I wrote this in the days after what looked very much like a co-ordinated assault—on Glastonbury, the BBC, and on anyone who dared speak honestly about Palestine on a public stage. You could almost ask: did they all get the memo? Within hours of Bob Vylan’s performance, in which frontman Bobby shouted “death to the IDF” and the crowd chanted back, a rolling cast of outraged MPs, columnists and lobbyists had taken their mark.
“Speak up for Palestine, and we’ll see how far the state and media are willing to go to make an example of you.”
Reform UK’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns, took to GB News to call for his arrest. “If the police don’t arrest and treat them the same way as Lucy Connolly and all the other political prisoners,” she declared, “then they should let Lucy Connolly and the other political prisoners out and give them compensation.” Connolly, a far-right activist jailed for inciting racial hatred after the Southport attacks, was held up as the victim. Bob Vylan, a punk duo with no criminal charges, were cast as hate criminals. “This is evidence,” Jenkyns insisted, “that we’ve got a two-tiered justice system.”
The same day, The Telegraph ran a column by Stephen Pollard with the headline: “Bobby Vylan’s chant was far worse than Lucy Connolly’s tweet. So why is he not in prison?” Pollard accused the BBC of enabling “primetime Jew hate” and compared the Glastonbury crowd to “a modern version of the Nuremberg Rallies.” The chant in question—“death, death to the IDF”—was was instantly cast as a genocidal incitement, rather than what it was: a furious, anti-military slogan directed at an occupying army under investigation for war crimes. No mention, of course, of the children buried under rubble in Rafah. No mention of the charges filed at the ICC. Just righteous fury that a Black British artist said the unsayable.
By Monday, the BBC had issued a clarification. Glastonbury organisers posted a tepid condemnation. Avon and Somerset Police said they were “assessing” video footage to see whether “any offences may have been committed.” The message was clear: speak up for Palestine, and we’ll see how far the state and media are willing to go to make an example of you.
This article is not about Bob Vylan or Kneecap or even Glastonbury. It’s about the structures that made the reaction to them feel inevitable. Because every time a chant is criminalised, every time a stage becomes a courtroom, every time a punk band is cast as a national security threat, a deeper chill sets in. And what you’re left with is not law, but fear. Not open debate, but silence. And silence, when it comes to Palestine, is the point.
There’s no K Street in Westminster. No parade of beltway lobbyists in lanyards and pinstripes, no institutionalised bribery in plain sight like in Washington. British politics prefers its compromises behind doors and over drinks—just as transactional, just less vulgar about it. But when it comes to the politics of Israel, the corridors of British power are quieter still. Not because there’s nothing happening, but because no one wants to talk about it.
The reality is plain: the discourse around Israel–Palestine in Britain is not free. Not in Parliament. Not in the press. Not in civil society. There’s a line that can’t be crossed—not a legal one, not even a clearly articulated one, but a line enforced by silence, fear, and the very British art of reputational ruin.
Over a quarter of sitting MPs have accepted hospitality or funding from pro-Israel lobbying organisations. That’s not speculation. It’s in the public record. More than £1 million in travel, gifts, and support across party lines. The Conservative Friends of Israel claims that 80% of Tory MPs are members. Labour Friends of Israel is less brash but no less embedded, a ghost of the New Labour machine now folded into Starmer’s triangulated realism. One of ELNET’s donor reports proudly lists over a dozen shadow ministers flown out to Jerusalem to “learn the regional security landscape.”
None of this is illegal. Most of it isn’t even unusual. There are Turkish, Saudi, even Chinese parliamentary friendship groups too. But only one exerts this degree of narrative control. Only one has the power to make politicians, journalists, academics, and civil servants visibly flinch at the mere mention of its existence.
If this level of influence came from Beijing or Budapest rather than Jerusalem, the right-wing press would be up in arms. Imagine a Chinese parliamentary friendship group that had flown dozens of MPs out on fact-finding missions, funded party officials, shaped university policy, sued critics, and discouraged debate on Uyghur repression—The Telegraph would run front pages on “foreign interference.” If Viktor Orbán’s government were financing MPs and leaning on civil servants, The Spectator would howl about sovereignty and subversion. But when it comes to Israel, the outrage dissipates. The silence, in fact, is part of the consensus.
