The nefarious, prejudicial and deeply-flawed IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-semitism – Part 2
By Dr Ranjeet Brar, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (ML) and consultant vascular surgeon
In our previous issue, Dr Ranjeet Brar analysed in detail the reactionary and repressive nature of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. His exposé continues by showing the underhand way that the definition has been incorporated into the fabric of government surreptitiously and without legislative authority.
Step by step imposition of the IHRA definition on British society
1. Britain’s wholesale adoption of the IHRA definition
In December 2016, during the run up to Corbyn’s first general election as Labour leader, the British government adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The government is to formally adopt a definition of what constitutes antisemitism, which includes over-sweeping condemnation of Israel [!], with Theresa May saying the measure will help efforts to combat hate crime against Jews:
“Britain will become [the] first countr[y] to use this definition of antisemitism, as agreed last May at a conference of the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the prime minister will say in London.
“A Downing Street statement said the intention of such a definition was to ‘ensure that culprits [!] will not be able to get away with being antisemitic because the term is ill-defined, or because different organisations or bodies have different interpretations of it’” (Peter Walker, ‘UK adopts antisemitism definition to combat hate crime against Jews’, The Guardian, 12 December 2016).
When Theresa May stated in Prime Minister’s Questions in July 2018 that the Tory Party had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in full, it was already as part of a wider campaign to paint Corbyn and Labour as ‘antisemitic’.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), to which I belong, has been quite clear, that we consider Labour to be a party of imperialism, and the ‘left labourites’ like Benn and Corbyn to be nothing more than ‘left-wing’ fig leaves intended to disguise Labour imperialism. Corbyn’s entire recent conduct has fully demonstrated this truth. Nonetheless, Corbyn undoubtedly became a focal point for millions of British workers who imagined that Labour really could bring some measure of ‘socialism’ to Britain – a discourse that, although fundamentally flawed by a hope that was unfounded, was nonetheless totally unpalatable to monopoly capitalism in crisis, as was his oft-proclaimed support for the Palestinian cause, further exacerbating their systemic political crisis of legitimacy coming out of Brexit. The real lessons to be drawn from this are documented in my book The rise and fall of Project Corbyn (available from shop.thecommunists.org).
2. Corbyn leads Labour to adopt the IHRA definition – and the whole political swamp follows
The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), amid much media and establishment hype and pressure, adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in September 2018 while still nominally under the ‘leadership’ of Jeremy Corbyn, who, at a much-covered Labour NEC meeting, put up a short-lived symbolic attempt to ‘qualify’ its introduction and then quietly subsided back into the social-democratic swamp. As a result, “All 11 examples accompanying the IHRA definition were agreed by [Labour’s] NEC meeting at the party’s headquarters in central London, as the 40-strong party body attempted to end the long-running row about how to tackle alleged antisemitism within the party” (Dan Sabbagh, ‘Labour adopts IHRA antisemitism definition in full’, The Guardian, 4 September 2018). This is generally the approach of Corbyn and the Labour left to all questions of importance to the capitalist class. A few words of protest. A quick question in the House. An Early Day Motion supported by a handful of MPs. And then a ‘triumphant’ and ‘militant’ speech to the motley crew of ‘Stop the War’, revisionist, Trotskyite and ‘left-Labour’ camp followers to the effect that ‘we came! we tried! we failed!’. (But never forget that in 2003, we had the biggest march in history!!) Now – let the business of the imperialists continue as normal. (Vote Labour!)
Labour, in adopting the IHRA definition in September 2018 was followed the Tory Party and Liberal Party (the latter by a few days). The SNP and Scottish government adopted the IHRA definition in June 2017 and the Green Party did so in October 2021, as did the Welsh government and Plaid Cymru.
3. State institutions adopt the IHRA definition
Thus what amounted in effect to Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘cross-party consensus’ was central to the corporate and mainstream political adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and thereby gave the green light for it to be rolled out across British society.
When May and Sturgeon took the decision for ‘the government’ to adopt the definition in 2016-17, the policing arm of the state also did so – despite the fact that the definition is inherently politically biased, designed to indemnify Israel from criticism, and paves the way for the political and economic repression of those who speak out against Israeli crimes. This outcome was, of course, the real intention behind its adoption.
