When a site in Finchley, north London, appeared on a list of targets circulating in far-right chat groups calling for actions on 7 August, several groups immediately promoted counter-mobilisation. One online graphic, issued in the name of “Finchley Against Fascism”, used the slogan “Get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley”. The local Stand Up to Racism group called for mobilisation under the slogan “Refugees Welcome: Stop the Far Right”. The protest that actually took place was organised and stewarded by Stand Up to Racism supporters. However, the Finchley Against Fascism graphic achieved relatively wide circulation online.
The response to the far right in Britain is taking place at the same time as Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, a nakedly brutal expression of the Israeli state’s suppression of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. Israeli national chauvinism towards the Palestinians is so intense that it has become a form of racialised othering. A charitable reading, therefore, of Finchley Against Fascism’s formulation is that it represents an attempt, albeit perhaps a clumsy one, to create linkages between domestic anti-racist struggle and a struggle elsewhere also seen in anti-racist terms, with “Zionists” presumably intended as a catch-all term for people connected in some way to Israel’s misdeeds.
But the way many currents on the radical left have analysed Zionism indicates that there is, to put it mildly, more to unpack here. The slogan suggests a view of “Zionism” as something so singular and essentially malign that it is most meaningfully understood as equivalent to Nazism, or at least occupying comparable political space.
Finchley has one of Britain’s largest Jewish populations. In the 2021 census, 23% of residents of the Finchley and Golders Green constituency identified as Jewish, almost exactly the same number as those with no religion. According to polling by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 63% of British Jews self-identify as “Zionists”. For many of those, “Zionism” may be little more than a shorthand for a loose affinity with Israel as an expression of Jewish collectivity, a country where 71% of British Jews have family and whose national formation is deeply connected to Jewish experiences of persecution and racism. Finchley Against Fascism’s “Zionists out” call will have been interpreted by many who heard it as “Jews out”. If one’s “anti-racist” activity carries even the risk of being interpreted in this way, some reflection may be required.
But, the typical rejoinder usually runs, “Zionism” and “Judaism” are not the same thing. Zionism is a political ideology. Opposition to an ideology is not the same as opposition to someone’s ethnic or religious identity.
In this case, history has largely refused such a neat separation. Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic; but some forms of anti-Zionism are.
What is Zionism?
Zionism is Jewish nationalism. It is the belief that the Jews comprise a national people, which can and should self-determine at the level of a state. The vast majority of Zionists see the state of Israel as the expression of that national self-determination.
Zionism developed as a response to antisemitism. The Lebanese socialist Gilbert Achcar summed it up well: “It is indisputable that […] Zionism emerged in reaction to an unbearable form of racist oppression that, ultimately, defined the Jews as a race and culminated in the Nazi genocide.”
Like all nationalisms, and especially those emerging from amongst an oppressed people as a response to their oppression, Zionism evolved different, often competing, political wings, including both a far left and a far right. Like all nationalisms, it implies some degree of othering of those outside the imagined community of the nation.
The material enacting of Zionist ideology in a process of national formation and state foundation involved historic and ongoing settler-colonisation and occupation that systematically dispossessed Arab-Palestinians, and continues to deny them civil and national rights. But “Zionism” as a shorthand for those processes should not be used interchangeably with “Zionism” as a shorthand for the affinity most diaspora Jews feel with the Israeli-Jewish nation, which may exist alongside a very critical attitude to Israeli state policy.
73% of British Jews, an even larger majority than those who identify as Zionists, say they feel either “very” or “somewhat” attached to Israel. But this attachment does not necessarily indicate support for the policies of the Israeli state. A 2023 survey showed 79% of British Jews disapproved of Benjamin Netanyahu, with 72% pessimistic about the future of Israeli democracy. Older research showed 75% saw West Bank settlements as “a major obstacle to peace”, with 72% acknowledging Palestinian claims to statehood.
Identifying as “Zionist” does not give diaspora Jews any agency over the material structures of Israeli state power. Israel’s war is not directed from Finchley. Even Zionist Jews in Britain who are positively supportive of Israel’s policies are not directly “responsible” for them, any more than people in Britain of Indian, Turkish, or Chinese background who support Modi, Erdogan, or Xi Jinping’s regimes are “responsible” for what they do.
Why does this matter? Even if one accepts the formulation is wrong, why get worked up about it when one should be spending one’s energies opposing the actual violence Israel inflicts on the Palestinians, which is surely much worse than implicitly violent language?
