Left: Me in a playful mood exploring so-called ‘pride in heritage’; Right: Great-grandfather Rabbi Meir Matras who escaped pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine.

In January 2025 the Runnymede Trust published a short report entitled ‘Facing antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity’, authored by members of the Birkbeck Institute for Antisemitism based at University College London. The report makes a number of critical points about current UK-based campaigns against antisemitism that some will welcome. Others are likely to regard them as seeking to appease left-centre political circles at the expense of standing up for Jewish interests.

Among the highlights of the report is its assertion that antisemitism is ‘hardwired’ into UK society and that it is structural and institutional. This is a bold claim that will without a doubt meet with scepticism among many left-wing activists who regard Jews as a minority that is privileged and that benefits from sustained safety, security and socio-economic prosperity.

The report also maintains that equating antizionism (which it consistently spells ‘Anti-Zionism’, implying opposition to a real-life, overtly formulated Zionist ideology) with antisemitism prevents effective action against antisemitism. That is likely to infuriate many campaigners against antisemitism who regard antizionism (which they usually spell without a hyphen, implying a metaphysical stance that is more often than not disconnected from the reality of the actions and beliefs of self-ascribing Zionists) as the principal manifestation of contemporary antisemitism.

The authors call to integrate and embed the struggle against antisemitism into wider, cross-sector campaigns against racism, decrying a tendency to play communities against one another. This is likely to agitate those who regard their struggle against racism as an important building block of their own identity and who therefore wish to maintain ownership of their campaigns. At the same time, the blanket approach to racism will make some people wary that key issues might be glossed over, much like the call “all lives matter” has been used to relativise and even belittle a community’s existential concerns.

These questions – the persistence of antisemitism, including in self-declared left-wing progressive circles, its relationship to Zionism, and the question of a joint struggle against racism – have been pre-occupying me for many years. It is for that reason that I have decided to share my thoughts about the Runnymede report. I write not as a scholar of antisemitism but as an activist who has campaigned for many years against forms of racism in Israel, Germany and the UK and who has written about antisemitism, romaphobia (antigypsyism) and the racism that is directed against immigrants in Western Europe. I also write as someone who has spent an academic career linking linguistics with human rights, working closely with minority communities including Roma and migrants from the Middle East and West Asia. In my latest book ‘Speech and the city: Multilingualism, decoloniality and the civic university’ I discuss UK society’s linguaphobia, how multilingualism has been cast as “deficient citizenship”, how parts of the academic establishment post-Brexit tried to embrace the new Rule Britannia agenda in a bid to safeguard their own departments, and how the proclaimed “civic university” is a mirage as UK higher education remains infested with xenophobia and antisemitism.

In October 2023 I joined the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) as Associate Fellow. In my public statement explaining my reasons to join I mentioned my commitment to addressing antisemitism in the context of other forms of racism such as Romaphobia and Islamophobia. I wrote that I was agnostic of Zionism, meaning that I do not feel a need to position myself in regard to the historical processes that led to the creation of an Israeli-Jewish society. Instead, I believe our conversations should focus on practical steps towards forging a lasting partnership between Israelis and Palestinians based on equality, pluralism, personal freedoms and communal self-determination, and on correcting historical injustices without inflicting new ones.

In that spirit, I identify with a number of points made by the Runneymede Trust report. First, I agree that antisemitism is a problem in UK society and that its denial in left-wing circles poses a particular challenge. I agree that there is often overlap between antizionism and antisemitism that needs to be called out consistently, diligently and forensically while avoiding a wholesale conflation of the two. Based on my personal experience of antisemitism in the UK, I identify with the report’s concept of a “cultural reservoir of antisemitic prejudice” that surfaces across sectors of British society.

On other issues I take a more critical view of the report. One is the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. Definitions are imperfect but they can help raise awareness. The IHRA definition has served that purpose, and the subsequent critique that was directed at its weaknesses and the emergence of alternative definitions such as the JDA have, in my opinion, made a positive contribution to sharpening the discussion. Notwithstanding the status that the IHRA definition has gained among government agencies internationally, I remain unconvinced by the report’s claim that there is a clear and intentional construction of a hierarchy of racism with antisemitism being given privileged attention. There is a risk that that very argument can be mobilised against the effort to confront antisemitism. At the same time, I see a benefit in forging partnerships with other communities to combat forms of racism that they experience under a shared universal understanding of human rights and dignity, without the need to assimilate definitions or commemoration practices into a single template.

There is no doubt that the question of antisemitism has surfaced in the UK over the past year with particular vigour in connection with the war in Gaza. The report authors are right to draw attention to this connection, but I find the manner in which they draw conclusions towards the end of the text rather inept or even disingenuous. One cannot admit that the Gaza war has been a major cause of tension and then demand from Jewish circles to embed into their campaign against antisemitism an expression of concern for Palestinian rights without simultaneously denouncing the fact that on the opposite end the campaign against Israel’s war in Gaza has miserably failed to denounce antisemitism within its own ranks. The authors choose to end their report on that note, and their failure to show sensitivity towards Jewish fears and concerns in regard to the current pro-Palestine campaign is likely to distract from the many constructive points that they make in the body of the text.

Read my full comment on the Runnymede Trust report on antisemitism here.

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