The right to protest against Zionism and the Israeli state
Neve Gordon writes in the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice website on 16 September 2026:
One of the features of the criminalisation of pro-Palestinian protestors and activists (see the CCCCJ report Britain’s Political Prisoners) has been accusations that criticism of the Israeli state itself is antisemitic. Different pro-Israel lobbying groups have been falsely conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism as they promote the criminalisation of protestors.
In response, Adam Sutcliffe, a professor of European History at King’s College London, Antony Lerman, an Honorary Fellow at Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish-Non-Jewish Relations, Southampton University and I drafted an expert opinion that considers ‘anti-Zionism’, both as a political perspective and as a term used in public discourse, with respect to its place in recent and current pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other forms of activism in the United Kingdom.
The expert opinion focuses on the issue of whether anti-Zionism should be considered as tendentially or intrinsically antisemitic, or otherwise hurtful or disrespectful to Jews. We note, for example, how anti-Zionists often describe Israel as a ‘racist endeavour’ and how according to one illustrative example provided by the IHRA definition of antisemitism such categorisation of Israel is antisemitic. We maintain, however, that whether or not the legal and material privileges accorded to Jews in Israel, and not to Palestinians, make contemporary Israel ‘a racist endeavour’ is most fundamentally an empirical question: such allegations cannot be considered as antisemitic if they are plausibly true. Human rights organisations from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to B’Tselem and Al Haq regard Israeli policies towards Palestinians as apartheid, underscoring that many critiques of Israel as ‘a racist endeavour’ may indeed be plausibly true, and that allegations that they are antisemitic are therefore spurious.