On Sept. 28, The Guardian uncritically published an interview with Aimee Shalan, the incoming director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), in which she made unqualified claims that Palestine has become a domestic electoral issue, repeated libels against Israel, and downplayed the extent to which the pro-Palestine movement is compromised by antisemitism.
From the outset, Shalan, in the Guardian piece (“Palestine has become electoral issue in UK for first time, says solidarity campaign chief”, by Aamna Mohdin), states:
We’re seeing for the first time in British history Palestine become a domestic issue, electorally, at the national level and at the local level.
Whilst Shalan is right that Palestine has compounded the UK’s collective political imaginary to the point that Palestine has become an electoral issue, she fails to qualify: an electoral issue for whom? Important to whom?
A survey conducted by Policy Exchange in April found that a quarter of British Muslim respondents said that the Israel-Gaza conflict would determine their vote, a greater proportion than those who opted for the economy, housing, healthcare, or crime as the deciding factor. This figure contrasts starkly with the five per cent of the general population sample who chose Israel-Gaza.
Three-in-five Muslim voters (60%) said they would consider backing pro-Gaza independent candidates to prevent Labour winning locally, while almost half (49%) would consider supporting the Green Party for the same reason.
This is perhaps unsurprising given the decline in the Labour Party’s popularity amongst the British Muslim electorate. When questioned on their voting intentions, only 33 per cent of British Muslims would vote Labour in the next General Election, down from the 86 per cent of Muslim voters who backed the party in the 2019 General Election under Jeremy Corbyn.
This disenfranchisement is variously attributed to the Labour government’s perceived reluctance to criticise Israel. Commonly cited are the party’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in November 2023 and the ‘pro-Israel’ stance many perceived in then Labour leader Keir Starmer’s early LBC interview, given four days after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which he said Hamas bore responsibility and Israel had a right to defend itself.
Unsurprisingly, the Green Party stands to be the main beneficiary of Labour’s continued loss of British Muslim support. According to the same survey, 18 per cent of British Muslims voted for the Green Party at the 2024 general election, and 27 per cent, more than a quarter, would do so now. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election in February of this year bears testament. In a seat that is almost 30 per cent Muslim, The Muslim Vote (TMV), a self-described “anti-genocide” pressure group established in December 2023, backed the Green Party, which won with a significant amount of the Muslim vote.
Strikingly, the Policy Exchange also found that a quarter (25 per cent) of those same British Muslim respondents held a favourable view of Hamas, while 23 per cent viewed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) favourably.
They were also almost twice as likely as the general population to hold unfavourable views of Jews: 21 per cent against 11 per cent. Nearly half (45 per cent) endorsed the conspiratorial trope that Jews have too much power over the media, and similar shares said the same of the weapons manufacturing industry (43 per cent) and the banking system (42 per cent).
In this view, Palestine may be an electoral issue but let us not equivocate about the section of British society for whom it is the decisive influence on voting intentions.
Given the Green Party’s proclivity to shield members who espouse antisemitic rhetoric, it is any wonder that the party has become a hotbed of extremist views? Consider, for example, the archived X posts of Green Party councillor Mothin Ali, who did not face reprisal, from Oct. 7, 2023 (Image below), in which he wrote that “white supremacist European settler colonialism must end!” alongside the hashtag طوفان الأقصى [English: the Al-Aqsa Flood], Hamas’ codename for its attacks. After his local electoral victory in May 2024, Ali was also observed to shout chants of “Allahu Abkar” and “victory for Gaza.”
Archived Mothin Ali X post from Oct.7, 2023.
In Oct. 2025, the Antisemitism Policy Trust submitted evidence to the UK government documenting at least 10 instances of antisemitic social media activity by Green Party candidates [see: here]. These included claims that “Hamas are not terrorists,” “October 7th was orchestrated by the Israeli government,” “victims of the Holocaust are now predators,” and that “ISIS was run by Mossad.” CAMERA UK found that the Green Party did not suspend seven of these ten candidates, all of whom were permitted to stand.
In the first half of 2026, there were another 10 instances of antisemitic social media activity by Green Party candidates. These included conspiracy theories linking Zionists to the Epstein file disclosures, claims the Hatzola arson attack was a “false flag” operation, and that “Zionists collaborated with the Nazis,” in addition to calls to “burn Zionism to the ground.” One candidate ran an Anne Frank ‘parody’ account, on which she posted an image of an industrial shredding machine, captioned “Zionist juicer.” CAMERA UK also found that four of these ten candidates are sitting Green Party councillors.
In July, Hackney Council, led by the Green Party, citing its anti-racist values, voted to formally end its twinning agreement with Haifa, conspicuously setting Oct. 7 as the deadline for a response.
