Has Kier Starmer, 'Queered his Pitch'?

by Tim Veater

In one of his recent monologues, George Galloway identified three existential threats to Kier Starmer remaining much longer in post as Prime Minister.

One, the up-coming local elections in which Labour is expected to do disasterously, resulting in a revolt by MPs and a demand for his resignation.

Two, the appointment on his personal recommendation, of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States of America, despite his long and close association with the trafficker of under age girls, Jeffrey Epstein, even after he knew he had been convicted of related criminal charges.

Three, the up-coming trial of three young Ukrainian men, who set fire to two houses and a car, either owned by, or associated with, the Prime Minister. How they knew, and were able to identify those items, and why they would want to set fire to them despite the risks, is of course the burning question. (I hope you will excuse the pun but it is I think in better taste than Galloway constantly referring to "arsonists" and "arsonising"!) 

Starmer and the Labour Party gained a sweeping victory by default in the July 2024 General Election, because the nation was sick and tired of fourteen years of Conservative mismanagement. It was not because Labour had any clear prospectus or clearly stated priorities other than "clearing up the mess" left to them. This was not accidental but an intentional and successful manipulating electioneering strategy by Morgan McSweeney, who subsequently took responsibility (and 'the bullet') for the Mandelson farrago.

Starmer was elected his party's Leader and Prime Minister as 'Mr Truthful' and 'Mr Clean', having for many years been the Director of Public Prosecutions (2008 - 2013) before becoming an MP in 2015. He had obtained law degrees from Leeds and Oxford before becoming a Barrister and taking Silk in 2002 specialising, perhaps ironically, in International Humanitarian Law.

A whole series of events, including the three referred to above, have rather taken the shine off his public persona as a competent, ethical or even mildly inspirational political leader. In fact I believe history will regard him as one of the most forgettable.

Public attitude surveys indicate he is seen as stilted and unapproachable, and it is notable that his PR team has been working hard to correct this by multiple 'meet and greet' opportunities, particularly with children and animals, where he has obviously been groomed to be relaxed and smiling. Whether this ploy has been effective is doubtful.

Despite this, his public support figures are at historically low levels. You-Gov in March put him at 'Minus 49' and declining, not helped by the on-going Mandelson fiasco, in which it would appear everyone is to blame, apart from himself. No one believes he can cling on to the 'greasy pole' for much longer. 

As a prelude to today's (22.4.2026) Prime Minister's Questions he again drew attention to alleged attacks on jewish establishments and his government's commitment to opposing 'anti-semitism', whilst completely ignoring the appalling violence and injustice meted out to incarcerated innocent Palestinians. Torture and death in Israeli prisons has become a consistent and institutionally approved state of affairs, yet Starmer is blind to it. (See articles below)

He has notoriously defended and excused blatant Israeli war crimes including starvation, with the legal fig leaf of 'right to self defence', whilst for the last two and a half years, he has headed up a government actively supportive of Israeli genocide, whilst criminalising, arresting and prosecuting English men and women who have the audacity and courage to protest against it.

It is symptomatic of his biased and blinkered 'moral outrage', evident yet again in the Mandelson case, which was directed against every one and every thing, except his own opinion; his own judgment. Particularly surprising in a man who spent decades as a prominent Barrister and Chief Prosecutor for England and who has made much of his own professional integrity.

There is a touch of the Dickens' character Uriah Heap about him, particularly as he fawned over Donald Trump, rushing to pick up his dropped papers and making a 'present' of the King's invitation. (Was it done on purpose by that meglomaniac? I have often wondered.) Little good it did him as he resisted Trump's demands to join the attacks on Iran, perhaps his first principled move.

What we have witnessed in Parliament and more generally, is not integrity, but legal sophistry and chicanery: ignoring the spirit of an agreement by finding the let-out clause in the small print. Blaming everyone else for the policy he agressively promoted. ("Fucking get it done" were the actual words emanating from Number Ten Downing Street to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office!) Yet now he insists if only he had known the full facts, he would have not appointed Peter Mandelson to the post of American Ambassador. 

In less than two years he has managed to blame and sack (or 'resigned') at least eight important officials in either party, government or civil service. Sue Gray, Chief of Staff; Matthew Doyle, Head of Communications; Stephanie Driver, Hear of Communications; James Lyons, Head of Communications; Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister; Morgan MacSweeney, Chief of Staff; Chris Wormald, Cabinet Secretary; and Sir Olly Robbins, Permanent Under-Secretary. 

