Jewish And Anti-Zionist: These Pro-Palestine Brits Increasingly Face Backlash
LONDON — For someone who once appeared on a U.S. black list, Philippa Winkler seems calm, almost proud.
“Noam Chomsky was on it, too,” she said.
Despite the exalted company she keeps, in the eyes of some, this makes her dangerous. The list she ended up on was the notorious S.H.I.T. List (Self-Hating and/or Israel Threatening), maintained by the pro-Israel group Masada2000.
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Her name appeared on the list because she’s a Jew with anti-Zionist views.
Despite the group’s McCarthyite antics — they published her home address, resulting in death threats — Winkler, who lectures in Middle Eastern politics and runs the Substack newsletter ‘Geopolitics: It’s Not Rocket Science,’ saw it as a badge of honor.
She said she remains an outspoken critic of Israel, a position she has held since childhood.
“The more I read about Israel as a Jewish person, including the foundation of Israel, the more shocked and dismayed I was at the tragedy of the Palestinians, in the name of Jewish people,” she added.
Her stance came at a price. At first, it made relations with her parents difficult.
“We didn’t discuss it around the table. They thought I wasn’t thinking straight. They had grown up in the U.K., but it was during [World War II] and the camps, so they were Zionist to the end,” she says, adding that, “I had to hide a book about Yasser Arafat under my bed.”
The rest of her family in the UK., she said, are more sympathetic.
“My sisters, my nieces and my son are all upset about the current genocide. It’s a lot easier for them to have that view because the terrible crimes in Palestine are too obvious. They’re live-streamed now,” she added.
A recent survey certainly suggests opinions are changing. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, about 28% of U.K. Jews identified as non or anti-Zionist — an increase since 2022, when only 23% of those surveyed used the label. A slight minority (49%) of 16-29 year olds identified as Zionist, and overall, Zionism among British Jews was shown to be in significant decline; those who defined themselves as such had dropped from 72% in 2013 to 63% in 2022.
Meanwhile, high-profile British Jews like film-maker Hugh Brody, the husband of actress Juliet Stevenson, and journalist Hadley Freeman, have voiced criticism of the government’s violent onslaught in Gaza, all while highlighting the importance of their religious and ethnic background to their stance.
Mistrust of Zionism among British Jews is nothing new. Despite the Rothschild family’s support for Israel, Lord Nathan Rothschild stated in 1903 that he thought a Jewish homeland would be “a ghetto within a ghetto.”
Dr Kate Lebow, a historian at the University of Oxford and a member of Na’amod, a group campaigning to end British Jewish support for Israel.
“Zionism was a minority political position until the post-World War II period,” Lebow added “There were strong anti-Zionist currents in the Jewish labor movement, and many religious Jews opposed it on theological grounds. The British Jewish establishment was also sceptical; in the 1930s, for instance, the Board of Deputies was officially non-Zionist.”
She also stressed that “Jews have been disproportionately represented in the U.K. movement for Palestinian rights since its inception.”
A London-based rabbi, who did not want to be identified because he feared for his safety, said he feels disturbed even to be asked for his views on Zionism: “I’m not a Zionist, and neither are the people in my community. Why should we be? It’s a political movement. It’s like saying all Jews should be communists.”
He added, “Judaism is the wellspring of human decency, but Zionism is a 19th-century ideology with no innate connection to Judaism. There’s no deep link between Israel and the Holy Land — Uganda and Madagascar and Cyprus were all possible locations for a Jewish state. And it was mad to think Zionism would end antisemitism. It’s made things worse.”
Despite being forthright, he is wary of being named.
“Most people are kind and respectful about my position, but I’ve also been shouted at and attacked in the street. There are individuals who like to create division,” he added.
Yet “Zionist” has become a term with no fixed definition. Rabbi Lev Taylor of Kingston Liberal Synagogue said his relationship with the word is “complex.”
“I think it means too many different things to too many different people, and defining it one way or the other shuts down conversations,” he said. “I find it's more useful to talk about what we actually want.”
In a grim irony, given the stubborn prevalence of the conspiracy theory that Jews control much of the media, mainstream outlets are often illiterate about the varying rates of belief and practice within Judaism. According to Winkler, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which recently made headlines for suspending five members for their critical statements about Israel, was presented as speaking for all Jews.
“The Board only represents synagogues, and thousands of Jews are not in the synagogues,” she said.
Lev Taylor emphasises that more than half of Britain’s Jews belong to a place of worship, but agrees that the mainstream media often fails to highlight the breadth of thought concerning the war in the Middle East.
“I want to see a shared land where Israelis and Palestinians live in peace, and I want to see a Judaism that is connected to the life of Israelis, but also has its own energy and thrives here in the diaspora, without being dependent upon Israel,” Taylor said. “I’ve written to every broadsheet there is, but I never heard back from any of them. The war in Gaza is against Jewish law, but they want a story that divides up Jews and Muslims in Britain and presents a clean narrative that promotes a particular view.”
According to Kate Lebow, Na’amod reported a surge to 700 members since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but Jews who speak out against what has taken place in Gaza still face threats and intimidation from those inside and outside of their faith.
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network holds a protest every day outside the British Parliament. Their members tell stories of being spat at, insulted by passers-by and harassed by police. When the group protested outside the home of Israel’s ambassador to Britain, they were accused by police of causing “disruption” — yet when counter-protesters showed up, screaming, swearing and playing loud music, IJAN claims the police have looked the other way.
Being a anti-Zionist Jew isn’t easy at all. Retired accountant Alan Lazarus was told by another Jewish friend of his that he was “not a proper Jew” for criticizing the Israeli government. She then blocked him on social media.
For British Jews trying to find a non-Zionist place of worship, it can be particularly tough. A glance at Reddit shows how spiritually homeless many can feel. One woman was even told not to bother converting to Judaism if she couldn’t deal with Zionism.
Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber, who leads the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue, said it’s possible to meet in the middle and be both politically progressive and a Zionist:
“Every human being was created in the divine image. What’s happening in Gaza is completely bereft of Jewish values — but the late Rabbi John Rainer believed in a Jewish state where any gaps in Jewish law from biblical times should be filled by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention,” he said.
His community is rare in that those around him have supported his right to free expression in the pulpit. However, he has faced external complaints made to his employer and death threats aimed at him and his family. As a result, he said, “we’ve installed CCTV in our home. We’ve taken our address off the electoral role and I’m very cautious about posting about my children or their nursery school online.”
Winkler said she feels her sense of humanity comes before the label she was given at birth.
Judaism, she said, is “being used to kill people.”
“I’m very concerned about that,’ she added. “I’m a Jew, but I’m a human being on this planet first.”
Maddy Fry is the editor of the Westminster Abbey Review magazine and the founder of U2 and Us on Substack. She writes about politics, religion and pop culture, with bylines in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Time, The New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She also enjoys drinking stout, listening to U2 and telling you why you are wrong about the “Star Wars” sequels.