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Antisemitism is being weaponised once again, as Andy Burnham’s government rounds on the Jewish-led Greens and rolls out a Big Brother programme in schools
Britain is firmly back in the grip of a full-blown moral panic about leftwing “antisemitism”, once again manufactured by the UK’s political and media classes desperate to shield themselves and Israel from scrutiny.
They are keen to smear large swaths of the British public as Jew haters, just as they did a decade ago when they targeted Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.
But this time the task will be far harder.
Britons are being told they must pretend that the last three years – years in which they watched Israel butcher and maim many tens of thousands of children in Gaza, and then starve them – never happened. They must not believe their lying eyes.
Nor apparently did they see the British political class actively collude in those atrocities year after year: by supplying weapons, passing on intelligence, excusing atrocities, providing diplomatic cover, and crushing protest.
Nor did they witness the billionaire-owned media smear the anti-genocide protests as Jew hatred and soft-soap Israel’s relentless atrocities as a “war on Hamas”.
Now the British establishment is recruiting once again a self-serving definition of antisemitism it foisted on public life a decade ago to smear its critics, from the Jewish leader of the Green party to schoolchildren expressing solidarity with slaughtered Palestinian children.
The Israel-initiated definition of antisemitism, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), focuses on stigmatising criticism of Israel and its apologists rather than protecting Jews.
It cites as examples of Jew hatred the description of Israel as a racist state and any kind of historical comparison between Israel and the actions of the Nazis – long the West’s cultural yardstick for judging crimes against humanity.
Under the IHRA’s misleading definition, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, must be judged antisemitic for concluding in 2024 that Israel enforces a system of apartheid against Palestinians – that is, a system of institutionalised, racist segregation.
Similarly, the critically acclaimed Israeli documentary NAZA must be called out for Jew hate, because an intelligence officer compares the military actions he took part in in Gaza, using AI to kill Palestinians on an industrial scale, with those of the Nazis.
One-party state
In this latest round of the British establishment’s weaponisation of antisemitism, the main target is once again a political leader whose party has broken with the decades-old, failing neoliberal consensus.
Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a major political party, is being painted as an enabler of antisemitism – accused of permitting Jew hatred to infect the Green party just as Corbyn was while heading the Labour party.
The pretext this time is that the Greens passed a motion at their annual conference – supported by a majority of the wider membership – declaring Zionism to be a racist political ideology.
The motion notes that the self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel, the realisation of the Zionist movement’s ambitions, was created through the mass expulsion of the native Palestinian population. As the ICJ concluded, Israel also upholds a system of apartheid rule for the benefit of Jews only.
This may all be hard to refute but the British political and media classes aren’t interested in truth. They want blood – and the IHRA antisemitism definition supplies the knife.
Both prime minister Andy Burnham and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey have responded to the motion by refusing to work with Polanski and the Greens, should the next general election produce a hung parliament.
In other words, they are prepared to spurn the only Jewish-led party, supposedly on the grounds of fighting antisemitism, even if it means killing their own chances of holding power. By default, that may open the door to the right and far-right forming the next government.
That is where, as both Labour and the Lib Dems know only too well, real racism, not the confected kind, runs rampant.
According to a 2017 Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey, recording antisemitic attitudes by political affiliation, those holding “very rightwing” views were three times more likely than other political factions to have strongly antisemitic views.
Notably, the proportion of “very leftwing” voters holding strongly antisemitic views was entirely in line with the rest of the population – that is, it was a marginal phenomenon.
A similar survey by MORI two years later showed a similar pattern: of the right being both far more pro-Israel than the left and far more anti-semitic.
Nonetheless, at the time of these surveys, the political and media classes were claiming, contrary to all the evidence, that a leftwing, Corbyn-led Labour party was plagued by Jew hate.
Now they are doing exactly the same to the Greens.
The Polanski smears alone should serve as proof of the deep, institutionalised corruption of the British political system – a system that continues to excuse and conspire in Israel’s genocide.
Wrecking the Greens
As with the Corbyn era, the all-out assault on Polanski is intended to wreck his party by prising open divisions.
During Corbyn’s time as leader, he found his ability to represent the views of Labour’s huge grassroots membership consistently undermined by the bulk of his MPs and a rightwing party bureaucracy content to rely on big donations from corporations and the super-rich.
They were determined to stop Corbyn from ever reaching a position of power from which he could implement a popular programme of mildly socialist policies, such as ending austerity, redistributing wealth, halting forever wars, and taking failing utilities like the privatised, profit-seeking water companies back into public ownership.
His opponents struggled to attack him directly on policy, so they focused on character-assassination instead.
