{"id":496,"date":"2026-05-19T16:48:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T16:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/19\/what-keir-starmer-got-wrong-about-zionism-and-antisemitism\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T16:48:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T16:48:51","slug":"what-keir-starmer-got-wrong-about-zionism-and-antisemitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/19\/what-keir-starmer-got-wrong-about-zionism-and-antisemitism\/","title":{"rendered":"What Keir Starmer got wrong about Zionism and antisemitism"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span> Loredana Sangiuliano\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Police are investigating<\/a> an attack on a Jewish man in Golders Green, London, just weeks after two Jewish men were stabbed in the area. These are the latest in a series of violent attacks on Jewish people and institutions. They have also given fresh impetus to a long-running debate about the extent of antisemitism in the UK. <\/p>\n

My research<\/a> explores how the law approaches the thorny question of where political critique of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. This is a sensitive topic, which events like this have brought to public attention once again.<\/p>\n

In a statement<\/a>, Prime Minister Keir Starmer identified three causes of what he described as a \u201ccrisis for all of us\u201d. First, he cited \u201chate preachers\u201d and \u201ccharities that promote antisemitic extremism\u201d. Second, Starmer referred to \u201cthe malign threat posed by states like Iran,\u201d after a group with Iranian links was investigated in relation to arson attacks on Jewish charity Hatzola<\/a> ambulances in Golders Green.<\/p>\n

The third was more controversial: the prime minister pointed the finger at those who \u201cdiminish\u201d the antisemitism faced by Jews today. Standing alongside those who chant \u201cglobalise the intifada\u201d at marches is, according to Starmer, \u201ccalling for terrorism against Jews\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\n Read more:
\n Why banning pro-Palestine marches is a risky response to antisemitic violence<\/a>
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\n <\/em>\n<\/p>\n

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\u201cIntifada\u201d is an Arabic term used to describe Palestinian uprisings against Israel in the late 1980s and early 2000s \u2013 the latter involving suicide bombings aimed at civilian targets in Israel. Starmer went as far as saying that people who approvingly use that phrase should be prosecuted.<\/p>\n

Responses<\/a> from some of the British Jewish community seemed to back Starmer up. Many expressed<\/a> a sense of vulnerability and isolation, exacerbated by betrayal<\/a> at a perceived lack of solidarity from anti-racist activists.<\/p>\n

Similar feelings surfaced after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. For many Jews, a lack of empathy \u2013 at best \u2013 for the victims and the scale of the trauma testified to an \u201cindifference to Jewish death \u2026 across the world\u201d<\/a>. Throughout the subsequent war in Gaza, many felt that the military threat posed by Hamas was routinely erased<\/a> from public debate.<\/p>\n

The rising popularity of zero-sum arguments pitting Israeli \u201csettler colonialism\u201d<\/a> against Palestinian \u201cindigeneity\u201d further squeezed the space for dialogue. This led to a defensive hardening of positions. Even British Jews sceptical of \u2013 or appalled by \u2013 the war\u2019s conduct felt unable<\/a> to express that opposition, for fear that it might be used to delegitimise Israel\u2019s existence and encourage antisemitic reprisals. <\/p>\n

But it also contributed to the widespread adoption of a new critique<\/a> of \u201cantizionist ideology\u201d. While recognising that some of the more outlandish<\/a> claims<\/a> about Israeli conduct<\/a> can draw on an older repertoire<\/a> of anti-Jewish conspiracies, in its more crude variations this ends up classing almost any accusation of Israeli wrongdoing as a \u201clibel\u201d<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The claim that Israeli actions in Gaza could amount to genocide, for example, is regarded as akin<\/a> to the \u201cblood libel\u201d \u2013 the antisemitic fantasy that Jews kill Christian children for religious rituals. Often, no distinction is made between, say, the careful analysis<\/a> of an Israeli scholar and the wild-eyed rantings of a social media provocateur.<\/p>\n

There are diverse modes of opposition to Israel, ranging<\/a> from Islamist rejections of the concept of Jewish sovereignty, to sober reports of Israeli human rights abuses. In the current framing of antizionism, these are reduced into a singular, undifferentiated ideology, which is then inflated into an existential threat to \u201cthe west\u201d<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This mirrors the equally reductive characterisation of Zionism by some of the pro-Palestinian movement: a single, innately malign ideology that is \u201cthe enemy of world peace\u201d<\/a>, responsible for climate change<\/a>, and a danger<\/a> to the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At its worst, this new movement against antizionism<\/a> denies Palestinian suffering<\/a> in much the same way as those who refuse to \u201copen their eyes to Jewish pain\u201d, as Starmer put it.<\/p>\n

Jewish identity and Israel<\/h2>\n

Starmer\u2019s claim that slogans like \u201cglobalise the intifada\u201d should be simply understood as \u201cterrorism against Jews\u201d owes something to this reductive approach. It is true that some Jews interpret such phrases in this way, particularly in light of the sometimes casual attitude<\/a> to political violence among protesters. And there are clearly times when they could be hate speech \u2013 if directly targeted at Jewish people, communal buildings or even pro-Israel protesters<\/a> for instance.<\/p>\n

But there are other rational interpretations for its non-targeted use \u2013 using \u201cintifada\u201d as substitute for \u201crevolution\u201d, perhaps, or as an attempt to link the Palestinian cause to wider opposition to global capitalism. Regardless of how convincing one finds such explanations, such uses of the word cannot be automatically classed as calls for antisemitic violence.<\/p>\n

To insist that this is the only meaning is to eradicate any distinction between Jews in general and Israel in particular. This is troublingly similar to those who call for violence against Jews in retaliation for Israeli actions \u2013 albeit for very different reasons.<\/p>\n

Conflating Jews and Israel, from whatever direction, simplifies the complex historical relation that exists between modern Jewish identity and Israel. The two are certainly not identical, as confirmed by the rising number of Jews who are rejecting<\/a> any connection, or warning of an impending clash between \u201cJewish values\u201d<\/a> and an Israel controlled by far-right factions.<\/p>\n

Yet it is also too easy to pretend that they have nothing to do with each other. Like other 19th-century nationalisms<\/a>, Zionism sought to revive and transform older modes of (Jewish) collective belonging. Meanwhile, the post-Holocaust reconstruction of Jewish identity was inextricably linked to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. <\/p>\n

The connection might vary from person to person \u2013 from the belief that Israel is needed to guarantee Jewish safety, to national, religious, cultural and familial reasons. But the significance of Israel to the majority of Jews cannot be lightly skipped over by repeating truisms like \u201cnot all Jews are Zionists\u201d \u2013 even if it categorically does not mean Jews are politically responsible for what the Israeli government does.<\/p>\n

But neither is Israel a simple extension of Jewish identity, in the way that Starmer suggests. The risk is that \u2013 as shown by the misguided proscribing of the Palestine Action<\/a> group \u2013 pouring police resources into arresting those who chant indeterminate slogans will divert attention away from protecting communities like Golders Green.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Matthew Bolton receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government\u2019s Horizon Europe funding guarantee (grant number EPZ002893\/1). <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Loredana Sangiuliano\/Shutterstock Police are investigating an attack on a Jewish man in Golders Green, London, just weeks after two Jewish men were stabbed in the area. These are the latest in a series of violent attacks on Jewish people and institutions. They have also given fresh impetus to a long-running debate about the extent of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}