If Starmer is serious about stamping out antisemitism, he must end Britain's blind support for Israel
Submitted by Gwyn Daniel on Thu, 05/07/2026 - 15:46
The British prime minister should tell Netanyahu that Israel’s behaviour is endangering the lives of Britain’s Jews
Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks to the media on the situation in the Middle East, at Downing Street in central London on on 16 March, 2026 (AFP) On The following is a fictional letter from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, as imagined by author Gwyn Daniel.
Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu:
I am profoundly saddened and disturbed by the recent attacks on yet more members of the Jewish community in the UK. These attacks are completely unacceptable and must be combatted and condemned in the strongest possible terms.
My job as prime minister is to keep all our citizens safe but, within the parameters I have set myself, I am failing.
We have provided additional police protections for our Jewish communities, but members of these communities are telling the government that, while this is helpful, it is not sufficient. They ask us to address the root causes of this upsurge in antisemitic attacks.
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So I am doing exactly that. I am reviewing our policies and strategies to date, and questioning whether our responses have actually been helpful - or whether they might have put Jewish citizens further at risk.
As it turns out, many of our policies have been profoundly mistaken, and have indeed exposed Britain’s Jews to more danger, while alienating other sections of the population. One mistake we have made is to expend so much energy trying to clamp down on protests against your government’s actions.
We have encouraged the idea that protest marches against Israeli massacres of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are the primary source of anti-Jewish hatred. We are now receiving renewed demands from representatives of the Jewish community, including the chief rabbi, that they be banned or curtailed.
They have been termed “hate marches” without any challenge from us. We have proscribed Palestine Action as terrorists. We have failed to take seriously the blindingly obvious question: what are these protesters actually demonstrating against?
Looking deeper
We - together with most of the mainstream media - have consistently implied that the protests are a bigger problem than the crimes they are denouncing; that UK citizens whose families and friends in Gaza have been wiped out, and all those who care about justice and oppose mass killing, are somehow the problem.
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Leaving aside the fact that many of those protesting are Jewish, including some ultra-Orthodox Jews in full religious regalia (who are consistently saluted rather than abused), can we truly have allowed ourselves to pretend that the thousands of citizens who have turned out week after week since October 2023 are basically motivated by anti-Jewish hatred?
I have finally been compelled to look deeper, and to re-examine my assumptions. There is evidence staring me in the face from the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors rates of antisemitic incidents in the UK. Their reports point to clear spikes in “anti-Jewish hate” during and after periods of escalation in violence in Israel and Palestine.
It is not difficult to see how recklessly your government's actions are imperilling diaspora Jews
For example, there was a huge spike in July/August 2014 and another in May 2021, both times when Israel was bombarding Gaza and killing hundreds of Palestinians.
Obviously, since 7 October 2023, when your government started bombing Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, the rates have risen dramatically, leading to the sorry situation we are in today. Although the CST will not say this, Israel has a direct role in making the UK less safe for Jews.
Despite widespread agreement that Jewish citizens of the UK should not be held responsible for Israel’s war crimes, my government, and the previous one, played a key role in reinforcing this linkage.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which your government has enthusiastically urged all countries and the United Nations to adopt, deliberately links antisemitism with criticisms of Israel and Zionism. In October 2025, under my government, NHS England adopted the IHRA definition, causing enormous resentment and fear among healthcare workers. It has done nothing to make UK Jews safer.
Along with treating anti-Zionism and critiques of Israel as antisemitism - exactly as your government intended - we made another fundamental error. In declaring our support for Israel, soft-pedalling any critiques and asserting your nation’s “right” to defend itself, we have acted as if we were being helpful to Britain’s Jews.
Inflammatory rhetoric
In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle in 2022, which I am now embarrassed to look back on, in my eagerness to show how I would pull out antisemitism “by the roots”, I declared that Israel is not an apartheid state. As a former human rights lawyer, I knew that all the evidence shows otherwise - but I wanted to appeal to a particular section of the Jewish community by lavishing praise on Israel.
But of course we get no thanks for that. Every time we censor Israel in the mildest terms, your government invariably accuses us of antisemitism.
It suits you to ramp up this inflammatory rhetoric and then blame us for the results. After the Golders Green attacks, your foreign ministry was quick to “demand and expect action by the British government to protect the Jews of England”, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared: “We in Israel will not stay silent as our Jewish sisters and brothers are threatened.”
You were probably gratified when, after you had created the conditions for their lack of safety here in the UK, some Jewish citizens declared they would feel safer living in Israel.
The roots of antisemitism - primarily in Christian Europe - are long and deep, and no-one suggests otherwise. But despite your pious concern for “our Jewish brothers and sisters” worldwide, and despite the obvious fact that those who attack Jews are responsible for their own crimes, it is not difficult to see how recklessly your government’s actions are imperilling diaspora Jews.
So rather than blaming us, what responsibility will your government take for this terrible state of affairs?
The net result of my (and other western leaders’) efforts to mollify Israel, to pull our punches on its many excesses, to refuse to use the terms “genocide” or “apartheid” in relation to its actions and political structure, and to equivocate on implementation of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s arrest warrant for you, has been taken as encouragement to carry on your destruction of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim lives with impunity, without regard for the effects on diaspora Jews.
Taking action
At the same time, in failing to condemn anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab or anti-Muslim racism as strongly as we have antisemitism, we have given the impression that we favour one group of citizens over others.
Despite this, I have had to witness a group of Jews in Golders Green waving Israeli flags and chanting “traitor” or “Keir Starmer, Jew harmer”, while your state representatives have had the effrontery to castigate me for inaction.
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I have, I now see, been taken for a ride. So here, Mr Prime Minister, are some actions I intend to take - and had I taken them much earlier in my government’s tenure, some of the extreme hostility towards Jews that we are now witnessing might have been avoided.
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1) I will make sure that if you set foot on these shores again, we will comply with the ICC’s directive, arrest you and hand you over to The Hague.
2) I will suspend all military cooperation with your regime, including the sale and purchase of all arms and security apparatus.
3) I will forthwith suspend the trade agreement signed between Israel and the UK in 2019, which states that respect for democratic principles and human rights constitute an essential element. Israel is blatantly flouting this provision.
We take these actions, Mr Prime Minister, because I finally understand the extent to which Israel’s behaviour endangers the lives of Britain’s Jews, whom I have an absolute duty to protect.
I can no longer tolerate your toxic influence on our political culture and community relations. The impunity accorded to Israel by our government and others in the West has merely encouraged you to commit further acts of violence and aggression, and exacerbated the justifiable rage felt by our citizens - some of which has sadly been deflected onto our Jewish communities.
Yours sincerely, Keir Starmer
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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