28 March 2025

David Miller has gone from Asset to Liability for the Palestine Solidarity Movement

Targeting Jews and Jewish anti-Zionists is explained by Miller’s Failure to Understand Why Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide in Gaza – As Such It is Anti-Semitic





The Virulent neo-Nazi Stew Peters Show & His $6 Million Reward for Proving the Holocaust Happened  

I didn’t want to have to write this blog. There are far more important topics such as Genocide in Gaza. However Miller’s recent social media postings are becoming ever more bizarre and crossing the line into anti-Semitism. Miller has abandoned anti-Zionism.

His behaviour is not only strange it is also stupid. If 'antisemitism' is the ritual accusation of the Zionists why try to prove them correct by attacking Jews as Jews? It seems that Miller believes that it is Western Jews who are responsible for the hideous monstrosity that is the Israeli state. This is the Zionist narrative. 

Jews in the West are the moral alibi for imperialism. Does anyone seriously think that Trump is seriously concerned about Jews or anti-Semitism?  His ‘concern’ over the ‘plight’ of Jewish students is grotesque in the extreme given his own racism and hostility to Black Lives Matter and anti-racism, with his portrayal of migrants as rapists and criminals.

Trump has given overt support to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, describing them as ‘very fine people’ and to the Proud Boys and other White Supremacist militias. Miller understands none of this.

When Biden said that if Israel didn't exist it would have had to be created he was expressing the views of mainstream imperialist thought in the US.  According to Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and cheap at the price in an area of immense strategic and economic interest. Jews in the words of Barnaby Raine are merely the West's colonial pets.

I was reluctant to break from Miller because of what had happened at Bristol University where he was fired in a McCarthyist witchhunt. I was elated at his victory in the Employment Tribunal and I hope he wins at the EAT.  Initially I pushed back against the criticism of him by JVL and Na'amod, I cannot do so now because David has made it clear that he is going down an anti-Semitic pathway.

In holding Jews responsible for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, Miller lets imperialism off the hook. The genocide could be halted tomorrow if Trump, or Biden had stopped the flow of arms. It could have been halted if the Arab states had stopped the flow of oil. The fact that that miserable humanoid Starmer, has uttered not one word of criticism speaks volumes.

In a tweet of 24 March Miller said

Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let's be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.

Zionism is the worst catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people next to the Holocaust itself. It is an abomination. It has destroyed Judaism’s moral and ethical traditions.

Isaiah’s injunction to

‘learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause’

has been replaced by Israel’s determination to turn Gaza into a land of orphans. We have a new acronym WCNSF (Wounded child, no surviving family).

The injunction in Exodus ‘not (to) oppress a stranger... having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” has been replaced by Death to the Arabs.

I am all in favour of destroying Zionism politically and organisationally but targeting individual Zionists is not the way to do it.

Miller is arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. How will that stop the genocide? Israel isn’t even concerned about killing its own hostages. Why should it be concerned about Miller’s fans tracking down individual Zionists? He says ‘there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.’ And then what?

Leaving aside his paranoia, are individual Zionists in Britain, many of whom are Jewish, really responsible for what Israel does?  Is that how imperialism operates?

But if like Miller you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected system of war and political domination motivated by economic exploitation, then it is far easier to focus on individual Zionists. In so doing you let off the hook US imperialism and the complicity of Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s MBS.

Because Miller fails to understand why Western capitalism supports Israel, he believes that it is all due to ‘infiltration’ of government bodies. Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists this will inevitably be portrayed as Jew hunting. Is that what Palestine solidarity is about? 

Miller’s call for targeting individual Zionists lays him open to Police attacks. Of course the hysterical reaction of the Zionists is hypocritical. For years now Zionist organisations like the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and UK Lawyers for Israel have gaslighted and doxxed anti-Zionists and Palestinians like Miller himself and Shahd Abusalama.

Of course if the Police were to act as the Board of Deputies enforcers then of course we would defend Miller despite his stupidity.