It would be remiss not to mention the Green Party’s recent ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion, as it codified pre-existing anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus. One of its co-authors, Lubna Speitan, was previously filmed chanting that “Zionism must be dismantled in its entirety along with its racist state,” and proudly declaring that she was an “antisemitic terrorist” and would wear the label as a “badge of honour.”
In a YouTube video, on the Palestine Deep Dive channel, Speitan openly admitted that she joined the Green Party only to help other members write the motion rejecting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, adding that she also wished to reject the JDA definition (which describes discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews, or Jewish institutions as Jewish). In a video that circulated on X, she was filmed declaring that Zionists, by force, will be “hunted in the same way that Nazi oppressors were.”
Speitan is reportedly also “close friends” with Minh Quang Pham, a convicted al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who plotted a suicide bomb attack on Heathrow airport.
If Palestine is not an electoral issue for the UK’s general population, yet has found home amongst the small parties and a subset of British Muslim electorate who hold extremist views, when do we admit that Palestine is not the cause, but the anti-Jewish epidemic is?
The Guardian also repeated Shalan’s casualty figures without qualification:
She pointed to the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s war in Gaza and the more than 1,300, including at least 300 children, killed since a ceasefire was signed last year.
What The Guardian does not make clear to its readers is that the Gaza Health Ministry, which operates under Hamas’ authority, does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. The toll therefore includes combatants, whom the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) puts at upwards of 25,000 Hamas and affiliated combatants.
Later in the article, Shalan rejects the designation of PSC as extremist in addition to characterisations of the national demonstrations it has co-organised since Oct.7, 2023 as antisemitic “hate marches”:
“You can try and criminalise, but all it will do is anger the public more,” she said. “That’s why we’re seeing people going out on the streets and risking being arrested because they refuse to be hobbled by this effort to criminalise both Palestinians and those that stand in support.
Those who are responsible for trying to criminalise support for Palestinians and their rights, and supporters trying to end a horrific genocide, should hang their heads in shame.”
What the Guardian fails to mention to its readers, or even put to Shalan, is that, on Oct. 7, 2023, while the Hamas attacks were still ongoing, the PSC notified the Metropolitan Police of its intention to hold a rally the following week. This notification preceded any Israeli response to the attacks and thus cannot be construed as protests against the manner in which that response was conducted.
Whilst it may be politically expedient for Shalan to frame these national demonstrations as the product of moral do-gooding, it does not obscure the anti-Jewish animus on which they rest. Most of the public displays of support in London the day after Hamas’ attacks, for instance, were reported to include calls for jihad and eliminationist chants of “from the river to the sea” and “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud.”
Some UK student protests in London were even reported to have praised Hamas’ attacks, characterising them as a “heroic fight” by the “martyrs” against “fascist and criminal settlers.” Yet the attacks themselves were made upon civilians living legally within Israel’s 1949 boundaries. To degrade them as “criminal settlers” and celebrate their murder is to imply that the entire state of Israel is illegitimate, and all that of its Jewish inhabitants are criminals against whom even mass rape and child murder can constitute acts of heroism.
This is an inconvenient truth for the PSC, its partner organisations (Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, and Muslim Association of Britain) and the liberal progressive classes alike. The cause they have championed so obsessively effectively defends the mass rape, mutilation, torture and murder of Jews.
Rather than confront these facts, they hijack and invert the memory of Oct. 7, casting it as a response to Israeli action when Israel had not yet responded. They are likely cognisant that Hamas’ massacre does not advance the Palestinian cause, insofar as they attempt to rebrand Oct. 7 as the “beginning of the genocide in Gaza,” downplay Hamas’ attacks, or deny that they occurred altogether, all the while celebrating them.
The Guardian also fails to challenge Shalan’s dismissal of the PSC’s alleged extremist links, despite publicly available evidence. Salman Abedi, who carried out the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bombing, attended a PSC-organised protest two years earlier. Ziad El Aoul, former director of the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) who was later named as a Hamas operative, has also appeared regularly at PSC protests.
According to NGO Monitor, in 2012, the PSC’s then-director Sarah Colborne and then-chairman Hugh Lanning were photographed alongside Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of Hamas.
If The Guardian repeats Shalan’s claims without mentioning the electorate whose vote Palestine would determine, it misleads readers by omitting that the wider UK population does not rank the issue as highly.
Nor is it only a matter of priorities. In January, the Community Safe Trust (CST) recorded a 21 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025.
By letting Shalan’s dismissal of the PSC’s extremist links go unchallenged, it allows the PSC’s narrative to stand in for fact: Palestine matters electorally as a question of moral idealism, and that any reference to anti-Jewish animus is unworthy of discussion. If that is the standard, when do we admit that Palestine may be the cause on the ballot, but the cost is borne by British Jews?