He even claims to 'take responsibility' for a bad decision, whilst transparently not doing so. Has there ever been a better example of political humbug? He is the platoon leader who blows the whistle but remains in the trench.

It is clear Starmer is 'on the ropes', but hopes by 'ducking and diving' he can survive the sustained ferocious verbal attack. Maybe he has been partly successful? Today in Parliament he claimed the issue of his involvement in the Mandelson debacle, "had been put to bed". Some might consider this an unfortunate Freudian slip. With three Ukrainian 'Escorts' and 'Models' coming to trial, the expression may yet prove prophetic.

The Prime Minister has made much of the concept of 'due process and that it was followed, yet somehow the critical security failure finding was not conveyed to him. He sought to shift the focus from an extraordinary failure of decision-making, to an "extraordinary failur of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office". Acolytes were dispatched to newsrooms to repeat the exact same adjective in an obviously coordinated effort to shift the blame.

Despite the failure, vetting was said to have been passed and the appointment was made despite it. In fact the appointment was announced as Olly Robbins revealed, before even the vetting had taken place! This it was claimed was standard practice for 'political appointments', as in the Mandelson case. 

All of this is utilized by Starmer to deny accountability. It is all the smallprint in the contract - the let-out clauses, whilst deflecting the obvious. But Starmer did not need a professional vetting process to inform and persuade him Mandelson was unsuited for the American post: the reasons were already in the public domain - let alone in the private political one.

Mandelson had been sacked from office twice before. He had a dubious sexual history that may make him subject to blackmail. He had long been recognised as 'master of the black arts'. 

He had had a long-standing intimate relationship with a notorious sex addict and trafficker even after he had been convicted of such and had passed government confidential financial information to him. 

In addition his personal and business links with Chinese and Russian interests, particulary the Russian alleged criminal oligarch Oleg Deripaska, were enough to raise serious questions in any fair-minded person, let alone a well-informed Prime Minister, with direct access to all the Secret Services. 

All or any of this should have debarred him. Starmer, Englands Chief Criminal Prosecutor knew it; as a fellow Labour politician he knew it; as Prime Minister he must have known it; yet now incredibly he claims ignorance as the excuse for appointing him. The real question that Dianne Abbott posed is, "Why if he wasn't informed of the results of the vetting process, didn't he ask?"

An even more important question perhaps is, despite what everyone knew in and out of government of Mandelson's unsuitability for the post of Ambassador, why was Starmer and the Cabinet Office so determined to appoint him? What positive features outweighed all the negatives? 

Was it indeed that his reputation as "Prince of Darkness" and the skills he possessed would work well in an administration headed by Trump?  That there would in fact be a meeting of minds and outlook? 

And can we forget that both Trump and Mandelson shared a common friend - and no doubt a great deal of inside information on - a man called Epstein and the intimate life of all of them? By general agreement, Epstein was an asset, if not an agent, of the Israeli regime. There is similar concurrence regarding Netanyahu's influence over Trump. 

Starmer, grounded in his jewish roots, has made clear his support of Israel, despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes and heinous humanitarian infringements. It has been said that the secret services of America, Israel and Britain, behind the scenes, act as one. In the murky business of the appointment of Mandelson, the least referred to element of the puzzle, might in fact, be the most important.

Israeli Prison Torture: https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell

From:  Kristyan Benedict - Amnesty International UK

 

From:supporters@email.amnestyuk.org.uk

Dear Tim,   Following the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran which began on 28 February, hostilities have extended across borders - resulting in widespread civilian casualties, the largescale destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass displacement and serious disruptions to essential services.  This crisis has precipitated a grave and escalating human rights and humanitarian crisis.  We are continuing to press the UK government to do everything possible to protect civilians and strictly adhere to international law. We have also pressed for a commitment to an investigation of violations and potential war crimes by all parties to the conflicts. We want the government to do all in its power to prevent further military escalation and crimes under international law.  Sadly, our government is failing to meet this challenge when it comes to Israel and the US. In particular, they haven’t:

Refused the provision of UK airbases and airspace in support of military operations that may contribute to violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law.  Stopped arms transfers where there is a substantial risk that the weapons could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law.

Regarding Israel specifically, the UK government has still not unequivocally opposed – in words and more importantly, actions - Israel’s horrific invasion of Lebanon and its plans to set up a civilian-free buffer zone in parts of southern Lebanon.     The UK should work with and encourage the Lebanese authorities to investigate and prosecute these crimes. We want our government to defend and uphold human rights and rebuild the power of international law, uphold international justice, and ensure accountability.    We will update you further on our work, as we continue to pressure the UK government to respect international law, call out violations by its partners and leverage all available diplomatic tools to ensure all parties abide by their obligations to protect civilians.