I am currently being prosecuted for support for the Palestinian Resistance. I was targeted by Heidi Bachram, who follows in a long tradition of Zionist informers who in countries under Nazi occupation betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.

Heidi Bachram would have been in her element feeding the Stasi or the Gestapo with 'useful information' on their enemies

Scottish PSC has tried to arrange a debate between Miller and myself without success. Miller has shied away from debating his ideas. David knows that what he is saying is indefensible.

The idea that the West supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s cabinet all infiltrators?  Is Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State a Zionist infiltrator?

Does the German state support Israel and attack Palestine solidarity demonstrations because of Jews?  Why does the AfD, which is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers, love Israel so much?

Far-right and neo-Nazi groups are happy to support Zionism and Israel, not because they love Jews but because they hate Muslims and love imperialism. In appearing on anti-Semitic and White Supremacist platforms like Stew Peters he is mixing in some very unsavoury company. Miller seems to have no sense of self-awareness.

A Reply to Some of David Miller’s Comments

In his first controversial tweet Miller made 3 points:

Jewish Power and Discrimination Against Jews

1.          Jews are not discriminated against.

2.          They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.

3.          They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.

In reaction to criticism of this tweet I defended it although I had grave misgivings, in particular about the third point.

Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain. Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism with all its power dynamics. I was saying this long before Miller, as was Norman Finkelstein and others. I could even go along with his observations on Jewish 'overrepresentation' in positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is true.

However where I parted company was Miller's third point that this enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed. If Jews in powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the group or organisations they are part of, not as Jews. In private communication with Miller I made my position clear


In this long rambling tweet Miller declared that ‘the State of Israel is at war with you’. That when activists or Muslims are arrested by 'counter-terror' police, “that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel”

Miller is arguing that Islamaphobia in the West is a product of Zionism and Israel. “the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy.” How they managed to achieve this is not explained. To call this conspiratorial is an understatement.

At a stroke Miller erases the racism that results from colonialism and imperialism. Trump’s Muslim ban was a consequence of the Israeli state not racism in America.  What of the racism against Hispanics in the United States? Did Trump labelling all Mexicans as rapists arise from the soldiers of Zion? Are the deportations to Latin America all Israel’s fault?  Apparently so.


It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiratorial fantasy degenerates into anti-Semitism. When I was young British fascists condemned Israel. Not because of what it did to Palestinians but because in their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted nothing to do with them but Miller with his appearance on the Stew Peters Show and other tweets seems to be embracing them.

Racism in the West is not the product of support for Israel and its soldiers of Zion. It is home grown.  Of course today Islamaphobia in the West is goes hand in hand with support for Israel, which is seen as an anti-Islamic state. But that is a very different thing. Miller says

‘Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, ... Wilders can be said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets.’

This is completely unsupported by anything in the way of evidence. Geert Wilders is the product of racism in The Netherlands. He is a home-grown fascist. His support for Zionism and Israel flows from that. In his own words

If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.

Miller therefore exonerates the British and other states of racism by saying that their racism is not the product of their own class societies but solely that of Israel.  


Miller talks about ‘the global struggle against Jewish supremacism’. In this phrase Miller conflates all Jewish people with the Israeli state like the Zionists. That Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state is a fact which Israel’s human rights group Bt’selem testifies to. Again it is difficult not to take this as a call to oppose Jews everywhere and to brand them all as Jewish Supremacists.

Even accepting that two-thirds of diaspora Jews support Israel and Zionism, for a whole number of historical reasons, I doubt if any but a fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as some form of refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course a minority are overt racists and Jewish supremacists but even they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they live in.

Despite his academic status Miller’s language is sloppy, vague and open to misinterpretation. It is not helped by the fact that instead of putting his ideas down on paper he tweets out his latest undigested ideas and thoughts.

