The British establishment is creating a climate of fear about protesting in any meaningful way against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June . (No. 10 Downing/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
British-Israeli Jew Yael Kahn has been charged with causing “alarm or distress” for holding a placard referring to “Nazi Israel” at a London protest that opposed the continuing presence of Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s genocide-justifying Israeli ambassador, in the U.K.
There is a long tradition of Israeli and Jewish intellectuals, politicians and activists making just this sort of comparison between Israel and the Nazis. Many of these Jews were from the generation that lived through the Holocaust, and were presumably well-positioned to draw such a conclusion.
Many decades ago the renowned Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, nominated for the Israel Prize, warned that, after Israel began occupying the Palestinian territories in 1967, its soldiers had turned into “Judeo-Nazis”. Their behaviour has since got far, far worse than anything Liebowitz witnessed.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz lecturing in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1964. (Avishai Teicher/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5)
New York Times, Dec. 3, 1948.
In the early 1950s, Menachem Begin, who would later be elected prime minister of Israel, declared that “emergency regulations” adopted by the Israeli Parliament — and used against Palestinians to this day — were “Nazi laws.”
[A Begin visit to the U.S. in 1948 was protested by leading Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, who wrote in a letter published in The New York Times that Begin’s party was “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”]
In 2010, Hajo Meyer, an Auschwitz survivor who went on to become a noted physicist, spoke at an event at the House of Commons in which he repeatedly compared Israel’s behaviour to that of the Nazis — a comparison that was used by the Israeli lobby and British media to smear Jeremy Corbyn, his friend, as an antisemite by association.
What we have been seeing ever since is the gradual expansion of this twin-pronged demonisation campaign: both to oust a political leader that threatened the establishment with a mildly democratic socialist programme; and to silence critics of Israel, including critics who are Jewish and Israeli.
Corbyn, the establishment may hope, has mostly been neutered by the smears — though the first poll since he teamed up with Zarah Sultana to form a so-far unnamed new party suggests he may be more of a nuisance than they expected. It shows the pair currently level-pegging with Labour at about 15 per cent of votes.
Hajo Meyer in 2015. (Vimeo: MY GOOD FORTUNE IN AUSCHWITZ/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 3.0)
But more pressing for the establishment has been extinguishing growing popular anger at Britain’s continuing complicity in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, even as its genocidal nature becomes impossible to hide. Genocide and Holocaust scholars – including Israeli ones – are increasingly explicit on this point.
You know how bad the Gaza genocide has got when even the New York Times is ready to publish a noted (Israeli) Holocaust scholar explaining why this is one.
Omer Bartov: “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza.”
More here: https://t.co/M6Rmhgpmiw pic.twitter.com/ZhesA62c7p
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 15, 2025
The campaign to crush dissent began before the genocide. It was the establishment’s reaction to Corbyn becoming the first leader of one of the two main U.K. parties to give voice to widespread disquiet at Israel’s increasingly blatant violence towards the Palestinian people and its refusal to concede any kind of Palestinian state.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former U.K. Labour leader, at front of the Ceasefire Now march in London to the U.S. embassy, Nov. 11, 2023. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The British establishment’s response was to impose a new definition of antisemitism — produced by an Israel lobby group, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) — that intentionally conflated criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. One of the definition’s many Israel-related examples of antisemitism is “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
The IHRA definition, or rather mis-definition, of antisemitism has been widely adopted — either formally or informally — by British institutions, from the government and local councils to universities and the media.
Though obscured, it is the implicit basis of the BBC’s refusal to allow its reporters — and guests — to make any allusion to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza as a genocide. The BBC behaves as if the Nazis had a monopoly on mass extermination — and so any reference to a genocide in Gaza equates it to the Holocaust and is therefore equivalent to antisemitism under the IHRA definition.
Reminder: Whistleblower reveals that the BBC has DIRECT instructions to safeguard Israel’s image.pic.twitter.com/2si0p8K7Or
— Matt Aldarab (@mattybach1) July 16, 2025
The Starmer government is wielding other British institutions against the public: most significantly, the police and the courts. The legal sphere is being used to crush any meaningful criticism of Israel — and the British government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide.
In charging Kahn, the police are behaving as if the thoroughly discredited IHRA definition has actual legal standing. It doesn’t.
But the government’s proscription this month of the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation — making it now equivalent to Al-Qaeda or Islamic State — does.
The implication is that any tangible form of action — or support for such action — to stop either arms firms in the U.K. or the British state arming the genocide amounts to terrorism. Activists and their supporters could spend 14 years in jail as a result.
The government’s response is shocking — and is meant to be. It sends a chilling message that any opposition to Israel’s genocide is a highly risky endeavour that could leave one deprived of freedom and permanently tainted with a terrorism conviction.
The government’s goal has been precisely to muddy the waters about where basic rights end and criminality begins. It is to make the public frightened to protest in any meaningful way against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, whether it be its system of apartheid, its prolonged siege of Palestinian territory, its intensification of a long-standing ethnic cleansing programme, or now its genocide.
The direction of travel is clear, as two Kent police officers showed by threatening this week to arrest an anti-genocide protester under the Terrorism Act for waving a Palestinian flag and holding a banner saying “Free Palestine.”
Reminder: Whistleblower reveals that the BBC has DIRECT instructions to safeguard Israel’s image.pic.twitter.com/2si0p8K7Or
— Matt Aldarab (@mattybach1) July 16, 2025
Whether the police officers’ threats are backed by the law or not is largely beside the point. This is about creating a climate of fear.
Hard-won democratic rights are evaporating — as the West digs in to support its most important surviving, militarised colonial outpost, created nearly 80 years ago to secure the Middle East’s oil wealth.