Is Israel at the end of its moral tether or just replicating its British colonial past?

Israel daily demonstrates its moral degeneracy. Not only has the State followed a vicious policy of abuse based purely on religious and cultural distinction, it has abandoned justice and the rule of law, as it relates to powerful political figures on the one hand and detainees on the other. 

Recently State-employed torturers and rapists were aquitted. Torture in state detention centres and prisons is not unusual or exceptional. It is systematic and State-approved and those who implement it, irrespective of guilt on the part of the victim, are protected and indemnified. 

We know that individuals can act as monsters, but when the State itself initiates, encourages and protects monstrous acts on some pretext or racial logic, we know it is rotten to the core. 

The world has witnessed it for generations but has effectively done nothing about it. Worse the 'moral' West has actively engaged in supporting the policy and actions of this degenerate State of Israel, whilst pretending to support a 'two state sollution' that it knew Israel would never accept. This was blatant fraud and duplicity at the international level. 

America supplied the explosives that flattened Gaza and provided sanction protection at the UN. It provided the satellite and interception intelligence to enable an illegal assassination campaign of Iranian and other other officials, up to the Supreme Ruler of Iran itself. 

It has not opposed incursions into Lebanon and Syria and threats to Jordan and other states. It, in partnership with Israel, has initiated and pursued an illegal war and bombing campaign on Iran, including non-military targets and personnel. 

As in Gaza people and places, such as children in schools, the ill in hospitals, bridges, fuel storage and desalination plants have all come under attack, thereby proving they ignore and despise the international law of relations and war.

Despite Starmer claiming the British Government will not be pulled into the present conflict, throughout the current phase of Israeli/American military aggression, it has not been far behind, providing GCHQ and Military Intelligence, over-flight surveillance, use of airports in UK, Cyprus and Indian Ocean, provision of weapons and spares, and regular high-level military liaison and Whitehall-hosted semi-secret meetings. 

Though deeply embroiled in the Middle East mess from at least the 1920's onwards (see: Abdaljawad Omar's article below)  it now disengenuinely presents itself as the convenor of a solution-seeker grouping. Ever the 'perfidious Albion'!

It pretends to oppose the illegal and inhuman excesses of the Israeli/American criminal conspiracy, but is hamstrung by its financial, economic, political and military ties, that nonetheless have shown signs of fraying recently, with Trump's threat "he will remember" what he sees as desertion by an old ally in the present conflict. This in the context to disparaging remarks about European countries, NATO and threats to Canada and Greenland. Will diplomacy, most obviously in the up-coming King's visit, be able to repair or at least mask, the damage and repercussions?

Ben Givir's new execution law.

The latest sign of Israel abandoning all pretence to justice and humanity is Ben Givir's new law on execution. 

Not satisfied with incarcerating often totally innocent Palestinians - currently over 10,000, a quarter of which are under 18 years of age - and torturing and killing them on an industrial scale, it now intends to progressively execute them one by one. 

The fact that it is drafted to be vague as to qualifying guilt, lack of appeal, and application to only Palestinians proves itself to be yet another thinly disguised method of intimidation, subordination and genocide. 

A British Government spokesperson says "it is concerned at the law". Such mealy-mouthed, ineffective observation only confirms British complicity in and with a deeply offensive law - from a deeply offensive regime.

Below I reproduce three articles on the subject, providing far greater detail and insight than I am able to give. Hopefully in some small way it will help to galvanise opposition to both this particular unjust, inhumane law and State that proposes to implement it.

Mondoweiss: Daily Headlines 

From:newsletters@mondoweiss.net

‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook. Abdaljawad Omar The passing of the recent Israeli death penalty law aimed at Palestinians formalizes what Israel and colonial powers have always done: creating new laws to legalize colonial violence. By Abdaljawad Omar  April 2, 2026

Palestinians protesting the Knesset’s passing of the death penalty law exclusively for Palestinians, Gaza City on April 1, 2026. (Photo: Hashem Zimmo/APA Images)

The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.

It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.

Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.

What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.

Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.

The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.

There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.

Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.

For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.

A codification of existing practice

In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.

For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused.

Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.

What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months.

In Jenin, on November 27, 2025, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected.

That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution.

More recently, in Tammoun, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds.

Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes.

The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.

Refusing Israel’s timetable for death

Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent.

And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule.

But Ibrahim Tuqan, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well.

The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals.

What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart

Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination. 

But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly:

زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ

I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first 

What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone.

It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down.

---

Abdaljawad Omar

Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2. 

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Kristyan Benedict - Amnesty International UK 

From:supporters@email.amnestyuk.org.uk  Thu 2 Apr at 18:04

Dear Tim,   Earlier this week, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, expanded Israel’s use of the death penalty. Military courts in the occupied West Bank will be authorised to impose the death penalty against Palestinians convicted of deliberate killings in actions that are defined as terrorist acts under Israel’s discriminatory counter-terrorism law.  Military courts have a conviction rate of over 99% for Palestinian defendants and are notorious for disregarding due process and fair trial, and could now impose effectively mandatory death sentences and order executions within just 90 days of the final ruling.  Israel is brazenly granting itself carte blanche to execute Palestinians while stripping away the most basic fair-trial safeguards and further entrenching its system of apartheid.

For years, we have seen an alarming pattern of apparent extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings of Palestinians – with the perpetrators also enjoying near-total impunity. This new law which allows for state-sanctioned executions is a culmination of such policies. - Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns

We are calling on the Israeli authorities to urgently repeal these barbaric amendments, fully abolish the death penalty, and dismantle all laws and practices that contribute to the system of apartheid against Palestinians.  We will be in touch with more updates. In the meantime, you can join our fight to abolish the death penalty around the world.   WAR ON WANT Neil Sammonds, War on Want  waronwant.org From:support@waronwant.org

Hi Timothy Theodore,

Israel has passed a new law: it will execute Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks – whether living in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory – but not Jewish Israelis convicted of the same crime.

This is Israel’s apartheid in action: the same crime, but a different punishment based on your race.

Israel’s annexation of the West Bank – illegally incorporating more of the Palestinian territory it occupies into the state of Israel – is also an extension of its apartheid. Israeli settlers are illegally forcing Palestinians out of their homes – but do not face arrest or further legal action from Israel for this crime.

Timothy Theodore, take action to end Israel’s annexation of the West Bank now:

While Israel and the US bombard Iran – killing at least 1,900 Iranians so far – Israel’s brutal violence across the wider region has slipped out of the headlines. Here’s what you’ve missed:

• Israel has attacked Palestinians in Gaza on 147 of the 169 days since the ‘ceasefire’ began, killing over 691 Palestinians.

• Stocks of tents, bedding and other essential supplies are dwindling in Gaza as Israel has increased restrictions on humanitarian aid entering since it escalated regional attacks.

• In the West Bank, settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Tayasir on Tuesday, injuring at least four people. Settler attacks are happening daily.

• Israel is occupying huge parts of South Lebanon and planning to destroy homes along the border to prevent the return of about 600,000 Lebanese people – mirroring its “model in Gaza” according to Defence Minister Israel Katz.

Israel is extending its colonial occupation across the wider region, subjecting more and more people to its violent regime. Palestinians in the West Bank are already living under this regime – and if Israel continues its annexation they will face even more uncertainty.

 Antisemitism, racism and religion

 by Jonathan Clatworthy

  

Posted on 24th March 2026  https://www.clatworthy.org/

Oliver Goldsmith, Illustrated Races, 1774

Yesterday in Golders Green, London, an area with a high Jewish population, four ambulances were set on fire. They belonged to a Jewish charity. The British media condemned the attack as an expression of antisemitism. Since you are reading this post I’m guessing that you were not one of the arsonists and would disapprove of their action regardless of how you feel about antisemitism.

Antisemitism is often understood as a type of racism. However they have different histories and give us different meanings. Here is a brief summary of the differences and a question about the religious dimension.

Burning four ambulances is an act of destruction, but not on the same scale as killing around 70,000 Gazans which the Israeli government has done, equally deliberately. Those ambulances were there to help people who, even if Jewish, were most unlikely to be anything to do with Israeli government policy. The link, assuming there is one, is antisemitism.

The origin of Judaism

When the Persian emperor Cyrus conquered the Babylonian empire in the 6th century BCE he inherited, among other lands, the city of Jerusalem and a small area of land around it which until 50 years earlier had been an independent state. Some of the older people remembered those days and looked forward to re-establishing some form of independence.

