We reject this government’s construction of a hierarchy of racism, in which some communities’ fears are elevated into reasons to suppress dissent while others are told to endure abuse, suspicion and violence as the price of public order. Antisemitism is real and must be fought without compromise. But Starmer is now floating the restriction or banning of some pro-Palestine marches on the grounds of their “cumulative effect” on Jewish communities. That is not a neutral defence of minority safety. It is a political attack.
What is being privileged here is not merely “Jewish anxiety” in the abstract, still less every Jewish voice. It is a very particular set of anxieties: the ones that coincide perfectly with the priorities of the British state itself. The government is elevating only those officially sanctioned voices it can use to defend its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza via continued sales of F-35 components and refusal to sanction Israel, its complicity in the Israeli-American war of aggression against Iran, to criminalise Palestine solidarity, its domestic structural racism and to narrow the democratic right to protest. Meanwhile, when Muslims, migrants and other racialised communities are targeted in a political climate saturated with xenophobia, the answer is not exceptional protection but more border violence, more anti-migrant rhetoric, and more appeasement of the forces that inflame racist hostility in the first place. Starmer and Mahmood explicitly promised to tighten work, family and study routes, extend the path to settlement, and harden enforcement against asylum seekers and all migrants.
The British state is perfectly willing to speak the language of “Islamist extremism” when Muslims are the object of suspicion or to ban chants such as “Globalise the Intifada“1 But it has shown no equivalent appetite for policing pro-Israel incitement from the likes of Ephraim Mirvis or The Jewish Chronicle, and no equivalent zeal in prosecuting British nationals who’ve actively participated in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The hierarchy is obvious: Muslims are managed as a danger, while violence aligned with the British state’s own foreign policy priorities is treated with indulgence or silence.
That is the double standard. This government helps create the conditions for racial tension, then pretends to stand above them as the guardian of communal peace. It ranks racisms, plays minorities against one another, and uses one community’s pain as cover for repressing another community’s solidarity. We refuse that logic entirely. The answer to antisemitism is to fight antisemitism. The answer to Islamophobia and xenophobia is to fight Islamophobia and xenophobia. And the answer to mass protest against Britain’s complicity in Israel’s war is not bans, threats and selective policing, but an end to that complicity itself. This is not anti-racism. It is state management of racism: protecting the fears it finds useful, disciplining the solidarities it finds dangerous, and leaving everyone else to live with the consequences.
We call on everyone to defy this abominable logic and come to London on Saturday 16 May for the Nakba 78 march, assembling at 12pm on Exhibition Road, to oppose the ongoing occupation of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, the genocide in Gaza, the expanding regional war, and Tommy Robinson and the far right circus that will be engaged in truly a hate march.
Globalise the Intifada!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
- “Intifada” is an Arabic word meaning “shaking off,” “rebellion,” or “uprising” and can refer to both violent and non-violent uprisings. The First Intifada for instance, was largely non-violent; while the Second Intifada, which came on the back of continued occupation and apartheid post-Oslo, took a more violent turn after it was met with extreme violence from the Israeli side. Furthermore, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is also referred to as the Warsaw Intifada in Arabic. ↩︎