Of course Israeli state brutality is materially worse than a bad slogan relatively few people will ultimately see or hear. But such language does nothing to help the Palestinians. Advocating a political approach that treats Zionists in Finchley as equivalent to Nazis and, even if only rhetorically, aspires to drive them off the streets — or, even more wildly, out of the areas in which they live — will have no material impact on Israel’s war or occupation. It will not advance the cause of Palestinian freedom one inch. What it will do is drive antisemitism, by encouraging anyone who hears the message to see Jews in Britain as direct agents of Israeli state power. This will, in turn, entrench nationalist and particularist consciousness within Jewish communities, by treating what is an aspect of the historically-developed identity of most Jews as synonymous with Nazism, the very thing which impelled the growth of Zionism from a minority current to something more like a default.
Opposing such formulations, and the politics which inform them, is not a matter of holding back justified opposition to Israel’s actions, but of resisting reactionary attempts to misdirect such opposition into antisemitic channels.
Zionism and anti-fascism
The political amalgam of Zionism with fascism — not the analysis that Zionism contains far-right currents, but the assertion that Zionism is fascism — has its primary origins in Stalinism’s “anti-Zionist” campaigns of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The ideological material of those campaigns has been continually recycled on the international left ever since.
An irony of that amalgam, and of its extension into current efforts to make “Zionism” a target of anti-fascist activity, is that historic Zionism includes significant traditions of militant anti-fascism. Labour Zionists stood alongside Communists at the Battle of Cable Street. Zionists, of both left and right, were central to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In Britain, Zionist Jews were central to militant anti-fascist groups such as the 43 Group. It makes no sense to affirm these legacies whilst insisting that the subjective political ideas that motivated many of the participants are, in effect, equivalent to Nazism.
Some historical currents within Zionism, as with other nationalist movements, including Hindutva and Pan-Arabism, were influenced by classical fascism, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, from which Likud later emerged. And the far-right settler movements now embedded in Israel’s government, led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, represent a fascistic element within Israeli society. But people identifying as Zionist can also be found in left-wing movements such as Standing Together and the Jordan Valley Activists, putting themselves on the line to confront settler violence. The self-declared Zionists involved in these movements have undoubtedly done more to confront and protest Israeli settler colonialism than the vast majority of those calling for “Zionists out of Finchley”.
Presumably, for Finchley Against Fascism, none of these differences, contestations, or complexities matter. A screenshot purportedly from a Finchley Against Fascism group chat, which circulated on social media, suggests at least one organiser has a particularly capacious idea of who counts as a Zionist, declaring: “We will not be mobilising or standing with Zionists, liberal Zionists, Zionist sympathisers, two state solutionists, Fateh [sic], genocide deniers. […] Zionism is fascism.”
Following this absolutist anti-Zionist maximalism to its logical conclusion would compel leftists to view as “fascists” not only the vast majority of Jews, but most of the general public, and, presumably, the 47% of Palestinians who believe the main goal of Palestinian struggle should be to “achieve an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Tommy Robinson: Zionist?
Part of the backdrop to these issues are claims that the far-right upsurge itself is “Zionist”, and/or directed by the Israeli state.
Such claims have been promoted, for example, by the musician Lowkey, former university professor David Miller, and former Labour MP Chris Williamson. Given all three have a close relationship to Press TV, the broadcasting arm of the Iranian regime, their moral authority to attack the involvement of authoritarian regimes in the politics of other countries is not, perhaps, unimpeachable.
Their arguments, whilst not dominant, are not marginal. The main anti-racist mobilisation in Bristol on Saturday 10 August featured a speech by Miller, read out on his behalf, repeating claims that the state of Israel was directing “the EDL” through “Zionist” networks.
Tommy Robinson has, in the past, received funding from US-based right-wing think tanks which are supportive of Israel and some of which have links to the Israeli right. But it requires a leap of conspiracist imagination to see an individual once having received funding from a body supportive of a particular state as constituting the direction by that state of that individual’s actions.
Seeing the far-right upsurge as a matter of foreign interference in Britain — by Israel, or, indeed, by Russia — is to let domestic racism off the hook. The upsurge is the product of homegrown political trends, perhaps most fundamentally the licensing of increasingly reactionary attitudes to migrants by both major political parties and a large part of the press. A conspiracist quest for the hidden “Zionist” hand behind the violence not only stokes antisemitism, but blunts necessary political analysis of the real impulses behind the upsurge.
Whilst there are sometimes Israeli flags on far-right mobilisations, this belies the fact that the far right has always been divided in its attitude to Israel. Some currents, especially those which foreground anti-Muslim racism in the context of a “western” identitarianism, see Israel as providing a bulwark against Islamism and Islam. But other voices, such as former BNP and KKK leaders Nick Griffin and David Duke, former BNP youth organiser and current leader of Patriotic Alternative Mark Collett, and US neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes, are resolutely “anti-Zionist”, seeing Israel as a projection of Jewish power.
