Israel is the excuse to snatch away freedoms we once took for granted

Starmer's government is ripping up the rulebook on protest to protect Israel – from classing protests as 'terrorism' to banning repeat marches and fining universities that allow student to demonstrate

In interviews and a comment article over the weekend, the UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson made clear she plans to exploit the pause in the Gaza genocide to snuff out criticism of Israel’s criminal actions – and, of course, her own government’s collusion in that criminality.

Naturally, the British establishment media have been keen to amplify her message that there will be painful consequences both for individuals who continue protesting against Israeli atrocities and for institutions, such as universities, that mistakenly assume they have a duty to uphold centuries-old freedoms by tolerating such protests.

These protests, let us remember, are fully in line with a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which declared:

a) Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian populations there – and has been doing so for decades.

b) Western governments are obligated to do what they can to bring that illegal occupation and Israel’s apartheid system to an end as quickly as possible.

Instead, those same governments are violating the ruling, and international law, both by continuing to support Israel’s criminality and by preventing their own citizens from putting pressure on them to end their support.

The government of Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has even categorised protest against genocide as “support for terrorism”. For the first time in British history, a direct-action group, Palestine Action, has been banned as a terrorist organisation – in its case, for targeting weapons factories in Britain arming Israel’s genocide. It is now illegal to express any support for the group.

In a commentary in the Sunday Express, Phillipson said she wanted the government’s campaign against free speech to go even further to protect Israel. She intends to import to our shores Donald Trump’s full-frontal assault on academic freedom.

She has written to vice-chancellors warning them that their universities face fines and public funding cuts should they allow students to protest on campus against Israeli genocide and apartheid.

She added: “I’m clear the buck stops with universities when it comes to ridding their campuses of hate. Institutions have my full backing to use their powers to do so and keep their students safe.”

But as the rest of the article made clear, the universities don’t just have her “backing” to act against the protesters. They will be compelled to crack down on protests against Israeli apartheid and genocide – what she calls “hate” – or face stiff financial penalties.

This comes in the wake, as Phillipson notes, of separate plans announced by home secretary Shabana Mahmood to give the police further powers to outlaw protests that have a “cumulative impact”.

In other words, the police will be empowered to crush the very kind of protests that discomfit governments the most – those that are repeated because there is a strength of popular feeling to which the government is utterly unresponsive.

It should hardly need pointing out that western governments are most likely to be unresponsive when it is their own criminal behaviours that are the target of protest, whether it is their collusion in Israel’s genocide or their collusion with corporations to gut meaningful action to halt climate breakdown.

Though you would not know it from the media’s cheering, what the British government is doing is stripping out the last vestiges of the right to protest, a right that has been under relentless assault in the UK for the past 40 years.

Phillipson’s Sunday interview with Trevor Philips on Sky was illustrative. He pushed the education secretary to be even more draconian in hollowing out speech and protest rights, as well as academic freedom.

In turn, Phillipson sought once again to rationalise the government’s demolition of the last pillars of a free society on familiar grounds: as a supposed fight against antisemitism.

After conversations with Jewish students and their parents, Phillipson said she had come to appreciate that they are “worried about what it is to be a young Jewish person on campus at the moment in the UK, and we can’t tolerate that”.

The reality is that the police already have plenty of powers to deal with what she called antisemitic “harassment and intimidation”. Forces have the government’s backing and wide social support to tackle real race hate.

So why are the police not cracking down on these antisemites supposedly roaming our university campuses?

The answer – the one Phillipson wants to conceal from us – is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases she’s referring to, Jewish students are not the victims of an attack or even of personal criticism. They have simply been made uncomfortable by the presence of other students exercising a basic democratic right to protest in the public space of a campus – in this case, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and our own government’s material, diplomatic and financial support for it.

Any discomfort felt by some Jewish students flows not from the actual protests but from the fact that these students have been raised as Zionists. They have been raised with a political ideology that makes them identify with Israel. They have chosen to associate their Jewish identity with a state the World Court has declared is both illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian population.

It is not the protesters making an association between Jews and Israel. It is the Zionist Jewish families Phillipson has spoken to – and non-Jews such as Phillipson and Sky’s Philips who think like them.

There is a quick fix to this “problem”, one that does not involve shredding the right to protest and freedom of speech, or fining universities who allow students to protest.

And that is for the British government, and the British media, to stop treating Israel like it is a normal member of the community of nations – after it has just committed genocide and, on a very best-case scenario, is about to return to a status quo in which Palestinians are brutally abused under systems of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and siege.

It is for the British government and media to make clear to Zionist Jewish families, and those non-Jews who think like them, that it is not okay to identify with a criminal state, or to expect any special privilege – protection from being offended – when others want to criticise that criminal state for its criminal actions.

There are plenty of British Jews who do not identify with Israel. In fact, many are repulsed by its actions and take part in anti-genocide demonstrations like the one at the weekend in London.

Anyone offended by the protests needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. Their offence signals not just an identification with Israel, but an endorsement of its actions, including its genocide and apartheid rule over Palestinians.

So why is the government getting this issue so wrong?

Here we get to the nub of the matter. The British establishment, including the government and media, are not a disinterested party simply concerned with protecting Jews. Rather, they are an elite desperately trying to protect their own interests in a system of US-driven military supremacy that confers on western powers a sense of their complete entitlement to control over the world’s material resources, most especially in the oil-rich Middle East.

Israel is a central pillar of this criminal, militarised enterprise, which is why it needs to be protected at all costs.

That cost has included hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed and maimed in Gaza over the past two years. But it also includes the freedoms and rights we once took for granted. Now we see that these freedoms were only ever on licence from the ruling class – a licence that is being revoked now that we have proved too unruly, too defiant, too rebellious.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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