How anti-Palestinian racism drives Britain’s two-tier policing
A protester in a wheelchair is escorted away by police officers after taking part in a demonstration in support of Defend Our Juries and their campaign against the ban on Palestine Action, in Leeds on 18 November 2025
Jeanine Hourani writes in The New Arab on 6 August 2026:
Over the past three years, the British public has made it abundantly clear that it stands firmly and unapologetically with the Palestinian people. Yet this overwhelming public support has found little expression in the institutions that claim to represent its people. In fact, there is a structural asymmetry whereby the Palestine movement is continuously attacked and repressed by the state while Israeli war crimes are swept under the rug.
This asymmetry is not a question of inconsistent policing or legal double standards; it reflects a broader political order in which settler colonial violence is enabled and normalised while resistance to that violence is criminalised.
Who do you serve, who do you protect?
The normalisation of settler colonial violence relies on an ideological framework that has, for decades, reproduced anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia whereby Palestinians are routinely denied political agency and those who stand alongside them are cast as uniquely suspect, irrational, or threatening. This has created a public narrative that enables the criminalisation of solidarity, the justification of exceptional measures, the legitimisation of baseless accusations, and the manufacturing of public consent for repression while sanitising imperialist wars abroad.
Consequently, an entire political culture has developed that enables the mobilisation of extraordinary public resources to surveil and suppress our movement, while enabling those who have actively participated in the genocide of Palestinians. This reveals whose interests the institutions of the British state ultimately seek to protect, namely those of a domestic capitalist class and a foreign genocidal entity.