even though there is no semblance of any equivalence between Maccabi fans with a history of hooliganism and overwhelmingly peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators.
Zionist exceptionalism was also very much in evidence at this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. HMD Trust, the charity that organises the annual event, contemptuously ignored a call by IHRC to include Gaza in the list of genocides being remembered. That prompted IHRC to call on councils and universities around the country to boycott the official commemorations. It also compelled scores of activists, academics and celebrities to write to King Charles who is the patron of the charity, urging him to intervene.
HMD Trust’s refusal spoke directly to the Zionist exceptionalisation of anti-Jewish racism, the creation of a hierarchy of racially inspired atrocities in which one stands apart from all others. Conveniently forgetting that it undermines the principle of “Never Again” which is claimed to lie at the heart of HMD, the refusal exposed the event as a political device to promote one genocide over all others. The actions (or inaction) of HMD was a painful reminder of the importance of civil society grasping the nettle to devise alternative commemorations (Genocide Memorial Day being one example) that are universal in scope and inclusive so that they do justice to all the victims of all genocides.
Events like Genocide Memorial Day are an essential antidote against the instrumentalization of the Holocaust by the Zionist state to provide cover for its unceasing atrocities. Contrary to received (manufactured) wisdom, Holocaust Memorial Day has never been an apolitical remembrance of man’s capacity for inhumanity. It is an Israeli construct that serves to cynically exploit the memory of the Nazi Holocaust and provide a legitimisation for the very existence of the illegitimate Zionist state.
HMD was inaugurated by Israel in 1951, just three years after Zionist terror gangs had violently purged what was then Palestine of 800,000 inhabitants to make way for the new state. In the following years Zionists successfully campaigned to spread HMD, leveraging European guilt and political self-interest, to institutionalize it across the Western world. The commemoration has been accused, particularly in the last two decades, of airbrushing Palestinian and other suffering by establishing a memorial that remembered only or primarily Jewish victims of genocide. It has successfully helped to construct a narrative of unique, unparalleled victimhood that elevates the uniqueness of Jewish suffering into an unassailable political dogma. This has enabled Israel to use the Holocaust as a get out of jail card, allowing it to systematically evade adhering to international norms and values. Without the weaponization of the Holocaust, without the immunity conferred by this narrative of singular victimhood, Israel would not today enjoy the support that it still does in large parts of the Western world.
This shaping of the Holocaust into a sacred cow and the standard by which all racism should be measured is an insult to the memory of victims of non anti-Semitic racism and the millions of others targeted by Nazi supremacist genocide. It is also injurious to a cause that depends on the acknowledgement of the suffering endured by others in other genocides including Gaza. Elevating your own experience and relegating the pain of others does not make for a partnership of equals and only breeds resentment.
Despite the unprecedented exposure and discussion of Zionist agendas seeping ever deeper into our political system since the start of the Gaza genocide, the direction of travel is still deeply worrying with Zionists successfully lobbying for racism to be defined more and more through a Zionist lens. In October this year, the prime minister declared that all NHS staff in the UK would be required to undertake mandatory anti-Semitism training, a decision provoked by relentless campaigning from pro-Israel organisations concerned by the growing support that Palestinian liberation has harnessed among the British public. Groups such as Campaign Against Antisemitism which have hitherto been instrumental in demonising pro-Palestine activists as racists will be contracted to advance the insidious IHRA definition. The announcement came on the heels of a decision to award £1m to the Union of Jewish Students, another Zionist and genocide apologist group, to continue delivering anti-Semitism training to British university staff.
The virulent hate campaign launched by some British Zionists against anti-genocide campaigners over the last two years is another barrier to continued cooperation. As if it were not depraved enough to support or apologise for the genocide in Gaza, pro-Israel organisations have, often in the name of the Jewish community and without much pushback, undertaken a concerted effort to vilify pro-Palestine supporters as extremists and terrorists. Whether that has been to apply pressure on regulatory bodies to strike off professionals, or lobby the government to proscribe direct action groups like Palestine Action, prevailing on medical authorities to remove from a hospital artwork by child victims of the Gaza genocide or seeking the imposition of restrictions on freedom of expression as in the unsuccessful prosecution of Marieha Hussain, Zionists have waged an unrelenting war against anyone who opposes Israel’s racially motivated crimes.
