How anti-Palestinian racism drives Britain’s two-tier policing

Over the past three years, the British public has made it abundantly clear that it stands firmly and unapologetically with the Palestinian people. Yet this overwhelming public support has found little expression in the institutions that claim to represent its people. In fact, there is a structural asymmetry whereby the Palestine movement is continuously attacked and repressed by the state while Israeli war crimes are swept under the rug.

This asymmetry is not a question of inconsistent policing or legal double standards; it reflects a broader political order in which settler colonial violence is enabled and normalised while resistance to that violence is criminalised.

Who do you serve, who do you protect?

The normalisation of settler colonial violence relies on an ideological framework that has, for decades, reproduced anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia whereby Palestinians are routinely denied political agency and those who stand alongside them are cast as uniquely suspect, irrational, or threatening. This has created a public narrative that enables the criminalisation of solidarity, the justification of exceptional measures, the legitimisation of baseless accusations, and the manufacturing of public consent for repression while sanitising imperialist wars abroad.

Consequently, an entire political culture has developed that enables the mobilisation of extraordinary public resources to surveil and suppress our movement, while enabling those who have actively participated in the genocide of Palestinians. This reveals whose interests the institutions of the British state ultimately seek to protect, namely those of a domestic capitalist class and a foreign genocidal entity.

Indeed, the Zionist lobby has perfected a well-oiled pressure machine that emboldens the Met Police in their crackdown on our movement. In the moments when the government infrastructure, media institutions, corporate institutions, and policing bodies collude in defence of the status quo, repression reveals itself as a coherent political project in defence of Zionism.

Over 100,000 dead and you’re policing us instead

Earlier this year, Declassified UK reported that over 2000 Britons served in the IDF amid the genocide in Gaza. The Met Police opened an investigation, then closed it, and recently announced that they reopened their investigation into four of these nationals following pressure from legal and human rights organisations.

While this is a welcome decision, it begs multiple questions. First, why is the investigation of war criminals being treated like a game of political ping-pong? And second, why are only four war criminals, out of 2000, being investigated?

Meanwhile, more than 3000 people have been arrested since July 2025 on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action since their proscription. This number doesn’t even include the arrests made at national marches, student encampments, or other actions and demonstrations. Campaigners who have been referred to the UK government’s Prevent programme in an attempt to create a chilling effect on Palestine solidarity are also not included in these figures.

Allegations involving British nationals accused of participating in some of the gravest crimes under international law are met with hesitation and piecemeal investigations. Meanwhile, those seeking to disrupt the machinery that enables those crimes are subjected to the full force of the state’s coercive apparatus and deployed with remarkable speed and coordination.

Similarly, the Met Police refused to investigate the Great Israel Real Estate Event despite pressure from 100 grassroots organisations, leading human rights organisation Amnesty UK, legal advocacy organisations such as the ICJP, as well as pressure from over 100 parliamentarians and the Mayor of London. If these forces cannot collectively stop war crimes from occurring in our capital city, who can?

When public institutions repeatedly ignore such broad coalitions while devoting immense resources to policing those protesting war crimes, they reveal themselves as increasingly insulated from public pressure and accountable only to the entrenched political interests of the Zionist lobby.

The fight for Palestine sits at the sharpest edge of imperial domination of the region: it is the centrepiece that US hegemony relies on. Over the last three years, the Palestine movement has waged a fight exposing this reality and revealing the role of the British political class in this equation. In doing so, the movement created a crisis in the political establishment.

Before a system shatters, its cracks must first be exposed, and then widened. What the Palestinian people and resistance have achieved over the last three years is to lay these fissures bare, exposing a system of institutions and lobby groups that serve the interests of a foreign, genocidal entity.

Meanwhile, there are people in Britain who can’t even afford to heat their homes in the winter. This is one of the greatest moral failings of modern British history. Concretely, this has deepened the crisis within the political class and exposed them and their interests. Our role now is to widen these fractures further. The task before us is clear: to continue exposing these contradictions until the structures that sustain Zionism and injustice can no longer stand.

Jeanine Hourani is a London-based writer and community organiser. She’s a PhD candidate in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter and a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement.

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