An Open Letter to Iranian political prisoners by a group of mainly US-based intellectuals—including Angela Davis, Rashid Khalidi and Judith Butler—has provoked widespread criticism, even denunciation. Clearly, Iran’s successful resistance to US-Israeli aggression has led many opponents of the war to identify with the Islamic Republic.

The pushback against the letter has been so strong that some signatories are reported to have retracted—although to my knowledge only one, Robin Kelley, has so far confirmed that he has done so.

For many, the letter’s criticism of the Iranian regime is a betrayal of “resistance” in general—to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as to the military aggression. They object to the statement, “we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism”, justifiably pointing out that Iranian military resistance to US aggression, far from being hollow, has fundamentally weakened US and Israeli power.

The war and the repression

Yet critics like Vijay Prashad also object to the letter’s titular idea that Iran’s political prisoners are trapped “between two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom”.

This criticism is more problematic. The idea comes, it seems, from Iranians themselves—and although the source is not identified, reports from the beginning of the year attest that many then felt themselves to be living with this dilemma.

Prashad also objects to the timing of the letter, writing “I feel that this letter at this time plays a politically damaging role”, playing into the hands of Trump’s supporters just when Iran has military weakened the USA. In effect, he is saying that legitimate criticism must be subordinated to support for Iran for the duration of what may well be a long-drawn-out war.

A big problem with this is that the war erupted just after very brutal repression, possibly the worst in the long history of crackdowns by the Islamic Republic. Although prowar and monarchist propagandists exaggerate the death toll, verified accounts suggest that at least 7,000 died. Recently, during the war, the regime has intensified its repression, executing protestors.

It is this repression, rather than criticism of it, which plays into US and Israeli hands, making it difficult to counter the longstanding demonisation of Iran in the West. Rejecting the repression strengthens, rather than weakens, the antiwar case.

Valid core arguments

It is true that from a political point of view, the letter seems oddly unfocused, and there doesn’t seem to be any organisation around it. Indeed, it is not clear what the authors propose to do about the repression—or the war.

Yet the letter is offered as a statement of solidarity with Iran’s political prisoners—whom the pro-war lobby have abandoned—and as such it deserves respect. And its arguments have a rational core. They combine a critique of the Islamic Republic:

“from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution”

with a denunciation of US-Israeli aggression:

“you [Iranian prisoners] face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The US and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance.”

The letter is therefore correct to suggest that the regime’s anti-imperialism is compromised. It may not be hollow, but it is clearly one-dimensional. Iran is supporting Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. It propped up the murderous Assad regime during its murderous counterinsurgency. The Islamic Republic itself is a quasi-imperial state, with systematic repression of ethnic minorities like the Kurds and Baluchis, which has intensified in recent months.

The Iranian people’s dilemma is ours too

The Iranian people remain on the horns of the dilemma that the letter describes. It is too easy for Western leftists to pretend does this does not exist; they don’t have to face, at least not to the same extent, the same threats of incarceration and violence. Many of the letter’s critics would probably be in prison for their views if they were in Iran.

Genuine solidarity with Iran in its struggle against US-Israeli imperialism must be directed fundamentally, as it is by this letter, towards the people rather than the Islamic Republic. We should welcome the regime’s success in blocking Iran’s international enemies—but without any illusions about what this means for Iranians.

Iranians have no choice but to live “between two blades”, so we should also be able to hold two ideas in our heads at the same time. The Islamic Republic is defending Iran from aggression, but it also a chronic, brutal oppressor of its own people. Freedom and resistance are not divisible. This is a binary that we must indeed reject.

The decision rests on the following key propositions:

1. The Terrorism Act 2000 makes serious property damage a terrorist act, even where there is no intention to commit violence against people—which is of course how “violence” and “terrorism” are generally understood.

2. Three out of 385 PA actions were classed by government advisers as meeting the threshold for serious damage amounting to terrorism. The high court ruled that it would be disproportionate to ban PA as a whole on these grounds, in view of the chilling effect on the right to protest, but the Court of Appeal—claiming to look at PA in a “holistic” way—sees these 3 actions as indicating its overall character. The organisation, it says, “overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism”—a very dubious claim since PA explicitly distinguishes damage to property from violence, and so cannot be said to “overtly promote” it.

3. The Home Secretary, who banned PA, had (the Court says) greater leeway than the lower court allowed in making her decision, and in particular could take into account (which it had said she couldn’t) the effect of the ban in disrupting PA’s operations.

4. The “protection of the rights and freedoms of others”, notably Elbit and other arms companies, and the “interests of national security”, are sufficient justification for overriding rights to protest.

A strange “escalation” in 2024-25

A key argument is that PA was “escalating” its actions in the 18 months before the decision to proscribe it in June 2025. This appears dubious because arguably PA’s most serious property damage was at Thales SA in Glasgow in 2022, and the other two cases deemed to have involved “terrorism” were in June and August 2024.

The June 2025 announcement followed almost immediately after PA’s Brize Norton action that month, but no one has claimed that this met the level of terrorism—and in any case the Court makes it clear that the government had already decided to proscribe, on 14 May.

So what was the “escalation” between August 2024 and May-June 2025? Clearly, a case for proscription was under discussion, reflected in the report of the Proscription Review Group (PRG) on 10 February 2025, which identified the 3 out of 385 cases. But this was an escalation of government concern, not of “terrorism”-grade PA property damage.

The Trump connection

However, the Court records (para 52): “A further submission to the Home Secretary dated 2 April 2025 noted that Palestine Action’s activity had escalated in seriousness in the previous 18 months.” This submission—it is not stated by whom—seems in fact to be the source of the Court’s own “18 month” claim. But what had happened since August 2024 to prompt this heightened concern?

Not mentioned in the Court’s timeline is that on 8 March 2025, PA activists vandalised the turf at Donald Trump’s golf course at Turnberry in Scotland. At the end of March, arrests were made, and on 31 March, Trump took to Truth Social to brand the activists “terrorists” and personally call on Keir Starmer to ensure they were “treated harshly”. Just two days later, the crucial new submission was sent to the Home Secretary.

Given all we know about the Labour government’s nervousness about Trump, it is not fanciful to suggest that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The “escalation” was in the political embarrassment to the UK government, not in the level of property damage. The “rights of others” that PA was infringing included, crucially, an angry president of the United States as well as the bosses of Israeli arms firms.

“National security”

Although the decision to ban had been made before the Brize Norton action and that action was not “terrorist”, the Court—like the Home Secretary in 2025—could not resist heavily laying on the “threat to national security” that it apparently implied. The Court makes this a second key factor (alongside the effect on the rights of arms companies) which justified its decision to override rights to protest.

Yet it should hardly need emphasising that the effect of spray-painting two aircraft engines on national security was minimal—one of the planes was reportedly operational again within days, and the alleged “£7m” cost has never been justified. Elsewhere the Court suggests a broader threat to national security, through PA actions impacting firms that provide services that support Ukraine, NATO and “Five Eyes”—strangely, it doesn’t mention Israel or the UK-Israel defence pact.

The history of direct action

The Court suggests a big gap between Palestine Action and past civil disobedience campaigns. As Owen Jones has pointed out, this is historical nonsense as far as the Suffragettes are concerned.

It is also plain wrong of the antinuclear movement, I can say as its historian. Nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience always involve breaking the law—that is their point. They often impact military bases and the official version of “national security”—these are the usual targets. They always involve a degree of secrecy and covert organisation—because their proposed actions are illegal.

Moreover, physical damage to military equipment has been a strand of antimilitarist campaigns at least since the 1990s, before anyone in government thought about the need for laws against terrorism. And even with those laws, previous incidents have never been seen to warrant their use, let alone the proscription of organisations that carry them out as “terrorist”.

Whether or not one agrees with physically damaging weapons and the machinery used to produce them, there can be no doubting the moral imperative which drives this approach. It is scandalous that the Court of Appeal gives this no weight, instead elevating the rights of arms companies to supply states carrying out genocide and illegal wars.

Authoritarianism infects the judicial system

Hypercriminalising PA as a “terrorist” organisation, and covertly sentencing as terrorists young activists who were merely charged with criminal damage—hiding the terrorism connection from the jurors—reflects the new authoritarianism that support for Israel’s genocide has produced in the UK establishment.

But the ban on Palestine Action could well also reflect the desperate need of our feeble leaders to placate Trump at all costs, over something as insignificant as his golf course.

Much discussion of Gaza has focused on recognising Israel’s genocide. For political reasons, this has forefronted the legal definition: Gaza fits the Genocide Convention’s checklist. But equally important is to understand Israel’s campaign. Each genocide is different: genocides, like wars, are major historical events, and Israel’s is no exception. Not only is it, unlike all other recent genocides, perpetrated by a technologically advanced Western state with the direct involvement of the USA and the support of almost the entire West. What Israel has done, is doing, to the Palestinians is also very distinctive.

Eyal Weizman’s new book, Ungrounding, provides a valuable way into this question. Israel, he shows, has not only aimed to kill and maim; it has also sought to to “unground” Palestinian society in Gaza, to obliterate its very physical, geographical and architectural foundations, across the large majority of the territory. After the bombing came the bulldozers, levelling the earth so that the physical contours of the old society were made simply unrecognisable even to those who lived there. The survivors—still almost two million people—have mostly been forced into a small, economically unviable, south-western corner of the Strip.

Is expulsion Israel’s goal, and would it be genocide?

Where does Israel go from here? For Weizman, “mass expulsion of the Palestinians to Egypt” was always “the strategic aim of Israel’s campaign” (p. 198). There is certainly no shortage of evidence to support Israeli leaders’ consistent desire to expel, from October 2023 until the last week. If the ungrounding of Gaza became complete, removal would be the logical consequence, and this goal is openly proclaimed at the highest levels.

Such forced removal would not be an alternative to the genocide, but a means of completing it. In one of his most famous passages, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the genocide idea, wrote that there were two ways in which the perpetrators could destroy the national pattern of the oppressed, imposing their own pattern “upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals” (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79). Removal (“ethnic cleansing”) has often been a central means of genocide, from Bosnia to Darfur and Myanmar.

Yet in Gaza, the oppressed population has not been expelled, and has so far been “allowed to remain”. The Israeli preference has been consistently blocked, by Egypt which refuses (as does Jordan) to be part of such a scheme, and by Arab and Western states which recognise the explosive enormity—even after all the monstrous killing and destruction that Israel has carried out—of removing the Palestinians en masse. Even Donald Trump, who originally believed they could expelled so that he could build a riviera, has retreated somewhat from that notion.

Crippling as a core aim of the genocide

In what sense is genocide carried out on a “remaining” population? Lemkin’s answer was that it is “crippled”, in the twin sense of being immiserised and having its collective life destroyed. A “daily fight literally for bread and for physical survival” will, he argued, “handicap thinking in both general and national terms” by the surviving population (85).

