An Israeli Jew is charged over referring to 'Nazi Israel'. An anti-genocide protester risks arrest as a terrorist for waving a Palestinian flag, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer is intentionally stoking a climate of fear
A 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 ambassador, in the UK.
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 gotten far, far worse than anything Liebowitz witnessed.
Menachem Begin and Nazi Laws
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”.
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 who 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.
Popular Anger
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.
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 UK 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.
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 – so any reference to a genocide in Gaza equates it to the Holocaust and is therefore equivalent to antisemitism under the IHRA definition.
Crushing Criticism
The Keir 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 UK 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”.
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.
