LL_Zio orgs webinar_26.11.2025
From JNP-IJAN webinar, “Zionist Organisations supporting Genocide”, 26 November 2025,
recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJKznQlvN8o
Why UK Zionist organizations appear so powerful
Les Levidow
From previous speakers we heard in some detail about how Zionist organizations have protected Israel’s genocide in various ways, e.g. by justifying it as self-defence or persecuting opponents.
I will continue with a question, or perhaps a riddle:
In this country, what is the most powerful Zionist institution?
My answer: the British state. Powerful, obviously.
But why Zionist? Because it has had a deep commitment to the Zionist settler-colonial project since at least the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
Why such a commitment? Around that time, the first military governor of Jerusalem wrote in his diary: a future Jewish state would be ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism’.
He drew an analogy with the Loyalist perversion of the Protestant religion, using racist stereotypes of Catholics to promote Protestant supremacy, dependent on British imperial rule.
A future Jewish state likewise would depend on support from the British state. So it would defend imperial interests against Arab national sovereignty and self-determination.
His future scenario turned out to be prophetic.
Why do few Palestine supporters call the British state a Zionist institution?
As a trivial reason, it is so much more than that, not a main reason why it exists.
But there is more subtle reason. The Palestine movement has had a long-time ambivalence or confusion about how the British state relates to Jewish-led Zionist organizations.
How to explain the state’s pro-Israel policy, especially its recent support for Israel’s genocide?
Superficially it may seem to result from an extraordinary power of the Zionist lobby, or Israel itself, or both. Such a perspective imagines that Britain has been pushed to act against its will, even ‘against the national interest’, through a policy that brings Britain no benefit (some say). Many Palestine supporters imagine that an alien force has deceived or intimidated British politicians.
Roles shielding the UK commitment to Israel: five examples
Such images invert the real power relation, which lies within a UK-Israel partnership, as I will argue here.
For the Zionist organizations which are the focus of this webinar, their powerful role depends partly on support or complicity from the British state. Some examples:
- Funding for CST:
The Community Security Trust (CST) receives funds from the Home Office, especially a multi-year budget through the Jewish Community Protective Security Grant (JCPSG), to protect Jewish communities from hate crime, terrorism and antisemitism. After the Manchester synagogue attack, it received a pledge of £10 million to scale up security at synagogues and schools.
This indirectly helps fund its regular reports on Antisemitic Hate Speech. These sometimes conflate antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech acts, as in one annual report that named me. A badge of honour.
- Interfaith events:
Interfaith events bring together reps of Jewish-Zionist, Muslim and Christian groups, often with sponsorship from state programmes. As a crucial role, such events suppress or deter any reference to Israel’s colonization, or depoliticise the conflict as ‘violence from both sides’.
Some Muslim groups have participated, thus colluding in self-censorship. Why? Because they face Home Office pressure through various carrots and sticks. On the one hand, collusion is rewarded by carrots such as appointments to prestigious consultative roles. On the other hand, Refusal incurs sticks, e.g. being accused of antisemitism, extremism or both, thus marginalising them.
- Promoting racist criteria for antisemitism
As previous speakers have explained, Zio organizations have aggressively promoted and deployed the IHRA definition to stigmatize pro Pal views as antisemitic. As the extra relevance here, since 2005 they made great efforts to gain state endorsement for this racist document. After they finally succeeded in 2016, their false allegations could more effectively deter pro-Palestine speech and press institutions to do likewise, especially local authorities and Universities.
- Demonizing pro-Palestine protest
The state demonizes pro-Palestine protest through racist tropes and scaremongering, which are developed with Zionist organizations. They in turn discipline fellow Jews through ostracism. At the big Saturday protests, the prominent Jewish Bloc represents a small fraction of Jews in attendance, for many reasons. As an ominous reason, many Jews fear being photographed in the Jewish Bloc, since such association could attract criticism from relatives or friends.
- Police persecution
Since Israel’s genocide provoked larger and more widespread protests during the past two years, Zionist spotters have regularly advised police that specific protesters are acting illegally. For example, that a slogan is antisemitic or pro-terrorist. Police duly arrest the targeted person, often imposing bail conditions – a main purpose of the arrest. Such collusion gives Zionist activists an indirect repressive power over Palestine protestors.
Why this widespread pattern? Because Zionist commitments are deeply embedded in British institutions, especially the police; they conflate Jews with Israel. And police chiefs seek to please their political masters in Whitehall.
Those five examples illustrate how the apparent power of Zionist organizations has depended partly on the British state. Conversely, it needs them as a moral alibi or a shield to pretend that its racist policies protect ‘the Jewish community’, a racist stereotype.
The Jewish shield helps the state to suppress Palestine protest and deflect criticism of its own racist role.
Jewish supremacist ideology
We try to discredit Zionist organizations for playing those roles, which have protected Israel’s colonization project and more recently its genocide. Why do they eagerly play this role?
From an anti-Zionist perspective, their ideology is Jewish supremacist. This comes from and perpetuates a state philosemitism, stereotyping Jews as loyal citizens who identify with the Zionist settler-colonial project and thus serve the imperial order. Historically, this is how the ruling elite accepted some Jews as white, abandoning earlier negative stereotypes.
As an analytical concept, Jewish supremacism draws an analogy with the white supremacist ideology of European settler-colonial projects that spread barbaric practices around the world. They dehumanized, robbed, starved, dispossessed and ultimately massacred indigenous people. The Zionist project has imitated those practices, and likewise has justified its terror as self-defence. Conversely, Zionism still has an intuitive appeal to the colonial legacy of Western elites. This appeal has been intensified by demonizing the Palestinian resistance as terrorist or antisemitic.
Within the Palestine movement, however, some people use the term Jewish supremacist in an essentialist way. They attribute the Zionist settler-colonial project (and its political power) to special powers of wealthy Jews, i.e. a racist stereotype. This false explanation separates their role from the wider pattern of settler-colonial regimes. It implies that Zionist organizations are the main drivers of Western support for Israel.
State-Zionist partnership
Our anti-racist perspective locates the problem rather in a state-Zionist partnership.
When we target Zionist organizations, let’s highlight their role in that racist partnership.
As previous speakers have said, always fight back and go onto the offensive.
Bio-note
Les Levidow has been an anti-Zionist activist in various organizations since the 1980s. When the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was still anti-Zionist during the first intifada, he was a member of the National Executive Committee. Most recently he was a co-founder of Jewish Network for Palestine (JNP) in 2018. He was also a co-founder of the Campaign Against Criminalizing Communities (CAMPACC) in 2001. This worked with migrant communities (especially Kurds) opposing anti-terror powers.