Individuals are physically crippled, as so many Palestinians have been by Israel’s violence, and society is crippled too. Think child amputees, desperate people being mown down at US-Israeli “aid” points, hospitals destroyed—this has long been a major part of their campaign.

But in the twilight zone of Trump’s “ceasefire”, Israel is aiming to cripple Gaza’s Palestinians even more completely. Read Gideon Levy’s latest summary in the light of Lemkin’s words. As the Strip has been destroyed almost completely, and Benjamin Netanyahu announces his intention to take over 70 per cent of it, he argues,

“Israel is advancing confidently toward the next phase of the plan: making the entire population of Gaza permanently disabled, injured, sick, hungry, homeless and unemployed. Once Gaza’s population is reduced to a disparate mass without an organized society, without basic services, essential institutions and, of course, without leadership, the complete disintegration of the social fabric will make it easier for Israel to move to the next phase, which it has never relinquished, the phase of expulsion. Only then will the Gaza problem be finally resolved. Only in this manner.”

We can see that “crippling/remaining” and “expulsion” are not necessarily alternatives. One can create the basis for the other.

The time for action is now

Levy shows that as the world has lost interest in Gaza, the “Trump plan” is now a hollow shell that is allowing Israel to proceed with its aim of creating chaos, as a deliberate policy to disintegrate the remaining hopes of life for the survivors in their homeland.

Only by supporting Palestinians‘ efforts to retain their remaining social cohesion and identity, forcing Israel to allow vastly greater aid, and insisting on Palestinian control of the populated areas of Gaza—even if this involves Hamas, to which as Levy shows there is currently no alternative—can this be countered at this stage.

Israel has been thwarted in its aim of expulsion in the last two and a half years. Even in the 1948 Nakba, it was unable to complete the expulsion of the Palestinians because of US-British pressure. It can still be blocked now, but only if the pro-Palestine movement across the world puts much greater pressure on every state to stop this further abomination.

First, it needs to keep up the momentum built up through Zack Polanski’s leadership, the Gorgon & Denton by-election and the local elections, to expand the support for progressive politics.

Second, it needs to play its part in blocking the momentum of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, preventing it from taking power in the next general election.

Both these aims are essential, but in Makerfield they potentially conflict. The Greens almost certainly cannot win the seat. But the gap between Burnham and Reform could be small and Green voters could split the progressive vote and hand the seat to Farage.

This is not just ‘one seat’. It is an existential test of power between Labour and Reform. The Green Party cannot be neutral about this. There is a qualitative difference between Labour and Farage. Labour is bad, but Reform will be catastrophically worse.

We only need to look across the Atlantic to understand this. Many on the US left, and among the Muslim minority, thought that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were so bad that they should no longer vote Democrat—some even fell for the idea that Trump might be better. We now know how disastrously wrong they were. Israel has been further emboldened, the US has launched a horrendous new war, and democracy itself is under threat.

Some might think that if Reform crushes Burnham, Labour’s collapse will clear the way for the Greens. There is an infamous historical precedent for this view, the slogan of the German Communists, ‘After the Nazis, us.’ They believed that the Social Democrats (the equivalent of the Labour Party) were ‘social fascists’ and so there was no case to ally with them against the Nazi threat. As a result of the split, Hitler came to power and immediately crushed both parties and ended German democracy.

Farage’s party is not quite Nazism, but it is Trump UK. If Labour completely collapses, the immediate beneficiary is likely to be Reform. The Green Party may gain some seats, but it will almost certainly be subject to repression by a Reform semi-dictatorship. This has to be prevented.

This does not mean that the Greens simply have to roll over for Labour. The only answer to racist nationalism is the egalitarian, ecologically and socially responsible politics that the Greens stand for, and which Labour has betrayed.

But in the run up to the next election, the Greens cannot simply replace Labour on a national scale. The Greens, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Plaid Cymru will have to combine to block Reform. People will have to vote tactically to stop them, as they did for Plaid in the Caerphilly by-election and for the Greens in Gorton & Denton.

In Makerfield, this will mean voting for Burnham. But the Green Party and Green-inclined voters are entitled to ask him and Labour to pay a price for their tactical voting, by moving towards more progressive positions.

Ideally, there would be an agreement between the parties. However, the signs that Burnham has put out so far have not been encouraging. Apart from his own inclinations, which are not fully clear, he is obviously under a lot of competing pressures in his ambitious, but precarious, political project.

The Green Party therefore faces hard choices. A full Green campaign will not win the seat. Even a paper candidate could take enough votes from Burnham to let Reform win. Standing down altogether could be seen as an abdication.

Is there a way for the Greens to vote to block Reform and stand up for what they believe in? The link between the parliamentary by-election and the by-election for the Greater Manchester mayor—which will follow if Burnham wins—could provide a way forward.

Rather than trying for a deal with Labour—which will not happen—the Green Party should pitch to former Labour voters over the party’s head. We will vote for Burnham in Makerfield—but we expect progressive voters across Greater Manchester to back a Green mayor.

Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American Holocaust historian who since 2024 has used his authority to recognize Israel’s Gaza campaign as genocide, has published Israel: What Went Wrong?, a short, accessible book partly based on some of his occasional writings.

Few academics have achieved greater prominence in the Gaza debates than Omer, so naturally the book has commanded attention. It has received a rather sharp review from Gideon Levy (“Zionism didn’t go wrong, it was always built this way”)—to which Bartov has responded that Gideon “likely hasn’t read” the book.

Avi Shlaim gives it a more sympathetic treatment, but of Omer’s key argument—that if Israel’s leaders had implemented the constitution, bill of rights and defined borders that they promised, it might have avoided the disastrous course that culminated in the Gaza genocide—Avi comments: “Maybe. History does not disclose its alternatives. Arguably, however, Bartov does not go back far enough in history to explore the roots of Israeli racism.”

As I read these reviews, I was completing my own draft review of the book, for the journal Antisemitism Studies. It won’t be published until the autumn (this is a quick turnaround for an academic journal), so I have decided to make available a modified version of my draft. If this post prompts comments from others, I may take them into account in the final published version.

Omer Bartov’s purpose in this short, unreferenced book, aimed at a general (and implicitly Israeli and Jewish) audience, is not so much to discuss the Gaza genocide as to examine its implications for Israel’s future. Following return visits to the country, he reports that is trapped in its sense of its own trauma and denial of its crimes. It “seems to be a different, strange and threatening place, whose people, including some of my friends, have been transformed, perhaps irretrievably” (11)1.

Bartov describes the impression left by students who had recently returned from military service in Gaza, who protested at one of his lectures. They seemed to have developed “a way of thinking that I observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German Army soldiers in World War II. Having embraced certain views of the enemy—the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen, Hamas as human animals—and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military or to themselves, but to the enemy.”

Bartov also notes that more aware Israelis compare their sense of normalcy in proximity to atrocity to the situation of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s family in the film The Zone of Interest. Not for him the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s attempted prohibition, in its examples of antisemitism, of comparisons between Israel and Nazism.

“What if”

Yet while this historical approach is a strength, this is not primarily a work of history. At its centre, rather, lies a “what if” speculation about the early history of the Israeli state, and a proposal to rescue it, even at this late stage, from the effects of the harmful turns in its first decades that have culminated in the Gaza genocide.

Bartov believes that Zionism has been misunderstood; to focus on “the functional reality of settlement” is to miss the “ideological and emotional motivations” of the movement (4). Crucially, there was a “tragic transformation of … a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry … into a state ideology of ethnonationalism increasingly focused on the exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians” (3).

Bartov acknowledges the Nakba as a historic crime, but for him Israel could still have overcome its consequences if it had adopted the constitution, bill of rights and definite borders that its leaders promised. These could have constrained Zionism’s “worst impulses,” opened “a path toward a liberal society for all its citizens,” and even facilitated “a process of repatriation for part of the Palestinian population that fled or was expelled in 1948” (16).

Such moves, Bartov argues, might have “made Zionism superfluous” (181), since it would have accomplished what it set out to do. Instead, Zionism “began to transform as soon as it became Israel’s state ideology,” and the cumulative effect of its post-1948 failures tilted Israel toward becoming an ever more Jewish state (16).

The two sides of Zionism

Yet if Bartov is right that Zionism was an emancipatory ideology for many Jews, from the moment it fixed its colonization project on Palestine, it was also a threat of elimination for Palestinians. This began to be implemented even before the 1917 Balfour Declaration; as Rashid Khalidi has argued, Palestinians already recognized it with growing alarm. In particular, the idea of “transfer”—which even when represented as voluntary implied the forced removal of Palestinians—was part of Zionist thinking from its beginnings, even if some sought other solutions.

The idea that an emancipatory ideology became ethnonationalist when it was tranformed into state doctrine is therefore difficult to credit; these were always the two sides of Zionism, with the latter becoming dominant well before 1948. And while Zionism is clearly a special case among settler colonialisms, it is not entirely exceptional; European colonists often came from among the persecuted but then became oppressors.

Could Israel have corrected course in the aftermath of 1948?

Bartov’s argument that a constitution and bill of rights might have enabled Israel to overcome the effects of the Nakba is even more difficult to credit. He acknowledges that it constituted “ethnic cleansing,” but still seems unable, as he was when he debated it with me in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2010, to acknowledge the full implications for Israel of its being founded on the destruction of another society.

My argument which he challenged was that the expulsion of the Palestinians constituted genocide. This was in line with Raphael Lemkin’s 1944 view that forced removal was a means of committing the crime, and with proposals discussed in 1947-8 (the very period that the Palestinians were forced out) to list deportation and forced removal as means of genocide in the UN Convention.

Certainly, these proposals were blocked by the great powers—which were all committing or complicit in forced removal, in eastern Europe and India as well as Palestine—but they reflected a coherent understanding of group destruction, the core of the idea of genocide. Moreover, challenges have continued to be made in the ICJ to the resulting incoherence of the Convention definition, for example in the Bosnia case adjudicated in 2007 and the Myanmar case ongoing in 2026.

In context of Bartov’s new book, the terminology as such is less important than the recognition it affords of the Zionist destruction of Palestinian society. In contending that Israel could somehow have expunged this great crime in a wave of constitution- and rights-making, Bartov elides the deliberate planning behind the terror that drove the Palestinians out, the early decision to outlaw their return, and the violence through which this too was enforced— and with these, the deep eliminationism of the whole state project, which a constitution and bill of rights could hardly have corrected. (It may be significant that he refers to “ethnonationalism” rather than “eliminationism,” which could have implicated strands of Zionism that were not openly ethnonationalist.)

Israel’s reform and the need for a deus ex machina

These problems carry forward to Bartov’s present-day perspective. Through the post-1967 military occupation, the Israeli state has effectively expanded to include seven million Palestinians—most of whom lack citizenship and none of whom have full rights—alongside seven million Jews. There is, he quotes the Israeli writer Dahlia Scheindlin as saying, no “political pathway to a democratic version of [this] state” (213).

