Labour digs in with anti-Semitic language as thugs line streets with Israeli flags

Keir Starmer’s Labour government is playing a very dangerous game, bolstering rising fascism by pandering to both the far right and a genocidal foreign state. And on 7 October, it dug in with its anti-Semitic language just as far-right thugs put up Israeli flags in the street.

Labour’s anti-Semitic rhetoric

Jewish Voice for Peace has called the treatment of “Jewish people as a monolithic group” a ‘contemporary expression of antisemitism’. And the Labour Party seems to be doing just that. Because in a social media post clearly talking about Israel, it seemed to conflate the country with “the Jewish community”. This is despite many Jewish people being vocal in their opposition to the state of Israel and its war crimes.

At a time when Starmer’s government is seeking to crack down even further on people’s democratic right to protest, the prime minister doubled down on this anti-Semitism. He called the 7 October offensive “the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust”. It was, however, an attack by people from an occupied nation (Palestine) against an occupying nation (Israel). It was no more an attack on “the Jewish people” than Britain’s war against the Nazis in World War Two was an attack on “the German people” (both, of course, resulted in the deaths of civilians).

But Starmer didn’t stop there. He also sought to link Israel’s settler colonialism – and resistance to it – back to tensions in Britain. This was a clear attempt to justify the government’s crackdown on peaceful anti-genocide protesters by trying to link an attack in Israel to last week’s attack in Manchester – which did specifically target Jewish people. Yet again, this was a dangerous conflation between two separate issues. As Jewish leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said last week:

Speaking as a member of the Jewish community, I wouldn’t want anyone to feel like they had to be silent about a genocide that’s happening because of an outrageous, atrocious attack that happened on our soil too. These are separate things and we should condemn them all.

Labour’s hierarchy of racism

A previous Labour Party report noted the hierarchy of racism within the organisation. In particular, it highlighted how officials prioritised concerns about anti-Jewish discrimination over anti-Muslim or anti-Black discrimination. And this is still apparent today. Because while Labour chooses to commemorate the deaths of around 780 Israeli civilians on 7 October (at the hands of Israeli bombs or Hamas-led fighters), it still prefers not to commemorate the 20,000+ children Israel has killed in Gaza in the following two years. It talks about the need for aid, but not an end to Israel’s genocidal occupation.

Islamophobia is at record levels in Britain right now, and just in recent days there was an arson attack on a mosque. There has long been a growing problem with this type of hatred. But Labour has barely mentioned it.

At the same time, the party has mentioned other past genocides but refused to accept the overwhelming consensus among experts that Israel has been committing genocide for the last two years. Turning a blind eye to the decimation of Gaza, Starmer simply echoed Israeli propaganda in his 7 October message, saying “our priority in the Middle East remains the same – release the hostages”. Not holding genocidal war criminals to account for Israel’s relentless terrorisation of the people in Gaza. It’s the Israeli hostages, around 20 of them, that matter to Labour – not the hundreds of thousands of suffering Palestinians who have lost everything, including 67,173 of their family members, friends, and neighbours. Labour’s institutional racism is right there in front of us, for everyone to see.

Labour emboldening pro-genocide thugs

The type of dehumanising message Labour is sending out has an impact.

Indeed, on the same day as Labour’s anti-Semitic conflation of the Israeli state and Jewish people, a group of thugs which has proudly stated “THERE IS NO GENOCIDE IN GAZA” put dozens of Israeli flags up in Hastings:

The English flags have been replaced with Israeli flags in Hastings. pic.twitter.com/eOTYYPaG2T

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) October 7, 2025

Labour is playing a very dangerous game. By backing and denying genocide, and then trying to link opposition to that genocide to antisemitism, it is not only fuelling confusion and division among people who don’t understand what’s going on. It is emboldening genocide-deniers to push their ideology further and further into the public domain.

If we want to stop fascist ideology, we have to stop Starmer’s Labour too.

Featured image via the Canary