“If this were China or Hungary, the Telegraph would be howling.”
As Peter Oborne put it, Westminster is “beginning to resemble the Westminster outpost for Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud coalition.” The phrase sounds hyperbolic—until you look at the record: arms deals, diplomatic cover, media narratives, legal threats, party discipline. All lined up in support of a government now facing credible accusations of war crimes.
It is the lobby that can’t be named. Alan Duncan (hardly a man of the left) once described it as a “disgusting” influence that tried to block his appointment as Middle East Minister. In June, 36 members of the Board of Deputies were suspended for criticising Israel’s conduct in Gaza an internal purge to match the external one that Labour carried out under the banner of “zero tolerance.” Last year, a civil servant faced formal censure for saying in an internal webinar that the lobby has “insidious” influence over the way Whitehall talks about Palestine. That may sound unwise, but it’s hard to see how it’s inaccurate.
Fear, of course, does not operate alone. It is sustained by lawfare. UK Lawyers for Israel have repeatedly intervened to shut down campus events, and local BDS initiatives. They’ve threatened student unions with legal action under charity law, pressured organisations into cancelling events, and targeted pro-Palestinian campaigns as breaches of the Equality Act. In one case, a SOAS University of London student and comrade of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, Sarah, was reported to the Metropolitan Police by UKLFI, who demanded her arrest and prosecution over a speech she allegedly gave in October 2023. The police complied (arresting her in January 2024) and went on to arrest another SOAS FRFI supporter in March 2025 under the same terrorism legislation. Even flags are deemed threatening. The goal is not just to win legal victories. It’s to exhaust, intimidate and deter.
The crackdown has drawn international condemnation. Gina Romero, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly, described the situation on UK campuses as “deeply disturbing,” accusing universities of taking “deliberate actions to curtail” students’ rights to protest and organise around Palestine.
“In practice, UKLFI doesn’t need to win cases—only to threaten them. Fear alone often achieves the same result.”
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has also condemned UK Lawyers for Israel for platforming extremist views, accusing the group of inviting a representative of Regavim—an organisation that advocates the violation of international law by promoting Israeli settlement across the entire West Bank. Regavim was founded in 2006 by figures such as Bezalel Smotrich. It actively monitors Palestinian and Bedouin construction in Area C of the West Bank and often pursues legal action to remove or demolish such structures. Critics describe Regavim’s agenda as one of systematic displacement—what some have called ethnic cleansing under the cover of legality.
“It’s not law doing the work. It’s fear. And fear polices speech better than any statute.”
It’s not just the left that has gone silent. Once, even MPs on the centre would have condemned the shooting of those queuing for food, the bombing of UN shelters, destruction of hospitals or the deaths of thousands of children. Now, there’s triangulation, evasive language, or worse, outright denial. Starmer refuses to back a ceasefire. Lammy mouths platitudes about restraint. Ministers speak as if war crimes are unfortunate diplomatic misunderstandings.
Meanwhile, arms continue to flow. The High Court ruled recently that supplying parts for Israeli F-35s does not breach UK export law. Civil servants who object are told to quit. Media coverage (despite moments of clarity) returns inevitably to the cycle of “Israel has the right to defend itself,” followed by silence.
The great irony is that the more powerful the lobbying, the more absurd it is to deny it exists. But that is precisely the trap. To speak of “the Israel lobby” is to risk being labelled antisemitic. And so silence becomes the dominant condition. Fear does the work of censorship. Self-censorship becomes policy. A population that overwhelmingly supports Palestinian rights finds its voice excluded from the institutions that supposedly represent it.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé calls it an “aggressive” lobby, one that “eagerly seeks to stamp out narratives of Palestinian dispossession and suffering.” And in Britain, that aggression doesn’t need to shout. The threat of reputational damage is enough to do the work.
Britain doesn’t have a Hill. But it has a dominant class. And on Israel, it has chosen to side with power, not with justice.