The answer, he argues, is to recognize the national claims of both communities in a confederation of two sovereign states, with inclusive citizenship and mutual freedom of movement and residency across the borders. While ethnonationalist Zionism is not reformable, through this plan the state of Israel could be; it could resume its long-blocked path towards a constitution and bill of rights.

In theory this scheme might reconcile the conflicting aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis, but Bartov recognises that it is currently unlikely to gain majority Israeli support—he does not even ask about Palestinian.

The new German question

This proposal requires, therefore, a deus ex machina to thrust it into Israel’s political life—ideally (he writes, compounding its unreality) before the elections due by late 2026.

In principle, the USA should take this role, but this seems implausible under Trump. In its place, Bartov proposes that Germany should act: “Germany proved in 1945 that with much help from others, there was a path out of devastation and horror, tyranny and genocide;” if it became the midwife of a new Middle East, this “could end up being Germany’s greatest atonement for the event that precipitated the creation of the State of Israel” (219).

This is fanciful politics. The “help” that the Allies provided to end German genocide in 1945 took the form of defeat and occupation; in contrast, today’s Germany is a partner in Israel’s genocide. It has provided more weapons and more fervently repressed pro-Palestinians than any state apart from the USA.

Bartov appears not to take into account that Germany’s ideological path out of its own genocide has sanctified what Dirk Moses calls a “catechism,” in which Holocaust memory, anti-antisemitism and loyalty to Israel are supreme values. This has ultimately trapped both state and cultural institutions in deep complicity with Israel’s genocide. It is inconceivable that Germany would do a 180-degree turn in order to rescue Israel from its folly.

The international character of the genocide

This naivety reflects Bartov’s failure to situate the Gaza genocide internationally. His focus on Israel’s “tragedy” obscures the wider Western complicity, in which not only Germany but almost all European states are involved. Above all, much of what he says about Israel could also be applied to the USA, which has fundamentally enabled Israel’s actions and, emboldened by its “success” in Gaza, has joined it in two illegal wars on Iran.

Bartov believes that Trump’s Gaza plan “advances somewhat” toward the goal of the kind of Israeli-Palestinian settlement he advocates (217). Not only is this assessment wildly generous (since the plan includes only a token mention of Palestinian aspirations), but it also belies Trump’s record. In 2025, he made the USA an active partner in the genocide, encouraging Netanyahu’s March breach of the January ceasefire and resumption of heavy bombardment and starvation policies, while bidding to take over the conclusion of the genocide with his “riviera” scheme, which is still on the table following the October 2025 “ceasefire.”

Bartov’s recognition of the genocide

Therefore, although Bartov deserves credit for recognizing Israel’s genocide and attempting to make Israelis confront it, his account of its policies in Gaza also suffers from instability. Bartov has been widely described as a genocide scholar, but this book suggests only a limited acquaintance with the literature. His rather random assortment of recommended reading, mostly relating to the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine, includes hardly any of the articles that genocide scholars have published on Gaza (and only two out of a hundred works appear to be by Palestinians).

Bartov now implies that Israel was committing genocide from the start; he has confessed that he resisted the conclusion for as long as possible, but does not explain fully here. Having warned in November 2023 only of the danger of genocide, Bartov pivoted in May 2024 to arguing that it was ongoing; the Israeli Defence Forces’ invasion of Rafah, in defiance of Biden, was the turning point.

However, this was half a year after Israel’s most murderous phase, the extraordinary bombardment of October-November 2023, which led other scholars (including the present writer) to conclude that genocide was already being committed and South Africa to submit its comprehensive indictment that December. By May 2024, the ICJ had already made two sets of orders to Israel and was about to issue a third, since the earlier instructions had been ignored.

The character of the genocide

Much of the historical specificity of this genocide is still missing in Bartov’s view that Israel’s strategy is to force the population to leave (ironically, the same policy which in 1947-8 he does not regard as genocide).

While mass expulsion has certainly been a constant in Israeli thinking since 2023, as policy it has been almost entirely blocked. To date, Gaza is neither a genocide of wholesale extermination nor one of external expulsion, but a version of the long-term “crippling” of a society and its members that Raphael Lemkin repeatedly indicated as a major variant of the phenomenon. Israel has been determined to make the two million survivors of its killing and wounding live in the uninhabitable conditions it has deliberately produced, in tents and amidst rain, rats and ruins, with restricted food and care, concentrated in a small corner of the Strip.

If there is an end-state in view, it appears to be some version of the Israeli-run, biometrically managed gated facilities glimpsed in the plans that Trump’s son-in-law presented at the 2026 Davos—although obviously Israel will exploit any opportunity to remove Palestinians from the territory.

Begging the question

Ultimately, however, this book should be judged on its case about Israel’s past, present and future. As we have seen, its title, Israel: What Went Wrong?, begs the question of whether it was ever right. Bartov believes that the state established by mass expulsion could nevertheless have consolidated its legitimacy in the immediate aftermath. He believes that an Israel that has committed genocide can be part of a new equal confederation with the victims, also in the immediate aftermath.

It is true that many settler-colonial states that expelled indigenous peoples and committed genocide acquired legitimacy and reached accommodations—although rarely equal ones—with surviving indigenous populations. But they usually did this through force, over long periods of time, and before indigenous nationalist movements, international law and global justice campaigns became strong. Comparable late twentieth-century attempts to consolidate settler-colonial power failed, notably in Algeria, Rhodesia and South Africa, and none of these involved genocide on the scale of Gaza.

No soft landings

In the paperback edition of his edited Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (Oxford: Berghahn, 2024), Bartov argued, “there has to be a consensus that all those involved have a right to a home, in the deepest sense of the word, somewhere in the land they claim to be their own, as long as they do not deny that right to others or attempt to violently oppress or remove them.”

But what happens to those rights when denial becomes structural, and violence reaches the level of full-blown genocide?

In Israel, Bartov compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany; but Germans who recognized the enormity of Nazism, like the writer Thomas Mann, advocated its defeat, rather than the benign intervention Bartov seeks to shock Israel out of its genocidal state—and that was ultimately how it ended. The ethnonationalist Zionist state is not an equivalent world power, but its US sponsor (which is) is also adding Israeli characteristics to its rich indigenous supply of authoritarianism and imperialism.

It is not fanciful to believe that this axis will also need to suffer defeat, and that those who wish to change Israel may have to call for this. There is no soft landing in sight for Gaza, and there may not be for Israel, either.

The scene looks normal enough: activists holding a banner proclaiming their view, outside the Friends Meeting House in Brighton where I was talking to a Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) meeting. Yet the genocide deniers were outside--openly supporting a state which has deliberately destroyed a whole society—because they had failed in their attempt at covert censorship. The Meeting House’s management committee had faced a week of heavy pressure to cancel the meeting. The police had been involved (exactly how I’m not sure) and it wasn’t certain until the day that the meeting would go ahead.

In the end, the Quaker management committee of the Meeting House resisted the pressure, believing strongly that it was important that the meeting should take place. I am very grateful for their principled stand, and to Brighton PSC for getting everyone in safely despite the pickets and enabling a stimulating discussion. Yet the lesson is clear: the pro-Israel forces in British society will use every lever at their disposal to block discussion of the state’s crimes, and especially any expression of the “genocide” allegation.

The Labour government says that pro-Palestinians can protest, but this case shows that even basic forms of free expression are under threat. An academic genocide expert must be stopped from speaking to a public meeting. Alongside the censorship in the BBC, the involvement of the Metropolitan Police and the courts in intimidating normal protest marches, the government’s new restrictions on the right to protest, the brutal treatment of Palestine Action protestors, the attempt to remove the right to jury trials of protestors, and the prosecution of a barrister for defending protestors in court, it all adds up to formidable repression.

Yet why do they think this is necessary? Because Israel is losing the argument. Everyone knows it has committed enormous atrocities in Gaza and beyond. “Genocide” names the crime and provides Palestinians with a powerful lever for justice. The idea will not be suppressed, and I will continue to use it to criticise Israel whenever and wherever I can.

The Israeli-US genocide and wars of the last two and a half years, together with the Trump regime, represent a turning point in world politics. Israel’s genocide (with US and Western support) in Gaza, the illegal wars on Iran and Lebanon, the complete abandonment of international law and attacks on international courts, the sidelining of the UN, the cruelty of mass deportations and ICE - I could go on, but you get the picture. This is not just a new age of genocide, as I argue in my new book, but an age of violent, lawless power threatening a twenty-first century form of fascism.

This historic juncture is making itself felt in all corners of the world, and in many places with more drastic effects than in Britain. Trump and Netanyahu are causing huge devastation, destroying whole communities through killing, mutilating and vast displacements. Poor people throughout the world will suffer most from the wanton economic shocks that their aggression is causing. Each ton of explosive detonated is another disaster for our climate.

Britain’s complicity

But the United Kingdom is very much a part of this. Since 2023, both Conservative and Labour governments have supported Israel’s genocide, selling it weapons, conspiring with it to provide surveillance over Gaza, covering its back in international arenas, and making antisemitism an excuse for repressing protest.

In 2026, Keir Starmer, knowing that the US attack on Iran is illegal, has claimed to stand apart from the war. Yet at almost every stage the UK has been in there. Before the first attacks, US planes used English RAF bases to get to the Middle East. After these attacks, Starmer and his attorney-general Richard Hermer cooked up a pseudo-legal ‘defensive’ justification to allow US planes to bomb Iran from Fairford, Gloucestershire, and Diego Garcia. Now, they are allowing the US to attack Iranian positions that allegedly threaten the Strait of Hormuz.

So Labour’s sycophancy towards Trump and its loyalty to Israel - which leads its leaders to proclaim themselves ‘proud Zionists’ - has left it unwilling even to try to prevent huge international crimes. Labour appears to believe that the UK is powerless, but together with France, it is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which could have isolated the USA in an attempt to prevent the war. If they, the EU and other states had jointly taken their responsibilities seriously, they could have made a difference. Instead, they have drawn the line only at risking their warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The British parties on Gaza and Iran

This humiliating evasion has huge domestic consequences. Hopes of improving living standards and public services are starkly jeopardised. Because Labour refuses to criticise Trump, it allows Nigel Farage to get away with his support for him, compounding the years in which Farage got impunity for Brexit because Labour didn’t want to criticise that, either. The upshot is that rather than losing ground, Farage’s Reform UK actually stands to benefit from the mayhem that Trump has unleashed.

In this situation, one major party, the Greens, has stood clearly against Labour’s complicity in the war. Farage and the Conservative Party both enthusiastically supported it (to start with), like they backed Israel’s genocide. The Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party have been critical at times of the UK’s complicity in Gaza and have shown a more robust attitude to Trump, but at crucial moments they have capitulated: both criticised the banning of Palestine Action as ‘terrorists’, but then failed to vote against it. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey even managed to pivot - in barely a month - from calling Gaza ‘genocide’ to arguing that it would be a mistake to ban Israel from Eurovision (because of Trump’s ‘ceasefire’)!