Miller confirms that he is no anti-imperialist or socialist when he says that the British and US states don’t do what they do because of imperialism and their need to subjugate, exploit and conquer, but because of infiltration. He even says that

there's no such thing as 'foreign' policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by participating so directly in this genocide,... The British people will have to repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised,

In other words he is arguing that the support of the British state for Israel is on account of a handful of Zionist fanatics. Without them the state would be quite a benign institution. It wouldn’t be imperialist or racist, cut disability benefits or privatise the NHS. Instead

A de-Zionised Britain could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client relationship with the US.

This is utter garbage and has nothing to do with a principled opposition to imperialism, let alone Zionism. It ignores the economic imperative behind imperialism. Anyone who thinks Miller is on the left is wrong. I responded to this here and JVL republished it as Looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

The global Left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics  

In another conspiratorial tweet we are told that the ‘global left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics.’ For someone who is a Professor Miller is remarkably imprecise in his language. Who is this global left? One of the problems with the left is that it isn’t united but in Miller’s fevered imagination it is homogenous!

The left is divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the unaligned. There is little agreement between them. But in Miller’s fantasies we are all infiltrated.

Miller doesn’t realise that attitudes on the Left towards Israel have changed. In the wake of the Nazi holocaust most people on the left saw the establishment of the Israeli state as some form of recompense. They were wrong not to see that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state could not help but become an echo of everything they had escaped from. I summed this up when I said that ‘Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring’.

The Labour left around Tribune saw Zionism and Israel as progressive. The Labour Party saw settler colonialism as a positive thing and the natives were invisible. This was why people like Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation supported the Boers in the Second Boer War.

Much of the Trotskyist movement adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba seeing the 1948 war as one between British imperialism and its Arab allies and Israel. The Communist Party, after Stalin’s about turn in 1947 supported UN resolution 181 partitioning Palestine and with it the creation of the Israeli state.

However times have changed and the key point was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. The scales fell from their eyes. In 1948 most people knew nothing of the Nakba. What they saw were those who had survived Hitler’s genocide struggling again to survive. They were wrong. As we now know Zionism had much in common with the Nazis ideologically and had collaborated with them, as my book Zionism During the Holocaust explains. Israel’s fledgling army had been trained by the British and easily saw off the ramshackle Arab armies with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha.

With the rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles, the revolution in Cuba and opposition to the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa, the left moved into the Palestinian  camp internationally. Israel was seen as an arm of US imperialism.

In the Labour Party it was the right-wing which had historically been pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian.  People like Christopher Mayhew, David Watkins and Andrew Faulds. After 1982 the Right began to realign and Tony Blair made support for Zionism virtually a condition of New Labour.

So Miller is wrong on this point. The global left is less occupied by Zionists than it ever has been. He says that ‘'Pro-Palestinian' is a meaningless term’.  Perhaps to David but not to Palestinians.

Miller says that ‘A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion when confronted by possible agents of Empire.’ Really?  A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is support for the oppressed against the oppressor. We are told that:

leftists around the world are constantly deferring to Jewish 'allies' for analysis on Zionism... Not only do these leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism, they actively solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist crimes.

It is impossible to interpret this as anything other than anti-Semitic and a symptom of Miller’s hostility to the left. Jews supporting the Palestinians should be treated with suspicion. Miller fails to acknowledge that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism in the same way as Jewish communists and the Bund opposed Zionism in their time.

Jews are part of the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course Jews, including Israeli Jews, might have a special understanding of Zionism having gone through a process of deprogramming but that isn’t because they are Jewish. It is a recognition that anti-Zionist Jews have a special expertise.

We only have to think of people like Moshe Machover, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Haim Bresheeth – even myself! It was the Israeli group Matzpen which was first began calling Israel a settler colonial state.

Jewish activists have been to the fore in occupying Congress. Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace have been organising thousands of its supporters David Miller has been waging war against Jewish ‘infiltrators’ on Twitter.

This kind of attack, which can only turn the solidarity movement against itself is divisive and destructive. Miller is effectively doing the Zionists’ work.

American Jews are divided as never before, especially young Jews. Jewish students have been an integral part of the campus protests in the United States and Britain. Jonathan Ben-Menachem was one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel. In an interview he described his

amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a central role in them.’

