Calls to end Israeli impunity will continue to grow across the arts sector
Last week, a deeply unpopular Keir Starmer suggested that cultural organizations funded by Arts Council of England (ACE) are “platforming antisemitic projects”. The claim is wholly unsupported by evidence. It is an attack on our sector and on the many arts workers who have taken a principled stance against Israel’s horrific and ongoing violence against Palestinians.
The British government, complicit in arming and defending Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, is actively repressing opposition to Israeli crimes – including by criminalising peaceful protest. To justify its actions, the government is re-categorising support for Palestinian rights as antisemitism, conflating Jewish people with the state of Israel. A conflation that is wrong and dangerous.
The cynicism and inadequacy of Starmer’s response to actual rising antisemitism was instantly called-out by Jewish arts professionals: the government is using antisemitism as a “political football”; the announcement is “an opportunistic attempt to interfere with Arts Council funding and silence the Palestine liberation movement, in the wake of the rise in anti-semitic attacks.”
The Prime Minister has subsequently ordered an audit of ACE-funded organizations. This move will encourage the continued harassment of arts organizations by right wing media and the likes of the group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) who systematically target organisations with groundless legal letters demanding they cancel forms of cultural expression that cast the apartheid state in a negative light.
What Starmer intends is both needless and threatening. Organizations funded by ACE are already obliged to uphold legislation on anti-discrimination and freedom of expression. For its part, the government is officially bound to observe an ‘arms length’ relationship to ACE. This intervention is an indication of this government’ s willingness to erode the independence of our public institutions wherever it serves its political goals. It is a new, authoritarian, and deeply discriminatory form of governance.
At a time when the far-right is gaining ground, all minorities and racialised groups are threatened. We reject the divisive logic that pits Jewish safety against Palestinian and pro-Palestinian expression. As the Jewish arts workers’ letter to ACE says: “Since the onset of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the UK has been an increasingly less safe place for Muslims and Jews. Our safety in this country is entwined – and our common enemy is fascism.”
Israel has committed and is still committing international crimes of the gravest kind. Our movement will continue to press for an end to cultural partnerships with institutions or individuals that are complicit in, advocate for, or that whitewash crimes such as ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. In doing so we are clear that our target is the complicity, and not the identity, of individuals or institutions. Whatever policies the government devises to try to maintain Israel’s impunity, those calls for accountability will grow.
Progressive cultural spaces must build resilience by working collectively as they confront the threats posed both by continued cutbacks and by the mainstreaming of far-right politics. As the world descends into a might-makes-right era that poses a danger to all of humanity, ending Israel’s impunity has never been a more urgent task.
Photo: protests against the inclusion of an Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, May 2026