The result was a small mini-state within a huge empire. It had its own laws, as listed in the first five books of the Bible. Among the practical effects were these two:

1) The laws were designed to protect the peasants – 85-90% of the population – from being economically squeezed by taxes and rents. From that time on, for a few centuries, Jewish peasants were better off than other peasants. Out of that situation some characteristics of the Jewish lifestyle developed, like the commitment of families to look after all their members and help each other out financially.

2) Because the laws were so different – and mattered – it became essential to establish exactly who was a Jew and who was not. Inevitably, the distinction became part of the Jewish tradition. As they moved to other countries they congregated in their own communities because this made it easier to continue their distinctive practices, like their diets and the Sabbath rest.

Early Christianity and antisemitism

By the first century CE the benefit to peasants was reducing because of Roman tax policy: Jewish peasants were being squeezed just as much as others. The followers of Jesus were at first one of many Jewish movements, but were rejected by other Jews when they refused to support the war against Rome in 66-70 CE.

Some New Testament texts, especially in John’s gospel, give a misleading impression of ‘Jews’. An example is the resurrection appearance in John 20:19:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’

Why fear of the Jews? Most of those disciples, possibly all of them, were Jews themselves.

The Greek word for ‘Jews’, Ioudaioi, technically meant the people who lived in the Roman province of Judea. Galilee was outside Judea. But, more important, Jesus’ campaign on behalf of peasants was mainly directed against the local government at the temple in Jerusalem.

That local government, theoretically authorised to administer the laws protecting peasants, was in fact governing on behalf of the Romans against the interests of the peasants. The ‘Jews’ those disciples would have been afraid of were the agents of the Jerusalem temple, not the ordinary peasants. However the context got forgotten and texts like this became part of the antisemitic tradition that has existed ever since then.

Antisemitism was revived in late eleventh century Europe when the invasions declined and commercial activities revived. Among the revivals was lending money at interest. This practice was forbidden by the Jewish scriptures, but only in some cases. It was Christians who universalised the ban. Jews often became moneylenders partly because they were banned from other activities. Attacks on them increased. Artistic representations of them began to make them look different. Tracts described them as sub-human. Those who had in fact been driven to destitution by moneylenders had good reason to be angry with the system. Many projected their anger onto Jews.

Antisemitism, therefore, has a distinct history because Judaism has a distinct history. The idea of a ‘chosen race’ was at first the result of a constitutional-economic opportunity; but it stuck, and others disliked being unchosen. Christianity grew out of Judaism along with tensions between the two. All this worked – in a sense, was rationalised – by confusing ethnicity with religious affiliation.

Racism

Racism has a different history. In ancient times, of course, people noticed how foreigners were different. They spoke a different language, had a different diet and looked different. They might also have been understood to have been created by a different god – so it was possible to believe they were a different kind of animal. Even so, modern racism was unknown to them. Greeks and Romans could force slaves to spend their lives in the mines digging out silver or copper – the kind of thing nobody would choose to do – but that was because they were slaves, not because they were foreigners.

Racism as we know it developed its political significance in later medieval Europe, with the rise of nation states. Before then, popes and kings might encourage soldiers to attack Jews and Moslems because of their beliefs; but from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries kings seeking to maximise their own kingdoms encouraged their subjects to fight against rival kingdoms.

They defined those rivals as enemies. No longer was Europe ‘Christendom’ as opposed to Islam; instead France, Spain and England were defined over against each other. Ethnic distinctions were invented, along with the idea of a ‘pure race’ as superior to mixed races. I spent my childhood at a time when a marriage between a white person and a black person ‘wasn’t fair on the children’. ‘Our’ race was, obviously, superior.

All this has now been refuted, of course; if you get your DNA tested you will turn out to be a real mongrel, just like everyone else. But in the meantime racism has justified imperialism in ways which are still defended by families celebrating great-grandparents who ‘brought civilisation’ to ‘primitive’ societies.

The difference

Antisemitism has remained influential partly because it easily confuses religious with ethnic differences. Racism stresses ethnic differences rather than religious ones. Today, however, we are hearing more about ‘Christian nationalism’ as though the far right feels the need for a religious authority to underpin it. Why is this?

Is it because it seems more attractive when it appeals to some transcendent authority, much like most political campaigns?

Or is it because some far right leaders have convinced themselves that Christianity is nationalistic?

What do you think? You can add a comment here.

This entry was posted in Bible, Ethics, Society, Theology and tagged antisemitism, Cyrus, Golders Green, John's gospel, Judaism, racism, religion, Torah, usury. Bookmark the permalink.

← Gorton, Denton and the unconsulted powerless