Groups like Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Community Security Trust and UK Lawyers for Israel have made it their business to paint anti-genocide activists as raging Muslim extremists in a bid to delegitimise their cause, something that has served to exacerbate the already resurgent anti-Muslim prejudice being whipped up by the far right across the nation. Some of the same groups have also continued to press for authorities to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, not to protect Jews from racism, but to shield Israel from criticism. In doing all these things they have demonstrated that in the final analysis their loyalty is to Israel first, right or wrong.
This brings us neatly to the burgeoning alliance between some Zionists and the rampant far right. Hilary Aked, Melissa Jones and David Miller have traced the origins of this alliance in a counter-jihad movement that itself grew out of the shift in the West’s political focus in the 1980’s from the communist red threat to the Islamic green threat, a pivot that gained impetus after the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001. They write:
“…scholars have recognised a clear strategic reorientation by certain elements of the far-right. Some analysts have begun to speak of ‘two fascisms in contemporary Europe’: one ‘old’ form committed to anti-semitism, and another ‘new’ form – nurtured by the war on terror – fixated on Islam.”
This involved a reorientation for certain far right actors away from the Judeophobia which previously dominated their agenda towards Islamophobia. Today, the main rump of the far right in the UK is not only obsessed with dehumanising Muslims and attacking Islam as an existential threat to British culture, values and society, it also claims to stand with Israel and British Zionists in what it sees as a common fight. Admittedly, not all Zionists are comfortable with this allegiance but it is notable that most prominent British Islamophobic hate preacher and leader, Steven Yaxley Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, was recently rewarded with an invitation to visit Israel by a government minister. It is also not insignificant that the Islamophobia that fuels and underpins the revival of the new far right in the UK and abroad is heavily financed by pro-Israel groups. These ties have been documented extensively enough elsewhere for them to warrant detailed attention in this essay.
It is also pertinent to mention that tacit or public support for the Zionist state among some British Jews has sometimes crossed the line into active participation in the genocide. Several Zionist charities have openly raised money for the Israeli army as it blitzes Gaza, leading the charity watchdog in the UK to investigate and even rebuke them. On 18 November 2025, the Charity Commission issued an official warning to Mizrachi UK, which it found had engaged in “the raising of funds to provide equipment to soldiers in a foreign military”. Several more charities are still under investigation for similar activities after complaints from IHRC among others. Last year, IHRC submitted a report to the regulator, Enabling Genocide Fundraising in the UK: Questions for the Charity Commission, highlighting the role of several Zionist charities in collecting money to support the Israeli armed forces. What was even more worrying was that in the case of one charity, the Charity Commission had turned a blind eye to this activity despite being alerted to its probable breach of charity regulations as far back as 2015.
A Zionist exceptionalism that is prepared to sacrifice the greater good for nefarious self-interest cannot be a suitable partner in the fight against racism. The struggle for social and political justice requires a principled attachment to fundamental values, not a tactical adherence that can be derogated for communal political gain. Zionism and anti-racism are mutually exclusive: one cannot support a genocide and at the same time claim to fight racism without undermining the integrity of the whole movement. The same applies to inter-faith cooperation which is even more dangerous in that it is expressly designed with the intention of encouraging self-censorship in the name of “community cohesion” (as if it were possible to brush a genocide under the carpet). Moreover, over and above simply compromising the anti-racism movement, Zionists in Britain are also actively weakening it with their incessant targeting of anti-Zionist expression and campaigners. These are not the actions of genuine partners.
Faisal Bodi is a commentator and former journalist. He has written extensively for the Guardian and Independent as a specialist on Muslim affairs and has also worked for Aljazeera. Faisal has covered many riots over the years including the 2001 unrest in our northern cities and the riots that gripped French cities in 2005. He currently works for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the longest standing Muslim led rights advocacy group in the UK, and is co-editor of The Long View.
[1] See e.g. ‘Who counts? Anti-antisemitism and the racial politics of emotion’, Adam Sutcliffe, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14687968241256974 , Ethnicities, Volume 25 Issue 1, February 2025.