Griffin was associated with a current in the National Front that advocated an alliance with Islamist and Arab nationalist forces to confront “Zionism”. Many of the arguments of this wing of the far right overlap with those promoted by Miller and Williamson; indeed, Williamson pointedly refused to distance himself from Nick Griffin’s endorsement of George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election. Griffin, like Galloway, is also a staunch supporter of Bashar Al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria.
Nick Griffin and David Miller share the view that there is a singular force in the world called “Zionism” which is so malignantly powerful that merely to declare oneself “anti” it is politically constitutive in and of itself, a necessary point of departure. Again: this wildly misleading analysis does not help the Palestinians. It does encourage hostility to Jews.
Anti-racist strategy
Finchley Against Fascism is a loose grouping of activists which sprung up only recently, and may have little to no ongoing life. Their approach was also condemned by local supporters of existing anti-racist groups. It is tempting to dismiss their perspective as marginal and irrelevant. But the prominence of David Miller and his supporters in the Bristol mobilisation shows that these perspectives have some currency within radical political organising. The Finchley Against Fascism graphic was circulated online by major anti-fascist networks, and widely defended. For instance, Tom Gann, the editor of the New Socialist website, argued that it is “completely reasonable” to compare Zionists to Nazis, and that ensuring anti-racist mobilisations also targeted “Zionists” was necessary in order to “draw lines against supporters of Israel’s genocide.”
Why not apply this to other ongoing instances of racist brutality throughout the world? Should we seek to link all protests against anti-Muslim violence in Britain with efforts to drive supporters, or presumed supporters, of Han Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs, one of the worst instances of systemic Islamophobia ongoing in the world today, off the streets of London?
Certainly, links can be made between these issues; a movement against anti-Muslim racism in the UK should engage Britain’s small Uyghur community, which has campaigned steadfastly with little support from most of the British left. But it would fuel other bigotries if this was done on the basis of treating Han Chinese people in Britain as equivalent to Nazis.
It is unlikely Finchley Against Fascism ever really expected to be able to expand the anti-racist mobilisation, which ultimately numbered around 1,000 people, into a protest aiming to get “Zionists out of Finchley”. Given the unlikelihood of any actual “supporters of Israel’s genocide” wanting to get involved in left-led organising on any issue, the leaflet was more likely intended as an intervention into the anti-racist movement itself. It was presumably part of an effort to make an explicit commitment to a maximalist anti-Zionist position a condition for involvement, against those in Finchley who wanted to keep the basis for demonstrations broad enough to mobilise locally within the Jewish “mainstream” — i.e., people who are statistically likely to self-identify as Zionists, although many may be critical of Israel.
Whilst the latest far-right upsurge may not have had Jewish communities in its sights, the clearly antisemitic currents within the global wave of which it is a part should warn us that this could easily change. Anti-racist organising in an area like Finchley should consciously aim to mobilise local Jewish communities in shared struggles around common interests with other ethnic minority communities that are more immediately targeted, including Muslim communities.
Class-struggle radicals should be sceptical of the very notion of communal blocs, and ultimately seek to split all such blocs on the basis of class struggles and struggles against gender and sexual oppression. We should seek to contest and disrupt communal particularism, in the name of working-class internationalism and democratic universalism. But disrupting and contesting dominant ideas and power structures within minoritised communities is more fruitful, and gains most legitimacy, when conducted from within shared struggles.
None of this means anti-racist mobilisations should ignore the issue of Palestine. Situating both the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and struggles for equality in Britain within a global internationalist framework is not just legitimate: it is necessary. Anti-fascists in Britain should condemn Israel’s authoritarian right, as well as other leaders within the growing global right-wing network, from Meloni to Modi. Anti-racists in Britain should act in solidarity with struggles against racist or chauvinist oppression elsewhere, including those of Uyghurs, Kurds, West Papuans, Western Saharawis, and others, and similarly should link struggles against the far right here with the struggles of Palestinian and Israeli leftists against the far right in Israel (although doing that would require large sections of the left to drop their insistence that there is no progressive potential for struggles within Israeli society).
Meanwhile, attempting to make anti-fascist and anti-racist organising conditional on adherence to a maximalist form of absolute “anti-Zionism” not only fails to aid the Palestinians, but risks turning anti-racism into its opposite.
Daniel Randall is a railway worker, trade unionist and socialist activist based in London.
Ben Gidley is an anti-fascist, blogger, and reader in sociology and psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London.