There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism,... It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.

Sarah, also a Jewish student at Columbia, was arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.

“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”

Sarah had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been

weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism.

Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, asked:

Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties?  I don’t feel safer,” she said.

According to Miller all of those quoted above are Jewish infiltrators whom non-Jewish Palestine solidarity protesters are deferring to. Whereas to the press and politicians like Starmer and Braverman anti-Zionist Jews are invisible.


What really made me sit up and take note of Miller’s direction of travel was his retweeting of an article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly ‘On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain’.

Mankind Quarterly isn’t some obscure academic journal. It was was established in 1960 with funding from White segregationists opposed to civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist journal’ and ‘a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality.’

When I first saw the tweet I immediately saw that it smacked of the racial sciences:

Are Jews so (relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and influence of Zionism and the production of genocide in Palestine and Islamophobia in the West?

Miller saw a connection between ‘Jewish intelligence’ and Zionism. I explained in my response that Zionism was the idea of British imperialism and its Christian Zionist advocates not Jews.

A lead article in The Times of 17 August 1840, called for a plan 'to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers' claiming that it was under 'serious political consideration' and commending the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. When Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about co-operation in Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones who didn’t want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on 7 November 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it

'is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria’.



In his latest tweet Miller simply digs himself further into a hole. We are told that ‘there are no 'Israeli' anti-Zionists’. Presumably my comrades Ronnie Barkan and Stav, who are currently facing trial for participating in a Palestine Action outing and who are already on suspended sentences don’t exist?  Both of them are Israeli.

Miller also doubts that there are ‘more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere, particularly if we assess anti-Zionism on a *material* basis.’ What is this material basis?  Apparently we must first become martyrs! I wonder if this applies to non-Jews and if not why not?

Apparently I was one of the few Jewish anti-Zionists he conceded did exist but I suspect that after this article I will also be relegated!

Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole but a Zionist one too. Zionists claim that all Jews, bar a handful of ‘self-haters’ are Zionists. Anti-Semites too are happy to see Jews as Zionists with anti-Zionist Jews rendered invisible.

It is extremely sad and regrettable that Miller is unable to see that Zionism was the adopted policy of British and then US imperialism well before Jews. Jews provided the imperialists with legitimacy. Winkling out Zionists is not a strategy.

Tony Greenstein

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24 March 2025

RIP Marika Sherwood, a Survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust, an Anti-Racist Campaigner All Her Life

In 2017 Manchester University Forced Her to Change the Title of a Talk ‘You're doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me’ after Israel’s Ambassador Mark Regev Lobbied Them

Manchester University thought it a good idea to frame the Palestinian experience of apartheid and genocide as a religious one

Born in Budapest, Marika Sherwood (8 November 1937 – 16 February 2025) was the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish parents, Laszlo (Laci) Fenyő and Magda. Laci survived Hungary’s Jewish Labour Service, but many relatives died in the Holocaust. Magda secured false Christian identity papers for her and Marika, and they survived the Nazi occupation, reuniting with Laci after the war.

Marika survived the Budapest Ghetto that was established under the fascist Arrow Cross government that the Nazis installed in October 1944. Marika, who remembered having to wear a Yellow Star and witnessing many atrocities, later spoke of the impact of these wartime experiences in shaping her very public support of the Palestinian cause.

Marika Sherwood emigrated with her family to Australia in 1948 and then to Britain in 1965. As a teacher in London she witnessed the discrimination that Black students experienced and the absence of Black history from the curriculum.

Marika was shocked by the racism many of her pupils experienced. It was this that led to her becoming interested in learning about their Caribbean heritage.

This led to Marika becoming a pioneer in the field of Black and Caribbean history and the co-founder of the Black & Asian Studies Association with Hakim Adi, Britain’s first Black Professor of History.

Her writings include After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams and Africa and the African Diaspora. 