Now Polanski and Green members find themselves in the same boat, facing off against the old guard of the Green party, headed by former leader Caroline Lucas and a handful of MPs.
The media have been helping to bolster this group as a supposed safe pair of hands – the adults in the room – who can take back control of the party.
The goal, one assumes, is that, stripped of Polanksi, the Greens will sink back into electoral irrelevance.
Then there will be no danger of a Polanski-led party ending austerity, redistributing wealth, halting forever wars, and taking failing utilities like the privatised, profit-seeking water companies back into public ownership.
Soap-opera politics
During Corbyn’s tenure, the establishment narrative was that the many hundreds of thousands of disillusioned British voters drawn back into politics by Labour’s new-found commitment to democratic socialism were all dangerous “antisemites”.
In this fanciful telling, Labour became Europe’s largest party only because Jew-hating entryists overran it.
In response, Sir Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, purged Labour of its left wing, once again making the party dependent on donations from Big Business.
The left evicted from Labour found a new political home in the Green party, sending membership numbers rocketing to record highs there.
According to the political and media class, this is not proof that large swaths of the British public want a different kind of politics: an end to permanent austerity and imperial wars – an end to a policy agenda dictated by billionaires.
No, in their view, it simply means that the “antisemitic” left has now infiltrated the Green party and must be rooted out again.
This is the establishment’s whack-a-mole interpretation of rising public anger – anger it would prefer to channel into support for racist scapegoating led by the Reform far-right than risk the left gaining power to tackle the billionaire class’s chokehold on public policy.
Even as the two-party system splinters into an array of factions, Britain continues to look solidly like a one-party state, whose different rosettes represent the same monied interests.
You either back neoliberal austerity at home and corporate-sponsored imperial wars and genocides abroad – or you must be figuratively burnt at the stake as an antisemite.
Hierarchy of racism
The manufacturing of a “left” antisemitism scare for a second time is more ambitious and high-risk than before. Parts of the public are waking up to the playbook after three years of British government collusion in Israel’s genocide.
This time, the political and media classes are widening their dragnet to intimidate a far wider section of the population, through a new Big Brother programme to be rolled out in schools.
On this occasion the gaslighting and bullying of the British public is not being restricted to the left, or even to adult voters. It is reaching deep into the UK education system, with the government formally imposing for the first time a hierarchy of racisms to be enforced on children.
Schools will now be required to treat antisemitism as a unique and especially pernicuous form of racism – even as all the evidence shows racism towards Muslim and black communities is far more prevalent and troubling.
The large mobs taking to Britain’s streets, trying to stop small boats crossing the Channel and seeking to burn down migrant hostels, are chiefly hostile to brown people and Muslims, not Jews.
Survey after survey shows a swelling tide of Islamophobia.
According to data compiled by the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the three-year period to spring 2025, Muslims were the most likely of any religious and ethnic group to face both religious and race-based hate crime.
Nonetheless, Burnham’s government has announced it is adopting in full all 27 recommendations made by an official review charged with tackling a supposed antisemitism crisis in British schools. It was set up earlier this year, shortly before Starmer stepped down as prime minister.
The review was entrusted to Sir David Bell, a former chief inspector of schools and senior civil servant in the education department. Bell is described in the review’s terms of reference as “independent of government” and as having “no conflict of interest”.
And yet, as the media watchdog body Newscord notes, Bell was actually receiving a salary as vice-chair of a government agency called Skills England through much of the period he was conducting the review.
For the past decade he has also been listed as sitting on the national council of the Academic Study Group.
The ASG states that its sole “firm policy” is opposition to the BDS movement, which seeks peaceful means – through boycotts and sanctions – to end Israel’s criminal behaviour towards the Palestinian people, echoing the campaign against apartheid South Africa.
The group’s director, John Levy, wrote in 2021 that the trust was founded to curb “hostility” towards Israel and serve “as a vehicle for introducing British academics to some of the predicaments of contemporary Israel”. Its work includes providing talks supportive of Israel to British schools.
Bell himself has in the past been accused of Islamophobia. In 2005, when he was head of Ofsted, he singled out Muslim faith schools for putting Britain’s “national coherence” at risk.
Antisemitism weaponised
Bell’s decision to treat antisemitism as a “distinct form of racism” – separate from other racisms and requiring special safeguarding procedures to protect Jewish pupils – is exactly the approach fiercely rejected in an earlier inquiry, one set up by Starmer.
Martin Forde KC was appointed in early 2020 to investigate claims of an antisemitism problem under Corbyn, Starmer’s predecessor.
Much to Starmer’s annoyance, Forde’s report, published in 2022, found that Corbyn had been largely correct that antisemitism was weaponised during his tenure for factional gain, chiefly by the right of the party that Starmer had come to lead.