The lengths Western capitals are willing to go to prop up Israel, even as it shreds international law, tells us everything we need to know about where their real priorities lie.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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‘they’ know that they cannot justify the apartheid, the genocide (especially, of children), they know that they cannot crush the Palestinian insurrection by military means, they know that the tide of public opinion runs against them in increasing strength, therefore, they lash out against their critics in their vain ambition to perpetuate a gross injustice. Nothing like oppression to incentivize determination to carry on. Just as France lost control of Algeria; Britain, of Kenya, so too, in the fullness of time, will Israel loose control of Palestine.
meanwhile, while they express an intent to jail those whose opinions they despise, dread, they cannot find a way to house the homeless. Maybe the homeless should hold Palestinian flags – one way to get the government to provide them with room and board.
Now is not the time to be fearful. It is an ideal time to be unafraid, united and standing strong right around the globe. It is the time for be politically creative in all ways. For instance, there must be many decent people in wheel chairs who could show public support for Palestine Action. Imagine the difficulties this would cause the constabulary.
After many a year, it is so politically exhilarating to see all those wonderful people around the world fighting back. We must keep up the momentum. It is only when we don’t back down and take the fight up to these oppressors, we win. Surely we are not going to allow ourselves to be oppressed by corporate fascist U.S. Trump and his western ‘Trumpettes’ like Starmer.
Perhaps our written articles could also contain a call to action. United we stand divided we fall!
What the colonialist fascists fear most is losing the ideological argument to those supporting human rights for all. They know that once they lose that argument, they will never be able to intervene or wage war on another country again. It will be game over….permanently. That’s why they are willing to openly violate their own laws to prop up Israel. It’s their last stand against the multipolar world. They are terrified of what that means. Keep standing strong against the old colonialist world order. It’s on its last legs.
Thanks again to Mr. Cook for covering the complicity of the UK in the most heinous atrocities of our time. It was the UK who “gave away land that didn’t belong to it” to create the state of Israel in the first place. (aka Zionist regime). The UK/US imperialist dynamic duo is in lock-step in foreign policy and domestic authoritarianism (despite slightly different rhetoric). Despite the charades of the sham elections, there is little, if any, functional democracy in the UK or US. The Sycophant-Stenographers in the MassMediaMonopoly (MiniTrue) keep repeating almost daily that Russia/China/Iran are “autocratic” or “dictatorships” while the US and UK are democracies who respect the rule of law and human rights. The lies, hypocrisies and historical ironies here would take many pages to illustrate.
Chancellor Merz of the imperial vassal state of Germany, said that Israel is doing the “dirty work” for us. Now the neo-Nazi Germans have sided with the Zionists in Genocide. And they have revived the demonization of the Russian “uentermenschen” and are in de-facto war with Russia. However, polls show that the young people of Germany are not willing to fight on the Russian Front. How sad and pathetic. Has the US/UK and EU vassals become a suicide-death cult?
Like the US Ds and Rs, the UK political parties are no different: genocide, war, kleptocracy, privatization, slash social spending etc. There is no democratic accountability, or meaningful choice: only oligarchy. Just because there are PR “elections” does not make a country a “democracy” (whatever that means anymore)
With all the new spending on military, supporting Israel and Ukraine, increasing authoritarian repression, they might as well fully privatise the NHS while they are at it. They could raise many billions of pounds selling off NHS real-estate and assets to private interests. That would free up more money to give to Israel, Ukraine and UK military. If you protest the privatisation of the NHS, the authoritarian precedent is already set. Once the UK has a private health extortion racket, there will be no real difference with the US.
Well said.
While the direction of your comment is identifying both Starmer and in this comment, Merz as well, they are not alone. In Australia, normally a British bag carrier but now graduated to become a USA sycophant in every way possible, the most outrageous piece of honesty we have ever seen on this subject is that “Israel has a right to defend itself” Yes, the old propaganda as we have seen in the videos as part of this article. Thank you, Jonathan Cook, again for your writings.
It has always amazed me that the white Western media and the governments of those countries seem to accept that the Hamas numbers are so large as to be a major military force to be compared to the child-killing IDF, as we hear of them in schools, hospitals, suburbs everywhere, requiring bombing attacks without any end. Still today.
The Israelis have judged all this badly. Yes, they may have killed over 200,000 Palestinians as part of their plan but their plot is now being seen for what it is, not by tyre likes of Germany, the UK and Australia, but by parts of the media.
Certainly not the BBC, however.
Absolutely right Jonny. I’m glad i left that sinking ship over 40 years ago. They are becoming more and more “americanized”. And just a few weeks ago i was shocked to see an advert on an english newspaper website in which the narrator was speaking with an american accent. The privatization of the NHS is probably just a matter of time. The wasted money sent to israel is an abomination. Given the fact the bloody brits didn’t even want the jews after the second world war!!!!!
Starmer is from the ole British upper-class mindset, that wants to reestablish the now gone Empire. He sucks up to OH-Range in the hope that he will become elevated within the circles in his own twisted mind. He’s another white Unc’ Tom, as was Tony Blair, along with Barry.
“Armed police threatened a peaceful protester with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and having signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”, accusing her of supporting a proscribed organisation.
Officers told Laura Murton, 42, that her demonstration in Canterbury, Kent, on Monday evening expressed views supportive of Palestine Action, which was banned under terrorism legislation earlier this month”
Xxxx//www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/armed-police-threatened-to-arrest-kent-protester-for-holding-palestinian-flag
There’s a video in the above link of the attempted arrest of the protester. It’s a very bizarre exchange. And one of the police was standing with his hands in his pockets as though he was on an outing. If it wasn’t very disturbing, it would be funny.