The four Green MPs elected in 2024 are not the only ones to have consistently opposed Israel’s genocide. A handful of principled Labour MPs (9 out of 400 in the Palestine Action vote) and pro-Gaza Independents (including Jeremy Corbyn) have also stood against Labour’s complicity. But the Greens matter because they are becoming a significant national contender. And it is not only since Zack Polanski became leader that they have taken this stance. Ellie Chowns has consistently pushed the genocide debate in Parliament, and all Green MPs have been on the right side of history.

The Greens can be the principled left that Britain needs

This is important, because Gaza and Iran-Lebanon remind us that Britain needs a principled left-wing voice. In the past, this would have been looked for in the left of the Labour Party, but Starmer, spurred on by his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, has all but eliminated it from Parliament. Corbyn and fellow former Labour MP Zarah Sultana have taken the initiative in founding Your Party, a new left party that involves many former Labour Corbynites as well as other left-wing groups. But its founding has been marked by spectacular own-goals, from which both the party itself and its rival leaders have emerged with diminished credibility.

The Greens, in contrast, have captured the public imagination and, in February’s by-election in Gorton & Denton, a safe Labour seat. They have electoral momentum which, if sustained through May’s local elections to the general election in 2028-29, could see them consolidated as a significant national force - possibly the first serious large-scale contender to the left of Labour in modern history.

The Greens can give a political voice to Britain’s economically precarious, non-home-owning, radical young. They will be a louder, clearer voice for equality, democracy and civil liberties, and against racist immigration controls. And they will give the antiwar, anti-genocide cause consistent representation.

Stopping the Farage threat to British democracy

It is not necessary to believe that the Greens could supersede Labour and form a government in order to strongly support this breakthrough. The general election is some time away and Labour could recover ground by shifting its policies or changing leader, but it is still probable that it will lose its majority.

However, it is near-certain that Farage’s party will be the dominant right-wing force, threatening to introduce a British version of Trump’s semi-dictatorship. This will make this an existentially important election for British democracy, and for the left in particular.

Britain has been here before, with with the disastrous failure to prevent the majority for Brexit in 2016, which led to eight years of chaotic far-right Conservative rule and dire social and eocnomic effects. That happened because Labour failed to fight the racist Leave campaigns; Corbyn left the pro-European case to the austerity Cameron government, and Remain failed to mobilise its potential vote, especially among younger people.

Even in the best-case scenario, Labour by itself will not be able to stop Reform UK this time. It will renew its attempt, which was unsuccessful in the by-election, to represent itself as the inevitable tactical choice for beating Farage; and with its media advantage, this may have more appeal on a national scale. But this is unlikely to be sufficient to overcome the party’s huge loss of credibility.

It is only if all the sections of the progressive ‘bloc’ in the electorate are effectively mobilised that the threat of a Reform (or Reform-Tory) government can be securely prevented. A non-Farage government in 2028-29 will very likely have to be a coalition or a minority government dependent on wider support. We have to start to build the consensus for cooperation now.

The anti-Farage electorate will include, as well as the rump backing for Labour, the support that will go to the other centrist parties, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Plaid Cymru. But it is also essential that younger, left-wing, environmental and minority voters are fully mobilised. As 2016 showed, they are not an optional extra for a progressive majority.

What the Green Party can do

As things stand, the Greens are are by far the best placed to mobilise these voters. The recent by-election, following Labour’s losses and near-losses to pro-Gaza independents in 2024, confirms that there is a sizeable left vote that Labour cannot win. Bringing out the full potential Green vote will maximise the overall anti-Reform vote and - with effective tactical voting - seats.

Further Green advance will pull the whole pro-democracy coalition, in whatever form it eventually shapes up, in a more radical direction. The centrist parties, including Labour, will have to address their progressive rather than their right-wing flanks. If the Greens end up holding the balance of power in Parliament, obviously they will have to support an anti-Farage coalition. But they will also be able to set progressive conditions for the new government.

And this is not just about the still-distant general election. There is no Chinese wall between electoral and street politics, as Labour likes to believe. The electoral rise of Reform has emboldened racists and reactionaries on the streets, even stimulating the terrible riots in July 2024, just as Leave’s 2016 victory provoked racist abuse and violence.

In an opposite movement, the advance of the Greens can stimulate peaceful social movements and campaigns over the next three years, which in turn will reinforce the conviction that Green politics can win. Stand Up to Racism, Palestine Solidarity and other campaigns are all broadly based, of course, but they will grow with the Greens who are their closest electoral fit.

I’m joining the Greens

Time to put my own cards on the table. I first joined Labour in 1962 (!) when I was at school, but left the party during the Wilson government. I then rejoined in 1979 when it became clear that the groups to the left of Labour weren’t capable of offering a meaningful national alternative. After being active in the peace movement, I was even a Labour parliamentary candidate.

However, I’ve always had an open mind about the best way to advance radical politics in Britain’s undemocratic first-past-the-post system. Living in Brighton in 2010, when Caroline Lucas was fighting fot the first Green parliamentary seat, I broke ranks with Labour to support a Green vote.

I left Labour in 2016 and haven’t felt tempted to join a national party since, but Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Greens has convinced me that there is a meaningful opportunity here. I think it is important for me to say whose side I’m on. I’ve put in my application to join the Green Party.

Twenty-five years ago, 27 January was named Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). Since this was established, it has been understood that the lessons of the Holocaust are universal. This is a day for commemorating the victims of genocide everywhere, and for learning the lesson that genocide must be prevented everywhere.

Written out Soviet-style

But this idea has now been thoroughly compromised. The ongoing genocides in Sudan as well as Gaza are again missing from the official programme. Today’s victims are not regarded as worthy of our solidarity. They have been written out, Soviet-style, from the prospectus of the official Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. They are likely to be missing, too, from speeches by ministers, as they have been in the remarks of Sir Keir Starmer in the last two years.

Yet in Gaza, nearly two million survivors of the Israeli genocide, including injured, undernourished and bereaved children, still live in tents and ruins amidst the winter rain. Despite Donald Trump’s ‘ceasefire’, Israel still bombs and shoots at them and deprives them of the essentials of life, blocking humanitarian aid.

Not only that, but Trump - himself a major perpetrator, in view of his active support for Israel’s renewed bombing and starving from March 2025 - has invited the chief perpetrator, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, to sit on the ‘board of peace’ which will run Gaza. To all intents and purposes, Israel’s genocide continues with US approval. So does the genocidal violence of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, following several large massacres last year.

Holocaust Memorial Day should be a focus for solidarity, for pressure on governments to halt this violence. It should be a day to remember the hundreds of thousands of dead in these ongoing genocides, as well as those murdered in the Holocaust.

A captive commemoration

Why Holocaust Memorial Day has been emptied of contemporary relevance is hardly a secret. Millions of Jews worldwide view Israel’s genocide in horror and many protest against it, but Britain’s official HMD is captive to hardline pro-Israel forces in the Jewish community who dominate organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews. This Board is so closed to morality that it suspends members who have the temerity to express even mild criticisms of Israel.

Similarly, most Labour voters acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide and many supporters protest, but the Labour government has doubled down on its support for Israel. Last year, the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, joined the Israeli ambassador, an outspoken advocate of Israel’s violence, at her HMD event. In May, defence minister Maria Eagle boasted of the RAF’s role in providing surveillance of Gaza to the Israeli air force, while it was escalating its bombardment. The air force chief supervising this campaign of mass atrocity, like other Israeli leaders, was welcomed in the UK.

The government has even criminalised the nonviolent direct action group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation; only nine Labour MPs out of 400 dared to vote against this. Recently, it hounded out of office a police chief who tried to protect Birmingham from the violence of Israeli football “fans”. Now, pretending the genocide it never recognised is over, it proposes to lift even the limited restrictions it imposed on arms to Israel.

Inside Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day

As I was writing this, Melanie Goldberg, a support worker for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in Scotland, published an article in Haaretz, the liberal Israeli outlet, describing how she had been forced out simply for being a member of an Israel-based group that unites Jews and Palestinians and is critical of Israeli policies. But she also exposed how the HMD Trust had manipulated the commemoration of genocide in preparation for this year’s event.

Some background is needed here. For some years, HMD has featured certain genocides as worthy of commemoration alongside the Holocaust. Last year’s events highlighted Srebrenica, in the light of the 30th anniversary of the 1995 massacre. This year’s event focuses on Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, saying that these cases “represent a failure of humanity to learn from the Holocaust and are a reminder for all of us that we must be prepared to guard against genocide happening again in the future”.

These cases seem to have been carefully chosen to express awareness of the wider pattern of atrocities - but only through cases where the UK and other Western countries have not been directly responsible (although there was indirect complicity). Yet Goldberg reveals that “the Trust quietly edited their entire website“ to change references to genocide in these cases to “persecution”. I still found one place where they were referred to as “genocides”, but in general Goldberg seems to accurately characterise the presentation.

It is as though, since they are determined to deny “genocide” in Gaza, the idea itself must be minimised. The link, “Why does HMDT only recognise certain atrocities as genocide?”, no longer works. FAQs say that local organisers can include contemporary cases, but mention only the Uyghurs - not Gaza. The horrific current events in Sudan, omitted although their predecessors in Darfur in 2003-5 are included, are probably collateral damage from the Gaza blackout.

Problems of official memory

When Holocaust Memorial Day was instituted in Britain in 2000, historians of the Holocaust and genocide warned against its being hijacked by complacency about the historic role of Britain, as I discuss in the chapter on “Britain and genocide” in my The New Age of Genocide.

It was all too convenient for the UK to commemorate the Holocaust, celebrating its role in ending the emblematic genocide of the twentieth century. This overlooked the genocides of Britain’s own imperial past, not to mention Britains’s failure to do more to prevent the Holocaust or to welcome Jewish refugees after the Second World War.

At the time, the danger that HDM would become hostage to Israeli, rather than British, myths was not on the horizon. Flickering hopes for the “peace process” insulated the event from the fallout of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Yet HDM, although government-funded, exists (its website reminds us) to “protect” Holocaust memory, and it requires little imagination to see how this is understood today. The HDM Trust embraces the infamous International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which tars criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

Devalued and hollowed out

Commemoration of the Jewish victims of Nazism and opposition to anti-Jewish racism are devalued by being tied to Israeli agendas in this time of Tel Aviv genocide. Although the HMD Trust makes spreading awareness across the generations the theme of the current effort, only half the number of British schools which joined HDM events before 2023 are taking part this year.

The genocide historian Dirk Moses points out that idea of “the Holocaust” has now been hollowed out, and the Holocaust scholar Barry Trachtenberg argues the same of “antisemitism”.

If Holocaust Memorial Day is to be rescued, it will not be possible until official orientations, both in the Jewish community and the British government, shift to recognise Israel’s genocide and their complicity in it. This looks like being a while coming, to say the least, but we can still think about genocide on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tomorrow should be about a dignified, principled linking of our duty to remember the victims of 1939-45 with our duty of solidarity with the victims of 2026. This requires us to reject the official commemoration offered by the government, the HDM Trust and the mainstream media, who will undoubtedly publicise their narratives this week.