Forde also criticised the rightwing Labour bureaucracy, which had opposed Corbyn, for “in effect operating a hierarchy of racism”, privileging antisemitism while ignoring or downplaying other forms of racism. Staff were berated for using antisemitism for political point-scoring against the left instead of taking a serious approach to tackling antisemitism.
With the help of the media, Starmer has succeeded in largely wiping Forde’s report from the record. It is almost never referenced.
With the Bell review, we seem to be back to square one: the weaponisation of antisemitism to create a hierarchy of racism is being extended from politics to schools.
Hidden in the report’s later pages, Bell actually notes that there has been no rise in antisemitism, observing of recent years: “Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable.”
Perhaps not suprisingly, in parallel Bell points out that opposition to Israel has steadily risen during the period that the world watched Israel murdering, maiming and starving Gaza’s children.
Or as the report observes: “Anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.”
Bell himself points to a survey conducted in 2025 – at the height of the Gaza genocide – in which a quarter of all Britons and half of those aged between 18 and 24 said they were uncomfortable “spending time with people who openly support Israel”. By contrast, only 3 per cent said they were opposed to having a friendship with someone because they were Jewish.
In other words, Bell implicitly accepts the very premise of his review is flawed: antisemitism is not more of a problem than it was. It is opposition to Israel’s atrocities that is on the rise.
And that, it seems, is what the Bell review and the government’s new policy towards schools is really seeking to stifle.
Conjured from thin air
It should hardly need stating that, if the review’s premises are faulty, then any conclusions based on those flawed premises are likely to be wrong too.
But that is beside the point. The purpose of the Bell review is not to eradicate a problem of antisemitism in schools that the review largely has to conjure out of thin air.
It has been widely pointed out that Bell’s headline figure of nearly “three in five Jewish children” suffering antisemitism – cited by education secretary Lucy Powell and the corporate media – is completely unfounded.
In fact, the figure is based on a minuscule survey sample of 92 Jewish six-form students, aged between 16 and 19. Of them, 29 reported experiencing antisemitism – less than a third.
But there is a further problem. Even those 29 Jewish students who claim to have experienced antisemitism were likely to have based that experience on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which focuses on criticism of Israel more than hatred of Jews.
It is quite possible that in many, if not most, of these cases Jewish students perceived as evidence of antisemitism not hatred of Jews but opposition to Israel, or anti-genocide protests, or the promotion of Palestinian rights.
That is even more likely given that more than two-thirds of all Jewish pupils study in exclusively Jewish faith schools, many of which characterise themselves as Zionist and teach pupils to identify strongly with an apartheid Israeli state currently carrying out genocide.
That some Jewish children have been educated, like their parents, to regard critics of Israel’s crimes or its apartheid character as Jew haters, does not make Israel’s critics at fault. It is not their behaviour that needs policing.
Rather, it is the racist, anti-Palestinian education being promoted in Britain’s Zionist schools that needs to be rooted out.
Not fit for purpose
Nonetheless, under the Bell recommendations, pupils, teachers and parents will be bullied into accepting that the horrors they watched Israel commit over the past three years – and that the UK colluded in – are not what they seem.
How is this to be achieved? Burnham’s government is to impose on British schools the IHRA definition of antisemitism – the one that was used to trash Corbyn’s Labour party and is now being wielded against Polanski and the Greens.
On the basis of the IHRA definition, Polanski is being branded the “wrong sort of Jew” – that is, one whose leftwing policies cannot be tolerated.
Now the same atmosphere of the witch-hunt is to be unleashed in British schools.
Leading legal authorities in the UK long ago criticised the IHRA definition as being unfit for purpose. Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal judge and himself Jewish, warned back in 2017 that the definition was poorly worded, imprecise and was being used to stifle legitimate debate about Israel.
One of the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism expressly cites holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.
And yet, because seven of the IHRA’s 11 examples focus on Israel, the definition risks increasing antisemitism through its conflation of Jews with Israel – paradoxically, in violation of its own precepts.
It is precisely because of this continuing and wilful misuse of the IHRA definition that its lead author, Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly stated his opposition to it being codified into law and used to police behaviour in schools and colleges.
In a 2019 Guardian oped, Stern accused “rightwing Jews” of “weaponizing” his definition to silence debate about Israel.
But the problem is not just rightwing Jews weaponising antsemitism, it is governments like Burnham’s. The British political and media classes have realised that the IHRA definition is far too useful – in crushing leftwing critics – to ever be mothballed.
Zionist re-education
It is not difficult to predict the combined effect of imposing a hierarchy of racisms in which antisemitism sits at the top and of enforcing the IHRA definition on schools, effectively outlawing robust criticism of Israel.