Marika published 13 books about slavery, colonialism and the history of African and Caribbean people Britain in a long and distinguished career as a teacher, writer, and social campaigner. She was at the forefront of attempts to diversify the curriculum across schools and higher education.

With her BASA colleagues, Marika designed and wrote a GCSE module and textbook on migration to Britain (2016). In 1990 Marika was appointed a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and began organising history seminars there. Marika’s extensive publications are listed on the ICWS Research website.

Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-45),  published in 1985 was one of the first publications to highlight “the racism meted out to Black people by the British state” during the second world war, and to demonstrate that those from the Caribbean were an integral part of the war effort. Over the next 40 years she would produce more than 20 books and almost 100 articles.

Her books covered a vast variety of topics. In After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, she reminded people, during the bicentennial commemoration of the Abolition Act, that Britain’s involvement in human trafficking continued long after 1807.

In much of her work she provided in-depth histories centred on key figures and organisations in Britain, including Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935-1947; Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile; Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora; Malcolm X: Visits Abroad and Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: The West African National Secretariat 1945-48.

In October 2022 Marika was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of History at the University of Chichester.  When receiving the award she said:

I am honoured to accept this award and am extremely grateful to Professor Adi. I hope that I can inspire more students to research areas that universities have not been not looking at – the working classes, colonialisation, and the history of black people in the UK, which largely remains unexplored.

Prof Adi , whose latest book is African and Caribbean People in Britain, said:

I am delighted to present Marika with an honorary doctorate for her contributions to history. We first met in 1987 when I was a PhD student and she came to a seminar at which I was speaking. We have been friends and colleagues since, working and writing together as well as jointly launching BASA. This award is greatly deserved and long overdue.

In 2010, Marika was invited to contribute to the Kwame Nkrumah Centenary Colloquium in Accra. She wrote nine entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on the following: Dusé Mohamed, a journalist and playwright; Peter McFarren Blackman, a political activist; Robert Broadhurst, a pan-African nationalist leader; William Davidson, George Daniel Ekarte, minister and community worker; Nathaniel Akinremi Fadipe writer and anti-colonialist; Claudia Jones, communist and journalist; Ras Tomasa Makonnen, political activist and Henry Sylvester Williams pan-Africanist.



Manchester University Censored Marika Sherwood’s Talk

In March 2017 Marika was invited by students at Manchester University to give a talk, as part of Israel Apartheid Week. Marika chose the title, “A Holocaust survivor’s story and the Balfour declaration: You’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me.” In the light of Gaza it is prescient.

The Zionist lobby and Israeli politicians don’t like to be reminded that their chants of Death to the Arabs, their apartheid policies and talk of extermination mirror what the Nazis did to the Jews. For them the Holocaust is sui generis.

The Jewish News reported that Manchester University had

censored the title of a talk in March by Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood, ....

The subhead of the title was dropped and the university said it would record the speech after a visit to the university by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, and his civil affairs attaché, Michael Freeman.

Following his visit, Freeman sent an email to Manchester University’s head of student experience, Tim Westlake, which thanked him for discussing the “difficult issues that we face”.

Freeman also said in the email that the title of Sherwood’s talk violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and criticised another speaker as anti-Semitic.

Both of these events will to [sic] cause Jewish students to feel uncomfortable on campus and that they are being targeted and harassed for their identity as a people and connection to the Jewish state of Israel. I would be grateful if you could look into these events and take the appropriate action,” Freeman wrote to Westlake.

This idea that anti-Zionist critiques of Israel, because it challenges some Jewish students identification with Israel, is a form  of harassment is profoundly undemocratic and a recipe for the abolition of free speech. Would British universities have prevented anti-Nazi meetings on campuses in the 30s for fear that German students would feel uncomfortable?  Would they have banned anti-Apartheid meetings in the 70s and 80s because White students from South Africa would object?

The email also said:

We welcome debate and discussion and see it as an essential part of a healthy democracy and open society. In the case of these two particular events, we feel that this is not legitimate criticism but has rather crossed the line into hate speech.

What we had is racists deciding what is and is not legitimate and Manchester University going along with them in this.