Pushing back against this smear, I commented on Twitter on his lack of reflection “on the role of Israel’s genocide, which Netanyahu claims is for all Jews, in stoking antisemitism”. This post was a cue for a Zionist ultra pile-on against me. The idea that Israel is committing genocide was presented as a “blood libel” against the Jews - by implication, comparable to the medieval Christian claim that Jews were to blame for the death of Christ.

Was I, I asked one of my accusers, therefore to blame for the Bondi massacre? Yes, he shot back. This sounded remarkably like a blood libel against me. It was implausible that ISIS sympathisers in Sydney were earnestly absorbing my articles - if so, they missed the bits where I condemned the Hamas massacres. I’m pretty sure they weren’t even reading the mainstream reports (like that of the UN commission) which have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. It’s much more likely that they were absorbing the daily evidence of Israel’s atrocities, together with extreme Islamist propaganda.

The ultras not only claimed that the idea of Israeli genocide was a blood libel, they claimed that I was bending the idea of genocide in order to apply it to Israel. Like other genocide scholars, I’ve argued that the legal definition of genocide is flawed, and I’ve proposed a partially different sociological definition (I first did this before I ever wrote about Israel). But as far as Gaza is concerned, I’ve been clear that the legal definition is quite sufficient to convict Israel, as many have argued.

My accusers came armed with a script to disprove this. Israel had “only” killed 3-4 per cent of Gaza’s population (it’s almost certainly more). No matter that, with two million starving people living amidst rubble, it’s pretty obvious that Israel has “deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction” of the Palestinian population, which the Genocide Convention specifies as a means of genocide.

But I didn’t want to get into this legalistic debate, and the Zionists saw this as a gotcha. I’m very prepared to discuss how genocide applies to Israel with people of good faith, who recognise the atrocities it has committed and want to know why the category applies (I did this with a BBC interviewer this week). But these people were not like that. They saw disproving Israel’s technical guilt of genocide as a get-out for all its crimes. They’d have been equally keen to disprove its guilt of crimes against humanity or war crimes. They didn’t care about the terrible suffering that Israel has caused in Gaza. They just wanted to get it off the hook, so that it could cause some more.

There will be a time when these matters of law are settled: when the International Court of Justice decides on South Africa’s case that Israel has committed genocide, and (once Benjamin Netanyahu has been arrested) when the International Criminal Court rules on the crimes against humanity and war crimes with which he is charged. In the meanwhile, we don’t need to get into detailed legal arguments with grifters for atrocity. We need to expose the remorseless inhumanity that they are busy defending.

Much of this pro-Israeli discourse is in bad faith, and media outlets’ embrace of it represents at least woolly thinking. Although we don’t have firm evidence of the inspiration or sources of information behind the killers’ decisions to strike Jews, there is little reason to believe that Palestine protestors’ beliefs or actions have played a major role. And there is every reason to think that Israel’s own actions have been much more important.

To start with the obvious: the tiny numbers of lethal attackers have chosen a radically different course from the protesters who choose peaceful mass action. The police investigating these crimes see the perpetrators as likely to be either lone actors or embedded in informal and formal terrorist networks, not protest movements.

Pro-Israelis get over this difficulty by claiming that protesters have created the climate, by “demonising Israel”, in which terrorists develop their attacks. Yet Palestinian protests are so little reported in the mainstream media, except when pro-Israelis call for them to be banned, that it seems unlikely that they are a major influence. It is much more likely that, despite the media bias which minimises Israeli crimes, there has been so much coverage of them that this cuts through to potential terrorists - as it has done to the general public, large sections of which now recognize that Israel has committed genocide.

The bad faith arises particularly because pro-Israelis know that Israel’s genocide has massively turned opinion against the state. The antisemitism statistics - like those for anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism - have soared since 2023, as they did during previous Israeli wars.

Benjamin Netanyahu is notorious for jumping on the bandwagon of every anti-Jewish attack to mobilize support for further violence. He, and Israel’s supporters, know full well that the best way to make Jews safer across the world would be for Israel to stop its genocide and aggression. When will editors and journalists cotton on, and break this cycle which only feeds violence?

The threats to political and intellectual freedom which we are discussing today are to be expected in a time of genocide. For genocide is not just the deliberate destruction of a people or a society, which most definitions emphasise.

It is also a conflict between the perpetrators and their supporters, on the one hand, and all those who resist it - those who speak up for and defend the victims as well as the victims themselves - on the other.

And the core problem of freedom of expression in a time of genocide is simple: it is the orchestration and enforcement of genocide denial on one side, and resistance to denial on the other.

THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DENIAL

My late colleague, the sociologist Stan Cohen, worked with Palestinian detainees in Israeli facilities in the 1990s, and when he returned to the UK wrote States of Denial, the fundamental work on the denial of atrocities. He argued that there were three main types of denial:

1. Literal - for example, the arguments of Holocaust deniers that six million Jews did not die.

2. Interpretive - in the case of the Holocaust, this could be saying yes, many did die, but people die in wars; it was not genocide.

3. Implicatory - an example would be the Allies knowing about the extermination camps, but not not doing what that knowledge implied, to stop them murdering Jews.

In Israel’s genocide, literal denial has been very widespread. The basic facts of the huge, multi-faceted harm that it has inflicted have been rejected and suppressed. This has been carried out by many different means: killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza; blocking the entry of international journalists; refusing or failing to report atrocities; reporting civilian harm without saying who caused it; denying Palestinians and other witnesses the opportunity to speak in the mass media; etc. etc.

Interpretative denial has also been dominant in Western societies. Criticism of Israel has been smeared as “antisemitism”, as Sindre Bangstad discussed in his opening lecture (see his article). Israel’s violence has been misinterpreted as “self-defence”, and - as in my Holocaust example - the resulting civilian harm has been presented as an effect of war, “collateral damage”, despite all the evidence of Israel’s genocidal intentions.

Above all, there has been widespread refusal to acknowledge Israel’s huge campaign against the whole of Gaza’s society as “genocide”, despite the carefully-argued views of a great many genocide scholars, human rights NGOs like Amnesty International, and UN agencies.

DIRECT AND INDIRECT ENFORCEMENT

I will return to implicatory denial in a moment. But first I want to comment on the variety of ways in which denial is enforced. Some enforcement is directly coercive: the direct bans on protest, organisations, free speech and academic freedom that Sindre has discussed. I have reported my own small experience of this, when Jewish students tried to get an academic lecture of mine cancelled. So this could happen to an established scholar, but younger scholars and students have been much more vulnerable.

However, most enforcement is carried out indirectly, through the exclusion of pro-Palestinian - and especially Palestinian - voices from the public sphere, and even from academia, in Western countries.

Again I have some experience, from the refusal of liberal British media to allow the “genocide case” to made, at least in the first 18 months of the genocide, except perhaps by Jewish Israeli Holocaust historians - and from being ignored by mainstream British media, despite being possibly the most prominent genocide scholar in the UK and commenting constantly about Gaza in alternative media outlets and on social media.

I can only say that journalists from all over the world, including from mainstream outlets, beat their ways to my door, but never a single mainstream British TV programme or newspaper. And I am not alone - the eminent UK-based Israel-Palestine historian, Professor Avi Shlaim, has reported similar experiences.

ORCHESTRATING DENIAL - AND SEEING IT FAIL

These restrictions of speech have been orchestrated - you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to say, yes, there have been conspiracies. Israel and pro-Israeli forces have mounted huge campaigns; Western governments and politicians, many of them direct participants in the genocide and liaising with Israeli leaders, have systematically implemented bans; editors and journalists have also coordinated with Israel and pro-Israeli actors.

But denialism has also been a self-reinforcing system of “common sense”, in which politicians and journalists have taken their cues from each others’ denial.

Yet this structure of denial never fully worked. Despite the pervasiveness of censorship and self-censorship in Western institutions, in “the first live-streamed genocide”, the images and reports generated on the ground by Gaza’s citizen-journalists cut through.

And in 2025, support for the genocide almost collapsed. After Israel re-charged its bombing and starvation policies in the spring, Western liberal media started to allow “genocide” to be used - and some even proclaimed it editorially. Public opinion shifted, with around 50% of the electorate in the USA and UK agreeing that Israel was committing “genocide”. On cue, centrist Western leaders started to criticise Israel.

IMPLICATORY DENIAL

This is where “implicatory denial” comes in. This is where you know, or even acknowledge, that genocide is taking place, but you don’t follow the implications of that. So European governments criticised Israel’s actions, liberal media called them “genocide”, but still few would draw the conclusion that Europe needed to break relations with Israel, end its collaboration. In the UK, the government even boasted about providing military surveillance flights over Gaza and supplying the data to Israel.

My personal experience was that, just as earlier liberal media didn’t want articles about “genocide”, now that they acknowledged it, they were still not interested in articles advocating a radical boycott of Israel, unless of course by Israelis.

THE NEW AGE OF GENOCIDE

So, yes, as Sindre has argued, there is a long-established Palestine exception to freedom of speech. But there is also a general genocide exception - genocide normally restricts free speech in perpetrator and allied states - and Western governments and media still largely regard Israel as an ally and part of “the West”.

This is why the restrictions on freedom of speech are so sharp: with Gaza, we are in a new age of genocide. Samantha Power, in her book on “America in the age of genocide”, argued that the failure to prevent genocide was not a policy failure, since the policy was nonintervention.

Today, the problem is intervention by Western states on the side of genocide, even actual participation in genocide. Governments are guilty not just of complicity, but also (in some cases) of conspiracy to commit genocide.

There is an international “perpetrator bloc”, and its axis has pivoted to Washington DC, as Donald Trump has taken over the high-level management of the genocide. But other Western and Arab states are also involved.

A PERNICIOUS NEW STAGE

Trump’s first plan for Gaza, his “Riviera”, was at least fairly open in its intention to complete genocide through expelling the Palestinians. His new “peace plan”, to complete it through a new internationalised occupation of Gaza, is still likely to lead to a US-Israeli-Arab corporate makeover of selected areas, marginalising the survivors if not concentrating them in new camps.

This plan remains hypothetical. What we have is supposed to be a ceasefire, but Israel is still killing, starving and systematically destroying buildings; people are still dying and suffering.

We are in a new, even more pernicious stage of denial, in which the same people who said the genocide never happened are now telling us that it is over. The mainstream mass media in Western countries are acting as though this is a fact, and have already dramatically reduced their Gaza coverage.

THE FAR-RIGHT VERSION OF FREE SPEECH

So where does this leave the politics of free speech? The new age of genocide is also a dark new political age in general, in which the far right is surging and the centre is not holding.