It will require school administrations and teaching staff to police classrooms and playgrounds as never before and to crack down on any demonstration of normal, empathetic behaviours among pupils. Henceforth concern for the suffering of Palestinians will be classed as aberrant, as “radicalisation”.
Expressing solidarity with Palestinian children killed or injured in Gaza risks being flagged as a safeguarding threat to Jewish pupils. As will displaying pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide badges. As will holding bake sales to raise money to feed and house Gaza’s children living in Gaza’s ruins. As will wearing traditional Palestinian costume on national identity days celebrated in many of Britain’s more diverse schools.
Already since the Gaza genocide, record numbers of pupils have reportedly been referred to the government’s Prevent “counter-extremism” programme for wearing pro-Palestine badges and stickers.
Acts of fellow feeling for the oppressed, for the victims of what the world’s highest court warns is an apartheid regime, will be banished from schools.
Daniel Kebede, head of the National Education Union, has warned: “Recommending the IHRA definition risks tightening the chilling grip already stifling classroom discussion of the Gaza genocide.”
The logic of the government’s hierarchy of racisms will be fully on display.
Pupils will be denied the right to identify with traumatised Palestinian children in Gaza, so that Jewish children in Britain can be left in peace to identify with a foreign state – Israel – even as it is widely accused of committing genocide.
Presumably, the government’s hope is that, if caught early enough, pupils can be trained out of their normal instincts to care for the less fortunate, for those who suffer. They can be taught that such feelings are shameful and evidence of Jew hatred.
And by extension, they can be made to believe that the British state’s years-long collusion in Israeli atrocities is not a crime but the moral thing to do.
Any pupils who stray from the correct path, who refuse to be cowed, will be subjected to mandatory Zionist re-education, implemented through fiercely pro-Israel lobby groups masquerading as Jewish community organisations.
That is the prospect too for British children who have Palestinian, Arab or Muslim heritage, including those who have had family members killed, maimed, ethnically cleansed or tortured by Israel.
For years they have watched the suffering and humiliation of their communities, while knowing that the British government – their government – is complicit in those crimes.
Now they will have to permanently hide and suppress their true feelings to avoid punishment.
Those who fail to do so will be subjected to British state-sponsored instruction programmes – re-education – run by pro-Israel groups to “correct” their wrongthink, to force these children to love the very state that has murdered and abused their compatriots and loved ones.
Racist double standard
To put in proper perspective the government’s crackdown on a largely non-existent antisemitism problem in schools, remember that more than 2,000 young British Jews are believed to have headed off to Israel to help its military commit genocide in Gaza.
The government has done nothing to stop them going. Meanwhile, British police have been repeatedly handed details of potential war crimes suspects but so far have failed to investigate, arrest or charge any of them.
Powell, the UK’s education secretary, has told Sky News: “I don’t think that our schools should be a place where it’s about making protests and statements about geopolitical events around the world.”
And yet only a year ago her predecessor, Bridget Phillipson, who set up the Bell review, was filmed in British classrooms with primary schoolchildren waving Ukrainian flags.
Despite Powell’s new prohibition, many Jewish pupils will continue to be encouraged by their schools to identify strongly with the foreign state of Israel – a state almost permanently mired, in the worst possible way, in “geopolitical events”.
If it is important for British children to identify with and support Ukraine’s white children through their suffering, why is it not possible – why is it antisemitism – for British children to similarly identify with and support the brown children of Gaza as they go through far greater suffering?
It is hard to imagine an answer that is not racist to its core.
Whatever the government claims, these double standards are not driven by principle. They are not about antisemitism. This are about protecting Israel.
Burnham entered office apologising for how his predecessor, Starmer, “got it wrong” at the outset of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
But his government is now doubling down on what Labour got equally wrong in the years leading up to the genocide – when it dedicated its energies to crushing the section of the party led by Corbyn that was warning of Israel’s deeply racist character and of what it was likely to do to the Palestinians.
The gencoide has vindicated Corbyn and the left in the most horrifying manner possible.
No matter. As with the attacks on Polanski, none of this is really about antisemitism. It is about Israel.
It is about the British establishment and the billionaire class protecting their interests both in the war industries Israel is so central to and in the oil-rich Middle East, where Israel acts as the West’s attack dog.
This is about crushing dissent to prop up a crumbling western political order, led by a greedy, belligerent narcissist in the White House, as it is afflicted by collapse on every front: economic, environmental, political and social.
Dissatisfaction and unrest are growing. Violence is simmering. Bullying children into saluting the Israeli flag will not halt the decline. It simply underscores how much the “liberal” western order has lost the plot.
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