Britain's censorship of Palestine is doomed to fail

A few weeks ago, the director of the British Palestinian Committee Sara Husseini spoke of the anxiety suffered by British Palestinians after nearly three years of censorship, cancellation and denial of their experience since the Gaza genocide began in October 2023.

It's not just Palestinians who feel traumatised. Many Jews also feel gaslit by the absence of an honest conversation around Israel and Palestine, past and present.

Anti-Zionist Jewish voices - like mine - are rarely heard on mainstream media. When one of our number, such as Zack Polanski, becomes too significant to ignore, efforts are made to smear him despite his own Jewish identity. I was horrified to see Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips dismiss Polanski's reminder that he and many others with pro-Palestinian views were Jewish. "No, don't try that one on me," chided Phillips.

The clip of Phillips invalidating Polanski's Judaism was sent to me by a Muslim friend who observed, "The progressive Jew is the most terrifying figure to the Zionist establishment. That's why they keep trying to pretend you don't exist."

This landscape of dishonesty has alarming implications. As the rise in both anti-semitic and Islamophobic attacks shows, the delusion that Israel is a viable nation-state rather than a settler colonial entity is putting our communities in danger.

The risk extends to all who are committed to truth and justice. Consider the treatment of Misan Harriman. The renowned photographer and chair of the Southbank Centre, Harriman, called out the media and the Metropolitan police for failing to report that the assailant responsible for attacking two Jewish men in Golders Green had previously stabbed a Muslim man.

Harriman's post provoked fury. As well as a skein of vituperative articles, MPs called for his removal from the Southbank. The persecution of Harriman, who is Black, is a symptom of the racism that pulses in right-wing British culture. As the Israeli flags waving on last month’s far-right demonstration in London showed, malignance is now entwined with the pro-Zionist virus.

Silencing solidarity

Earlier this year, a new index by the investigative agency Forensic Architecture and the European Legal Support Centre documented 900 instances of pro-Palestinian repression over the last six years. The censors included police, educational institutions, pro-Israeli advocacy groups and journalists. Damage included doxing, job losses, financial blacklisting, visa cancellations and reputational smears.

In a telling example of how deep this poison has dripped into British life, the British Museum recently removed the name Palestine from certain panels relating to the ancient history of the region despite an outcry from expert scholars.

Britain was once a country which prided itself on free speech. But its failure to recognise the truth of Palestine's past and present has tarnished that reputation. In their annual 2026 report, censorship tracker Freemuse dedicated a section to the cancellation of Palestinian expression in UK cultural institutions.

Museums, festivals and music venues, say Freemuse, have fallen prey to a "quiet contraction of space" where self-censorship has become commonplace just as it is in overt regimes such as Iran and the UAE.

In all my years working as a cultural journalist, I've never seen the UK critiqued in this way. Before the Gaza genocide, organisations such as Freemuse would focus chiefly on autocracies such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, the pro-Zionist cancel culture is doomed to fail. The violent reality of Israel's foundation as a settler colonial state is easily proved. Meticulous chronicles by historians such as the Palestinian American Rashid Khalidi and the Israeli Jew Ilan Pappé are readily available.

A plethora of reliable English-language news outlets, including The New Arab, as well as granular reporting by Al Jazeera on the Gaza genocide and settler evictions in the West Bank, make it impossible for Israel's political and media allies to maintain the fiction that their support is morally justifiable.

That the treatment of Harriman garnered a record-breaking number of complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) shows how many people are refusing to be hoodwinked. That wave of support chimes with the rise of the Green Party, led by Polanski, in the UK and the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York.

Resistance

The recent decision by the British Medical Association (BMA) to challenge the definition of anti-semitism adopted by the NHS, on the grounds that it punishes workers who support Palestine, is further evidence of collective resistance.

Real and terrifying as racism and Islamophobia are, millions of British people are immune to their toxins. They recognise that a Muslim person's life is worth just as much as a Jew's. Both deserve equal protection and equal sympathy should they be attacked. The history of Palestine is not that complicated; many understand that you don't have to hate Jews to challenge Israel's behaviour.

After the recent attacks in north London, Keir Starmer called for funding cuts to cultural spaces, platforming anti-semitism, yet made no mention of Islamophobia. His denial of the danger Muslims face reveals that he values them less as citizens. Furthermore, his statement imperils Jewish lives by ramping up resentment at their favoured treatment.

If, as seems likely, Andy Burnham succeeds him, little will change. Burnham has refused to describe Israel's assault as a genocide and described it as a “democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights”.

We need politicians, journalists and cultural figures who will confront Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people with honesty and integrity. We need more Mamdanis, Harrimans and Polanskis.

In his lyrical elegy, In the Presence of Absence, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish describes the Palestinian survivors of the Nakba as "the ghost of the murdered who haunted the killer in both wakefulness and sleep."

"Israel's new king", imagines Darwish, "sits on the balcony of a psychiatric institute... and hallucinates."

Darwish may be right that, ultimately, it is Israeli society that will be maddened by the lies at Zionism's core. Since the genocide began, suicides have spiked in Israel, particularly among the military. One third of Israelis, according to Maccabee Mental Health Services, now need professional mental health support. Among soldiers, there has been a near 40% rise in post-traumatic stress disorder since autumn 2023.

Israel is surrounded by powerful friends, yet its people are being consumed by loneliness. It would be better by far to acknowledge the brutal truth of its creation and restore sovereignty to the Palestinians it evicted so violently.

Rachel Spence is a journalist and poet based in the UK and Italy. Her writing has appeared in The Wire, Red Pepper, the Financial Times, Hyperallergic, Ytali.com and The Art Newspaper. Her non-fiction book Battle for the Museum (Hurst 2024) was an FT Book of the Year. Her latest poetry collection is Daughter of the Sun (The Emma Press, 2025), which was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2026.

Follow Rachel on Instagram: @rachelwords

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Opinions expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of their employer, or of The New Arab and its editorial board or staff.