The Guardian got access to the email after the Information Commissioner’s Office told the University to disclose “all correspondence between the University of Manchester and the Israeli lobby” between February 1 and March 3.

Marika Sherwood said that:

I was just speaking of my experience of what the Nazis were doing to me as a Jewish child. I had to move away from where I was living, because Jews couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go to school. I would have died were it not for the Christians who baptised us and shared papers with us to save us

Sherwood told The Guardian. “I can’t say I’m a Palestinian, but my experiences as a child are not dissimilar to what Palestinian children are experiencing now.”

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy was quoted in Ha’aretz as saying:

Comparing Israel to the Nazi regime could reasonably be considered anti-Semitic, given the context, according to the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's] working definition of antisemitism, which is accepted by the British government, the Labour Party, the NUS [National Union of Students] and most British universities.

In other words the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism directly led to the censorship of Marika’s talk.

Manchester University said a free speech code applied to all campus events involving outside speakers and ‘controversial topics’ and that the university also consulted “relevant laws, including the Equality Act 2010,” in setting the guidelines for the event.

This is just verbal flatulence. The Equality Act has nothing to say about freedom of speech nor Jewish identity come to that.

On January 13 I was part of a delegation which met Manchester University’s Vice Chancellor Duncan Iveson and its Vice-President for Social Responsibility, Prof. NalinThakkar. Representatives also came from UK Jewish Academic Network, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) Greater Manchester, Jewish Action for Palestine Manchester, Na’amod NorthWest and Manchester Jewish Students’ Kehillah. I represented Jewish Network for Palestine.

The delegation arose out of a ‘debate’ held as part of the Whitworth debate series on October 31 2024. The title of this debate  was “Is antizionism antisemitism?”.

In an Open Letter to Iveson the 6 Jewish organisations wrote on 27 November that:

Not only is this question absurd to any serious historian of zionism, but the presentation of the debate framed as one to be argued on a religious basis - that is, as a dispute between Muslims and Jews - could do nothing other than result in an event of intellectual vacuity, while – as some wrote to the organisers asking them to change this framing - needlessly inflaming intercommunal tensions and exacerbating both islamophobia and antisemitism. This is indeed what happened on October 31st, just as many had warned the organisers.  

The letter went on to say that:

it seems extraordinary to us that an event billed as relevant to the current horror in Gaza, which a large number of the world’s most respected institutions are now referring to as a genocide, should have included no academic specialist in either Palestinian or Jewish history. Indeed we can only sympathise with the enraged despair of the brave young Palestinian woman who shouted out during the debate to ask why, while her people were being massacred by zionists, there was not even a Palestinian voice on the stage. She was forcibly dragged out of the hall by burly university security men, but her quintessential question still reverberates unanswerably around the world. The root cause of the century old conflict is the struggle for self-determination of the Palestinian people in the face of a settler colonial enterprise in which the UK has played a significant role. Attempts to portray this instead as a religious war are ahistorical, inflammatory and deeply divisive.

This resulted in our meeting. However it was clear that nothing that we had said about alternative Jewish voices to Zionism and support for Israel was being taken seriously. Manchester University, like most academic institutions, is too much a part of the British state to ever break free of the imperialist paradigm.

That is most evident in its support for the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which is not about anti-Semitism but the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote that the IHRA

fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred’ invites a string of questions. Is anti-Semitism solely a matter of perception? What about discriminatory practices and policies? What about perceptions of Jews that are expressed otherwise than as hatred?

There are many similar critiques of the IHRA including legal opinions from Hugh Tomlinson KC who warned that it had

a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment.

Which is exactly what happened at Manchester University. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson KC wrote that:

There is one aspect which I find remarkable, ... Despite its imprecision, it [the IHRA] does pivot upon manifestations of “hatred towards Jews.” As I point out in paragraph 2 above, “hatred” is a very strong word. It is the emotion that can be deduced in those who daub abhorrent slogans on tombstones and Synagogues, but it falls short of capturing those who express only hostility or prejudice, or who practice discrimination... This consideration, above all others, convinces me that the definition is not fit for purpose, or any purpose that relies upon it to identify anti-Semitism accurately.