The suppression of freedom of expression in the name of genocide denial has been a key mechanism in this wider shift away from democracy, towards authoritarianism. Centre-left political leaders like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Olaf Scholz and Keir Starmer, have been agents of repression, preparing the way for openly dictatorial leaders like Trump.

In this general crisis of freedom and democracy, the far right has long had its own “free speech” doctrine. Only “overtly” racist rhetoric, like using the n-word, has been allowed to be racist; in the name of free speech, hostility to migrants, Muslims and minorities has been protected, even to the point of proclaiming people who openly incited the burning down of asylum hotels, with refugees inside them, as martyrs to free speech when they are arrested.

In this view of free speech, Israel Defence Force soldiers, likely to have participated in the Gaza genocide and possibly committed specific war crimes, are to be allowed to speak on campuses. But pro-Palestinian students are to banned or expelled as “antisemitic”.

These ideas are even spreading in academia under the guise of protecting “academic freedom”. I have recently investigated London “academic freedom” campaign groups; despite my general apprehension, I have still been surprised at the extent that they are tied into far-right networks.

THE PRO-PALESTINIAN LEFT AND FREE SPEECH

The left and pro-Palestinians must be consistent supporters of freedom of expression. The kind of society we want is free and democratic, so we must practice openness and tolerance now.

But we must also look over our shoulders: the far right are waiting to pounce on any move that they can represent as anti-free speech, to justify their own repressive approach. We can see where this is leading in Trump’s America.

We must insist that freedom of expression includes the freedom to protest and organise, as well as to speak and write, on the campuses as well as beyond.

We must be vigilant against forms of protest that open us to charges of complicity in suppressing free speech or academic freedom.

We must generally favour debate and protest rather than disruption or prevention of lawful speech, including academic activities.

We are winning the battle of public opinion - we must not support actions that allow pro-Israelis and the far right to push back and reclaim the moral high ground.

We must defeat the supporters and accomplices of genocide by pushing in every way to present the information and arguments about what Israel and our own states have done and are doing.

Justice for the victims of genocide, in Palestine and beyond, needs the freedom to speak, organise and write openly, without restrictions.

Following its notorious “terrorist” ban on the direct-action group Palestine Action, Britain’s Labour government has now proposed new powers to restrict the right to protest. An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, currently going through Parliament, says that when considering whether to restrict a protest a senior police officer “must” take into account any cumulative disruption caused by past protests – regardless as to whether they were organised or attended by the same people.

While the government worries about the “cumulative impact” of protest, we should worry about the cumulative impact of anti-protest laws. As the human rights organisation Liberty says, “combined with other anti-protest measures in the pipeline like bans on face coverings, [these plans] will see the right to protest in the UK stripped to the bone. Police already have extensive powers to restrict protests, yet these measures add to an ever-expanding web of anti-protest laws. It is becoming harder and harder for people to exercise their democratic right to protest without falling foul of the law.”

And while we’re about it, what about the cumulative impact of British military assistance to Israel, as it continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza? There have been 30 national Palestine solidarity protests in London in 25 months, but in one year alone the RAF carried out over 500 surveillance flights over Gaza, generating information that it shared with the Israeli air force as it bombed the territory to bits. The UK has supplied parts, week in week out, for the F-35 planes that Israel has used in this genocide. There are cumulative impacts here too - surely cumulative protest is warranted to challenge these?

Let us also consider the cumulative impact of the government’s neglect of the International Court of Justice’s warning of genocide, the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and the determinations of genocide by UN bodies, human rights NGOs and genocide scholars (like myself). Not to mention the cumulative impact of the government’s ignoring, contempt for, and harassment of, the overwhelmingly peaceful protest marches through the capital that have rightly embarrassed them since 2023. People do not protest for fun: if the government addressed its legal duty to prevent and punish genocide, there would be less need for repeated demonstrations.

There’s another way cumulative impact comes in: this is how political campaigning makes itself effective. Keir Starmer didn’t have any qualms about repeating ad nauseam his messages about the dire results of Tory government - or even about his father being a toolmaker. Repetition is essential to campaigning, and that applies to protest too. The powers to restrict “cumulative” protest have not been introduced primarily to save police time, but to relieve the political pressure on the government.

How can we turn the “cumulative impact” ban into cumulative pressure to defeat both this ban and that on Palestine Action? The Palestine Coalition, centred on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which has organised the main demonstrations against Israel’s genocide, has rightly been wary of prejudicing its right to protest, having been maliciously accused of “antisemitism” and “hate marches” from the start, as well as facing harassment and arrests of its leaders. Its campaign has therefore always been separate from Palestine Action’s, whose activities sometimes deliberately broke the law - although on the few occasions they used physical force, this was against military facilities, not people, and they certainly were not terrorists.

So far, the campaign against the Palestine Action ban has continued this separation from the mainstream protest movement. Defend Our Juries, which has organised a campaign to “Lift the Ban” (pictured), has focused tightly on getting hundreds of people to defy it by holding placards that state “I support Palestine Action”. Their repeated actions, which have caused over 2,000 arrests, have made a mockery of the ban, breaking through in the media in a way that, sadly, the huge Palestine marches have not. They have had a lot of support from the wider movement, and Coalition leaders made a point of showing their solidarity at the last London protest. In past protest movements, mass protest and direct action have worked best when they have been complementary, as I show in my history of the antinuclear campaign.

Yet there is a paradox in the Defend Our Juries campaign that has so far helped its cause - but may ultimately limit its effectiveness. Campaigning to “lift the ban” is legal - but the means used, saying “I support Palestine Action”, is not. Anyone holding that placard faces a potential conviction not just for obstruction, as many sit-down protestors have over the years, but for “terrorism”. It is the absurdity of this that has so far made the campaign effective - but it could also turn into a weakness. The tactic puts the onus on the small number of people who are willing to risk a terrorism conviction to stand in for the millions who oppose the ban. But it offers no way for these supporters to stand against the ban themselves.

Defend Our Juries have announced a wave of regional actions to “Lift the Ban” between 18 and 29 November. Their instructions to potential protestors once again insist on using the “I support Palestine Action” slogan, saying that uniformity is strength. But this is not the lesson from campaigning in general - often diversity of slogans can demonstrate the breadth of a movement. Why shouldn’t protestors choose to put “Lift the Ban on Palestine Action” (or another legal slogan of their choice) on their placard, rather than “I support Palestine Action”? Defend Our Juries are worried about the police picking on the people who use the original, supposedly “terrorist”, slogan - but couldn’t it work the other way, to confuse the police and the courts, and make the absurdity of the ban even more apparent?

Opening up the “Lift the Ban” protests in this way could not only turn them into larger mass events. It could also open the way for a convergence with the Palestine Solidarity protests. PSC and the Coalition must surely recognise that, with the “cumulative protest” ban, they face the biggest threat so far to their right to be on the streets. They rightly wish to keep the focus on Gaza, and that is all the more important now that media coverage has collapsed and the government is encouraging the view that, although there was never a genocide, now it is over.

Yet Defend Our Juries has shown is that challenging repression also helps to bring Gaza back into the political debate. Surely that is now the challenge for the whole movement, and they way to link to the wider threats to democracy, including the prospect of a Farage government. Here is another potential cumulative impact - the multiplier effect of joining the Palestine campaign with the campaigns for freedom of speech and democracy.

Much has been made of the disruption by some pro-Palestinian students of a lecture by Michael Ben-Gad, an economics professor at City St. George’s University in London. I’ve made it clear on Twitter that I oppose the targeting of Ben Gad, who is accused of nothing more than serving in the Israel Defence Forces in the 1980s, as all young Israelis were required to do.

However, the campaign to defend Ben Gad (who is fully supported by his university, in any case) quickly led to a call to expel all the students involved, by the chair of the London ‘academic freedom’ group which organised it, Professor Abhishek Saha. If the students overreached by attacking the professor, the overreach of supposedly mature academics, in calling for mass expulsions, revealed the authoritarian orientation of those orchestrating the campaign - despite the good-faith backing of hundreds of academics.

This is what has led me to write publicly here, for the first time, about an incident at another London university, Royal Holloway, seven months ago, in which Jewish students attempted first to cancel and then to disrupt a lecture I was giving on Gaza. I didn’t write about it at the time because they were unsuccessful, and - unlike the right-wingers who have jumped on the Ben Gad bandwagon - I wasn’t looking to hype the incident into a cause célèbre.

Yet it was a troubling event. It made me realise that the pro-Israel repression in Britain - which sees campaigners tarred as ‘antsemites’ and students disciplined for peaceful protest - could also affect me, an established academic arguing from established knowledge to explain that Israel was committing genocide.

It began with a covert letter from the student Jewish Society to the University, asking them to cancel my talk. Royal Holloway refused to give in. However, it never showed me the letter - although I gather it made the usual references to ‘antisemitism’ (which may have been libellous) as well as the ‘hurtfulness’ for Jewish students of talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On the day of the lecture, there were security guards inside and outside the lecture theatre. About 60 faculty and students turned up to hear me speak, but only four Jewish Society members - one of them wrapped in a giant Israeli flag - who were accompanied by an older man who I am told was a rabbi. The chair explained that there would be an opportunity for everyone to express their views after I had spoken, but interruptions during the lecture would not be allowed.

No sooner had I started to speak, however, than the rabbi started getting very agitated, trying to interrupt, and had to be told by one of the organisers to sit down. When neither the chairperson nor I acknowledged his attempt to speak, he walked out. This was the end of the protest. Given the Jewish Society’s small numbers, it was never a serious threat on the day. But if there had been 10, 20 or more, it could have been a different story.

After his departure, the Jewish Society students listened to the lecture and did not intervene in the Q&A. They must have concluded that I wasn’t an antisemite, because afterwards two of them - including the young man with the flag - came to speak to me. He repeated that talking about genocide was ‘insensitive’ to them as Jews. I countered that Palestinian students in the USA, who Trump was starting to snatch off the streets, had much more to worry about. He said he didn’t necessarily agree with that. About Gaza and genocide, we had to agree to disagree.

Perhaps the best moment came when the security guard who’d been inside the lecture theatre came to speak to me. He thanked me for the lecture, explaining that he was Polish and that my references to the starvation in Gaza had sparked a memory of what his father had told, of starving under the Nazis’ wartime occupation. This, of course, figured in Raphael Lemkin’s original account of the Nazi genocide which I mentioned.

I’m not suggesting that Michael Ben-Gad - who was supposed to be lecturing on monetary policy - could easily have engaged with his protestors. But the eagerness with which the authoritarian, pro-Israel right-wing in the UK has used his case to urge repression is as opposed to the open idea of a university as any misguided student protest.

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, says that this must be a day of respect for the victims of Hamas’s attacks, and that pro-Palestinian protests are “un-British”. Certainly, we need to respect the Jewish victims, and be sensitive to the feelings of their families and communities. But can we really separate the Jewish victims of 7/10 from the Palestinian victims, who started to fall at Israel’s hands barely 24 hours later? Must we not commemorate all the victims - and since the killing continues, protest against Israel’s daily creation of ever more victims?