There are also Zionists such as Professor Geoffrey Alderman who are highly critical of what he called ‘a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’. David Feldman, Director of Birkbeck's Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism asked

So does the IHRA definition that Britain has adopted provide the answer [to the problem of anti-Semitism]? I am sceptical. Here is the definition’s key passage: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is bewilderingly imprecise.

The text also carries dangers. It trails a list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.

Kenneth Stern

And what of Kenneth Stern, the American academic who was the principal drafter of the IHRA. In an article I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it Stern wrote that: 

Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism”. It was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.

It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.

Yet that is what the IHRA has become.  A hate speech code.

On 29 January 2025, Trump issued an Executive Order (the Antisemitism EO) entitled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” This built on an order that Trump signed during his first term—EO 13899—that required federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism and its accompanying examples when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI).

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance

Trump’s EO states that it is intended to address the “barrage of discrimination” that Jewish students have faced “in our schools and on our campuses” since October 7, 2023, such as

“denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault.”

The  obvious question to ask is why Trump, a racist extraordinaire, who spoke of neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as ‘some very fine people’ and who has targeted migrants of colour as rapists and criminals, whilst offering asylum to White Afrikaaners is concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’? It is proof  positive that the ‘anti-Semitism’ he is concerned with is nothing more than anti-Palestinian racism.

Leaving aside the litany of lies about Jewish students being denied access to campus facilities etc. when it is common knowledge that it is pro-Palestinian protesters who have been harassed, beaten and attacked, what does this say about the IHRA that an open racist and bigot endorses it?

We only have to turn to Ken Stern’s testimony to Congress of November 7, 2017.  Referring to the use of the IHRA in Britain Stern wrote:

The EUMC’s “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom and applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor [Marika Sherwood] was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition.

Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group [Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s] citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’

I mention this because Professor Nalin Thakkar sent an email to the 6 Jewish representatives that he met in January defending Manchester University’s continued use of the IHRA. Thakkar wrote:

In line with the majority (100) of UK higher education institutions (along with UK national government, devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, many local authorities including GMCA, College of Policing), and UK government policy ... the University adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in June 2020.

 The University adopted the definition as guidance, which I have attached, and has due regard to the definition when interpreting and understanding antisemitism if and when raised in the University context….   

our approach to the IHRA definition does not affect the application of equality law and the rights it affords to members of our community, or our commitment to provide an environment free from harassment and discrimination.   

It also does not affect our legal obligations and the legal rights of our staff and students in relation to freedom of speech and expression, including to discuss and question difficult and sensitive topics, views and opinions, provided that is done responsibly, with respect for others, and within the law.

Thakkar seems to be saying that because most universities had caved in, under threat of defunding by former Education Secretary and toilet salesman, Gavin Williamson, Manchester University should do likewise. This is institutional cowardice.

I have responded with a letter (copied below) on behalf of Jewish Network for Palestine.  It is plain as a pikestaff that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being weaponised to defend Israel and its imperialist backers. No one seriously thinks that a racist like Trump is losing sleep over the ‘suffering’ of Jewish students.

The real question is why Manchester University is not willing to ditch a ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ that is deeply racist by defining Palestinian’s experience of racism as a form of anti-Semitism and thus making them invisible. In the IHRA’s eyes to call Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians racist is to be anti-Semitic. Yet there are a thousand reasons why Israel is racist. It is time that Manchester University and other academic institutions stopped  dissembling.

That the IHRA was used to prevent a holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood from explaining why her treatment by the Nazis was similar to that of Palestinians by the Israelis is reason enough to get rid of it.

Tony Greenstein

See also

In Memoriam: Marika Sherwood

Marika Sherwood obituary - Guardian

Marika Sherwood - Wikipedia

UK university censors title of Holocaust survivor's speech criticising Israel – Guardian Education



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