The connection is umbilical. It’s not just that Israel’s killing has lasted two years, where Hamas’s was over in two days. Or that there are so many more Palestinian victims (over 67,000, generally accepted to be an underestimate) than Jewish (under 1,200).

The central fact is that Israeli leaders insisted - from the day after 7 October - that Palestinian civilians must die because Jews had died. Israel has killed them in the name of its own dead and hostages. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu has told us that Israel will continue the slaughter until the hostages are freed.

It is understandable that Israelis and Jews want to remember their own dead, as Palestinians will eventually commemorate theirs - when the killing stops. But if Jewish commemorations support Israel and its military campaign, they cannot avoid the question of the Palestinian victims. Israel is still harming civilians at an astonishing rate - more have been killed in recent months than at any time since the end of 2023.

There is no moral difference between supporting Israel, as it continues its daily massacres, and supporting Hamas despite its massacre in 2023. However, there is a practical difference: no organised Palestinian protest supports Hamas, but every Jewish event supports Israel. There are certainly individuals in the Palestinian demonstrations who support Hamas, but they are disavowed by the organisers and the vast majority of protestors. But the Jewish events officially, collectively, support Israel and the Israel Defence Forces, despite everything they are doing.

If, as Starmer says, it is “insensitive” to Jewish feelings to protest for Palestine, how much more insensitive is it to the feelings of British Palestinians - and of all who care about human life - for British Jews to demonstrate in support of Israel while its murder campaign is still ongoing?

If, as he also claims, it is “unBritish” to protest for Palestine on 7 October, how much more so is to protest in favour of an ongoing genocidal campaign? Britain solemnly celebrates Holocaust Memorial Day with a promise of “never again” - does this not include Gaza? To ask the question is, sadly, to acknowledge that for Starmer and his government, it does not. It means never again for Jews, but not for Palestinians. We must mark “the biggest killing of Jews since the Holocaust”, but not the far larger, indeed the largest ever, mass killing of Palestinians.

The answer is to commemorate all the victims. Before the next 7 October, the Gaza genocide must be ended - not just the killing, wounding and starvation, but also the destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza that the Trump plan still entails. The British government must apologise for its role in the genocide, and for its suppression of protest against it. On 7 October 2026, there should be an official ceremony, bringing together Jews and Palestinians, to atone for this terrible chapter in British as well as Palestinian and Jewish history.

You can’t see that happen? Well neither can I, certainly while Keir Starmer remains prime minister. He and his government are so deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide that they are likely to double down on the tired tropes of October 2023, as they have this year. With their “unBritish” language, borrowed from the Daily Mail, they are likely to have further prepared Nigel Farage’s far-right British version of Trump’s US dictatorship. The official Jewish organisations are likely still to be backing the genocidal state, although more Jews than ever may be joining the fightback against its corruption of their traditions.

In this situation, pro-Palestinians, including Jews, should prepare a massive commemoration of all the victims, for the third anniversary of the Hamas massacres and the beginning of Israel’s genocide. And we should defy any attempt by Starmer - or his successor! - to ban it.

Genocide has returned to the centre of world politics, the leaders of the great powers have genocidal mentalities, and the idea has become key to critical thought and action.

Full discussions of Gaza; the deeper structure of genocide in Palestine; why the 'genocide' concept should not be abandoned; the question of 'political groups' today; Ukraine; and Britain's relationships to genocide from the colonial era to its complicity in Israel's genocide.

Here’s the link:

https://www.agendapub.com/page/detail/the-new-age-of-genocide/?k=9781788218726

Trump’s openly genocidal mentality lines him up with the leaders of the other two main military powers, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, whose regime continues to eliminate Uyghur identity in Xinjiang as well as backing Putin over Ukraine. Although Putin and Xi nominally oppose Israel’s genocide, they are doing little to stop it. Genocide is again the “dream of modern powers … exercised at the level of … large-scale phenomena of population”, as Michel Foucault put it. There is a veritable Axis of Genocide at the highest level of world politics.

How will democratic states and civil society respond? Evidently, most governments are already compromised: European and other Western leaders have largely supported or tolerated Israel’s actions, while Global South leaders (even South Africa, which brought the case against Israel in the International Court of Justice) have mostly adopted similar attitudes to Russia’s. True, there are some states that have voted for both Ukraine and Palestine in the UN General Assembly, and many positions are nuanced to some degree; but the lack of consistent opposition to genocide is striking.

Indeed, even social movements have been divided, although the common imperial-colonial character of the Russian and Israeli projects has been completely obvious: many pro-Ukrainians have failed to show solidarity with Palestine and vice versa, while Ukraine itself backed Israel after 7 October and the Palestinian Authority has failed to criticise Russia.

As Europeans, Canadians and others face the reality that they cannot rely on the USA, which may even be their enemy, the indication by Friedrich Merz, Germany’s incoming chancellor that he would disregard the International Criminal Court warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is itself a Trumpian stance. If Europe wishes to create a legitimate continent-wide opposition to Trump and a global coalition for Ukraine, it cannot be selective about international law.

It is not only a question of principles. Neither Ukraine nor Palestine can win through military action alone. The road to global support for Ukraine goes through winning over those who identify with Palestine, and for Palestine through winning over the pro-Ukrainians. Global alliances against the dominant imperial and authoritarian leaders, at the levels of state and civil society, must openly challenge their genocidal mentalities and ensure that neither Russia nor Israel gets away with its terrible crimes.

And there was worse: the same day, Starmer’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, was hosting a Holocaust Day event together with the Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, an extreme advocate of her state’s assault on Gaza. Referring to the Jewish victims at Auschwitz, Starmer had said, ‘every one of those names was an individual person, someone’s mother, father, brother or sister, brutally murdered, simply because they were Jewish’. But the Palestinians murdered in Gaza also have names, and their killing should spark the same revulsion that Starmer felt at Auschwitz. From the Palestinian point of view, it is difficult not to see Starmer’s mantras, ‘standing against hatred’ and ‘defending the truth against anyone who would deny it’, as gaslighting.

Unfortunately, this perversion of ‘never again’ is not only a problem of Britain’s Labour government. At the principal Nazi extermination camp itself the 80th anniversary of liberation was being commemorated and an impressive array of world leaders was present, but such was the danger that they would say the wrong thing that none of them was allowed to speak. However, politics had already left its mark: while International Criminal Court indictee Vladimir Putin was not invited, the Polish government had made it clear that Benjamin Netanyahu would be welcome despite his arrest warrant for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Meanwhile in Ireland, there were Israeli attempts to prevent President Michael D. Higgins, who has spoken out over Gaza, from addressing the national event.

Nor is the problem confined to political leaders. Britain’s national Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, official organiser of countrywide commemorations, not only refused to include Gaza in its programme - causing the Islamic Human Rights Commission to call for a boycott - but only referred to it in the context of antisemitism caused by Hamas’ attacks on Israel and ‘the subsequent war in Gaza’. The HDM trust briefly mentioned Islamophobia, but this can be considered purely token in the light of its exclusion of genocide against actual Muslims. Likewise, although the HDM trust highlighted Professor Gregory Stanton’s ‘ten stages of genocide’ it did not mention that he and his organisation, Genocide Watch, have concluded that ‘a genocide of Palestinians by Israel is underway in Gaza’. In this context, not only the Holocaust but also the Srebrenica genocide, which was prominently featured in the British national commemorations, were being hijacked to deny ongoing genocide.

These problems with Holocaust Memorial Day were partially anticipated when it was inaugurated in the UK by Tony Blair in 1997. Holocaust scholars warned against whitewashing Britain’s own Holocaust record - Winston Churchill refused to make stopping the Nazi extermination programme a priority and subsequently failed to admit Jewish refugees in significant numbers - and neglecting its colonial atrocities. Some argued that focusing on the Holocaust, which Britain thinks of itself as helping to end, fostered an illusion that the country is necessarily part of the solution to genocide, not part of the problem.

This is not the place for a full discussion of Britain and genocide, which I attempted in a 2010 lecture (an updated version of which will appear in my forthcoming The Return of Genocide). On the whole, British governments have tended to condone or fail to prevent genocide (by British settlers and allies as well as others) rather than organise it directly. Some might say that the same is true in relation to Israel, but the direct, real-time complicity of the British government - which Lammy flaunted on Holocaust Memorial Day itself - makes this argument impossible to sustain.

When genocide commemoration is selective and covers up ongoing genocide, it discredits its whole purpose, sullying the memory of the victims. It may be that some local activities have avoided the pro-Israeli politicisation seen at the national and international levels. It is certainly true that we must never forget and should find ways to ensure all those who suffer, currently as well as in the past, are remembered. But despite the courageous example of President Higgins across the Irish Sea, in Britain (and I suspect in other countries) official commemoration seems to have hit a complete dead end. In its implicit condoning of Israeli atrocities and national complicity, it has become Ever Again rather than Never.

When Angel noted that her magazine had been the first to have a genocide scholar calling Israel’s destruction of Gaza a genocide (Raz Segal’s “A Textbook Case of Genocide”, published six days after October 7 - in fact the same day that I also noted its “unmistakably genocidal elements” in a piece for Byline Times), her interviewer commented:

At NLR, we have ongoing disagreement over whether ‘genocide’ is the most accurate term for Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza. One issue is the basis on which terms are chosen: should they be as emotionally powerful as possible, to build the biggest movement, recruit the most people to our side? Or should they be as analytically precise as possible, on the grounds that that is the most useful contribution a political journal of ideas can make? From that point of view, the choice of terms on the basis of their alarmist character is a bad politics.

Angel gave a good defence of her journal’s stance, denying that the term was alarmist and explaining why the 1948 Genocide Convention applied - although she mistakenly called it the “Geneva Convention”, confusing it with the separate laws of war adopted a year later. But the interviewer doubled down, questioning the value of the Convention’s “intent” requirement, and arguing, crucially, that while many Israelis wanted to exterminate the Palestinians en masse, “their military-security leaders have always recognized that they do not have the capability for that”.

When Angel responded by questioning the Holocaust standard implicit in these comments, stating (correctly) that under international law, “it’s not a question of how many people you kill”, the interviewer replied that would then need “another term” for the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.

Genocide as a broad concept

Thus the NLR position conveyed in the piece is that “genocide” is emotive, alarmist and not “analytically precise” as a description of Gaza, because the term should be equated with the total extermination of the Holocaust. Let us unpack these ideas.

The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin invented “genocide” in 1944 because he wanted a simple, direct term to describe the deliberate destruction of national and ethnic groups. Its emotive potential was the point of the coinage, but he also believed that genocide could be defined precisely, as both a legal and a sociohistorical concept. If there might be tensions between the idea’s emotional/political and legal/analytical dimensions, in principle these could be combined.

Moreover, Lemkin’s definition was broad, including what he called the intention to “cripple” as well as to physically exterminate a population group, and the Genocide Convention retained this breadth, including the idea of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” as one of the acts constituting the crime, alongside killing, causing bodily and mental harm, etc.

Both definitions contained incoherences - the genocide scholar Dirk Moses has even argued that these have left the concept “inherently unstable” - but it can be argued that the breadth is the idea’s strength. Lemkin was right that the defining issue is the deliberate destruction of a population or society, and that this can be carried out by direct or indirect killing, deportation, suppression of national culture - or by forcing a population to live in a state of perpetual terror in tented encampments or the ruins of their homes.

In this sense, it is highly appropriate to invoke “genocide” to analyze Gaza. New Left Review appears to have been caught off guard by the return of the “genocide” idea in this crisis. In appearing to dismiss it as an “emotive” move, it reveals that it has not really explored the conceptual and analytical dilemmas and is far from reaching its goal of a precise analysis.

The overall impression - reinforced by the way the interviewer adopted Arielle Angel’s slip of the tongue about “Geneva”, which the editors failed to correct before committing the interview to print - is of a journal that has not really thought about genocide. The concept is not really part of its theoretical tradition - the word has appeared only once in the title of an article, in a piece by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1967 - and has always posed a challenge to Marxism. Indeed, Ali says that there has been no debate about genocide in the Review’s editorial committee. Perhaps that is now overdue.

But outside these legal cases, genocide did not widely become a campaign theme, even as activists grew more interested in international law. Rather, attention focused on the International Court of Justice’s 1996 opinion that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be illegal in most circumstances, and the Trident Ploughshares campaign, launched the following year, used this as a justification for direct action which damaged nuclear facilities - even achieving a famous acquittal on these grounds in the Scottish courts. Yet the ICJ did not rest its case on the law of genocide. Even today, CND charges Israel with genocide in Gaza, but not the UK with potential genocide over its deployment of Trident missiles and the likely return of US nuclear weapons to Lakenheath in Suffolk.

“Genocide” was also conspicuous by its absence in E.P. Thompson’s celebrated 1980 Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization, the most elaborated theoretical statement of the nuclear disarmers’ case (its title referenced Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” since he was critiquing the “immobilism” of the Marxist left in relation to the Cold War). Although Edward appeared as a witness for the Greenham women in 1982, he evidently saw the logic of mutual extermination in the nuclear arms race as different from the exterminatory targeting of specific population groups. Exterminism was the immanent tendency of the Cold War system of bloc rivalry, in which self-reproducing technological competition would unintentionally lead to the destruction of human civilization unless interrupted by peace movements from below, a tendency implicitly regarded as different from the intentional destruction of populations in genocide. (In the event, of course, although the movements did play a significant role in the end of Cold War, this was largely because they influenced political leaders, one of whom, Mikhail Gorbachev, took the initiative to break the cycle of nuclear competition from above.)

Thompson was not alone in avoiding “genocide”. I also began to write about nuclear destruction in the 1980s but it was a decade later - after Bosnia - that I began to make the genocide connection, for example in my War and Genocide, published in 2003. Clearly, the potential effects of nuclear war and targeted group destruction were the same - mass extermination - as 1939-45 had already shown, even before the USA dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, for some contemporary genocide scholars, such as Dirk Moses, this means that the very idea of genocide is superfluous, since the destructive potential is already there in war. Yet in my 2003 book, I concluded - as I still believe - that the distinctions matter.

Although nuclear policies were also intentional, the intentions of actors in the exterminist nuclear system - aimed at military and political supremacy, even “deterrence”, and targeting civilians as appendages of enemy states rather than enemies to be destroyed in their own right - were different in important ways from classical genocidal intentions. That mattered to the politics of the issue, at least when it concerned missile deployment. Yet Randle and the Greenham women were also right to say that at the point of missile launch, that difference would dissolve. Ultimately, both nuclear strategy and openly genocidal policies involved lethal syntheses of state power, mass politics, industrialism technology and military competition. In the end, their connections are more important than the distinction between them.

Almost a decade later, so few still believe in Brexit that in a recent BBC Question Time, only one person put their hand up to say it had worked well. It is widely accepted that it has damaged the British economy, deprived the NHS of doctors and nurses it desperately needs, and prevented young people from working abroad. This shift in public opinion is a major factor in the collapse of Conservative support which now promises a new Labour government, but it is largely unacknowledged. Britain is going through a historic change which could make 4 July 2024 its Independence Day from far-right Brexit domination. Yet its current election debate is all about the surface effects of this experiment: the ‘mess’ the country is in, the ‘broken’ public services, the venality and incompetence of Tory politicians.

The phoney election and the return of Farage

In this, Britain is rather different from other countries which have removed far-right regimes. When Trump was evicted in the 2020 US election and the far right were removed in Poland last year, the opposition campaigns clearly highlighted the anti-democratic character of the outgoing regimes, but in Britain there is little discussion of the unprecedented far-right dominance and its perversion of democracy. The lack of focus on these fundamentals is partly because the sense of Tory failure is almost universal and their loss of support so clear that none of the antidemocratic tricks they had lined up have any chance of saving them. But it is also because it suits Labour to focus on the symptoms, on which even Leavers agree, rather than the causes.

Some have noted that Brexit as an issue is almost missing from the election; but Brexit at large is hardly absent. Mr Brexit himself, Nigel Farage, is making a political comeback, brazenly blaming the failure of his signature project on the Tories’ unwillingness to use the ‘freedom’ it gave the UK to restrict immigration. Because the Tories are also promoting an anti-immigrant message and the Tory press is amplifying both, Farage’s is widely treated as a legitimate point of view. Yet we should remember where his message led in the last period in which he had major influence, the years leading to 23 June 2016.

2016’s violent atmosphere and its effects

By pivoting directly from Brexit to immigration, Farage is now underlining what much of the British political and media classes have spent 8 years denying - that this is what Brexit was all about. The £350 million for the NHS on the side of the bus was just a clever lie concocted by Dominic Cummings for Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave. The real driver was always the political racism - hostility to East Europeans, Muslims and migrants generally - which Farage had promoted over the previous decade and which Vote Leave and the Tory press, as well as his Leave.EU, orchestrated on a massive scale during the referendum, as I document in Political Racism: Brexit and Its Aftermath (now open-access).

It is now hardly mentioned that the Leave campaign was accompanied by a wave of intimidation and violence (whose only precedent was the response to Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech), and that its racism then set the terms of a fundamental far-right shift in Tory politics - as well as achieving a historic victory for anti-immigration politics by reversing European migration into the UK. Or indeed, that its poison has remained at the heart of British politics, as the Tories have compensated for their lack of social and economic answers by becoming the party of deportation, culminating in their cruel Rwanda scheme.

Few things are more remarkable about British public life today than the erasure of 2016’s atmosphere from the collective memory. The murder of Jo Cox is still commemorated, but it is treated as an isolated event comparable to the 2021 killing of Tory MP David Amess by an extreme Islamist. Yet Cox’s assassination was the nadir of a wave of assaults and abuse against Europeans, Muslims, gays and others, including other killings, which built up in line with the hostility that the Leave campaigns and press orchestrated over two months.

Continuing for weeks after 23 June, this tide of intimidation would surely have led to some kind of British ‘January 6’ if Leave had lost - almost half of Leavers, polling reported, already believed that the vote would be rigged. Tommy Robinson’s supporters would have had become Farage’s and Johnson’s stormtroopers as the Proud Boys were Trump’s; they did in fact mobilise tens of thousands on the streets in 2018-19 to counter the million-strong pro-European demonstrations. Yet because Leave won in 2016, the wave of violence ebbed. Whereas January 6 is now the fundamental benchmark of US politics, June 23 is almost an orphan date, which the left prefers to forget.

Only we cannot. The atmosphere of June-July 2016 migrated into the Tory party, where Theresa May railed against ‘citizens of nowhere’ as she fatefully made stopping freedom of movement the red line for her negotiations with the European Union. May, who was hardly new to political racism - she had overseen the hostile environment for David Cameron - is now rehabilitated as a humane and responsible prime minister in comparison with her successors, while the fiction that but for Johnson the UK could have made an acceptable exit from the EU is widely promoted. The truth, however, is that there was no good Brexit and June 2016 pushed the Tories firmly towards the far right.

Of course, Johnson - who came to power after consulting Steve Bannon and mocking Muslim women as ‘letterboxes’ - accelerated the movement, embracing ‘No Deal’ Brexit, proroguing Parliament and decisively shifting the balance in the party by expelling moderate MPs, so that in 2019 the majority of Tory MPs were ‘original’ Brexiteers. The rise of the UK’s most extreme political elite in living memory can be traced substantially to 2016, even if the roots go back further and there have been many other contributions to the outcome.

Britain has been at the centre of a transnational far-right trend

Few in the British political, media and intellectual elite are dwelling, during the present election, on the far-right character of the experiment that the current election could bring to end. The institutional continuity of this supposedly mainstream, still self-described ‘centre-right’ Conservative party is being given far too much credit, despite the flimsiness of Rishi Sunak’s pretence at bringing it back to sanity while appointing openly far-right figures like Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson. Farage’s and the Tories’ current attacks on each other contrive to make the latter seem the more ‘moderate’ party, but there is little ideological difference between them.

The idea that the Tories are still somehow, in essence if not in appearance, the same party that they were before 23 June 2016 is an expression of a familiar British exceptionalism of which that date ought to have been a definitive refutation. As in the USA, France, Italy, Poland, India and other countries, there is no longer a substantial centre-right alternative to the liberal centre and the left, and we are very probably well past the point at which the Tories can be restored to a such a path in the short term, even in the aftermath of the electoral disaster to which its far-righting has brought it. Its members, remaining voters and (probably) its surviving MPs all skew too far in Farage’s direction for its rump to be rescued. Farage’s likely success in achieving close to, if not more than, the Tories’ own vote will be the dominant spectre as it fights over its future.

In the short term, the reconfigured British right, in whichever form it settles, will be a weak force in parliamentary and electoral terms. It will not be able to claim foul as Trump did, but it it may be revived at the grassroots, where just as Farage is circling the corpse of the Tory party, so extreme-right groups are jumping on the Farage bandwagon. As the right revolts against its loss of power - possibly even suffering the humiliation of seeing the Liberal Democrats become the official opposition despite having received fewer votes than the Tories or Reform - it will express the frustration of a minority who will mistrust the new Labour regime, and it could become dangerous once cracks appear.

Britain’s unspoken new Independence Day

4 July 2024 ought to be a new British Independence Day, when the country throws off the Brexit Tory regime which has damaged it so deeply. Certainly millions of voters see the election in something like that way, and are desperate to vote for whoever they believe can oust the Conservative in their constituency. Yet the Labour leadership’s unwillingness to challenge the Tories for what they are and failure to stake out clear alternatives to many of their policies are likely to mask the significance of the moment. Meanwhile the re-emergence of Farage threatens the return, in the medium term, of the racist, authoritarian spirit that made 23 June 2016 the nadir of twenty-first century history in Britain.