Moreover, the IHRA definition has no standing in law. Indeed it is precisely because it is itself discriminatory, racist and justifies occupation, apartheid and genocide that it would not stand up to any formal legal scrutiny, which is why such a surreptitious method has been adopted to force it on an unwilling – and until recently largely unaware – public.
4. Met Police “ensure that the IHRA definition of antisemitism is strongly enforced across London”
“The London Assembly agreed a motion to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism on 8 February 2017. The Mayor of London (and future Tory Prime Minister, Boris Johnson) answered a question about it at Mayor’s Question Time on 10 August 2017. The London Assembly agreed a further motion on 10 June 2021, which calls on the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Service to ensure that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, as adopted by the Mayor and Assembly, is strongly enforced across London.”
Consequently, according to the Metropolitan Police website (as checked on 22 June 2026), “All UK police forces [now] use and recognise the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) 2016 working definition of antisemitism.” They do not mention the date of its formal adoption or any consultation or legal process as to its implementation. They do not mention how they came to adopt a definition that ties them to enforce strongly support for Israeli genocide “across London” – and Britain. Nor does this state body – the Police – that regulates the entire conduct of British civil society, and enforces its behavioural codes upon us with the full force of its 240,000 well-paid and protected officers and employees, explain exactly how it intends to use the definition, whether in internal matters, in data collecting, or in interpreting the laws and behaviour of British workers. In other words, the Police do not specify how this non-legal definition will be used to interpret the laws that will be used to criminalise the British public.
And so we see, that by a creeping process of adoption behind closed doors, by bureaucratic decision, and by degree, the ruling class, its political parties and the state – without any consultation with the British workers or wider public – have adopted, funded and sponsored a definition of ‘racism’ that originated in an Israeli conference, and was then adopted by an obscure branch of the European Union in 2005. The IHRA definition of antisemitism, originating in the Zionist movement, has gradually become implemented and treated as ‘law of the land’.
Colleges, schools and academic institutions of all stripes have been among the groups pressured to adopt the definition unquestioningly. In this way Britain’s ‘intellectual leadership’ was among the first group to be targeted. The list is long – well over 200, to include most universities.
Political repression under the umbrella of the IHRA definition of antisemitism
So what? You might very well ask. Well, take my case as an example. When Israel escalated its slow strangulation of the people of Palestine in October 2023, the apartheid and occupation, the Israeli ‘mowing of the lawn’ of Palestinian life, became a flood of death by hunger, starvation, bombing, strafing, and economic war – a genocide, according to the highest international court (International Court of Justice) and political body (United Nations General Assembly), accompanied by the Israeli leaders’ fascist rhetoric of extermination of the Palestinian people as ‘human animals’.
Masses of British workers, incensed and disgusted by the slaughter – the Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians, that is ongoing and has been perpetrated with full British and US and EU support now for over two years – took to the streets in the largest demonstrations seen since the Iraq War of 2003. Attending one such demonstration in November 2023, I was arrested, at the specific request of a Zionist activist group (shameless supporters of genocide) ‘Harry’s Place’, operating in collaboration with the Metropolitan Police. My ‘crime’? Distributing a history of Zionism written by my father, our Party’s founding Chairman Harpal Brar (Zionism: A racist, antisemitic and reactionary tool of imperialism, available from www.shop.thecommunists.org).
Political repression dressed as ‘anti-racism’
The circumstances of that arrest, and its direction by a group of Zionist agents and political police, working hand in glove with the Met Police, and government ministers (then Tories, but it might just as well have been Labour) is documented in an article I wrote in which I point out that this state-sponsored political policing was carried out to suppress the Palestine solidarity movement, the Communist Party of which I am a member and whose policies I express, and the exposure of Zionism in that brilliant work DESPITE the police knowing full well in advance, from previous knowledge and detailed analysis of the work, that there was nothing racist or illegal in the book.
This then is the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ in action. This the brave new world of ‘anti-racist policing’ as understood and carefully contrived by the British imperial state and its top governmental leaders, in this instance Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, and Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley. Braverman, in fact, became so brazen in exposing the partisan nature of the police (actually attacking them for not following her orders to crack down on Palestine demonstrators more fiercely) that she was forced to resign (see Rick Muir, ‘The constitutional consequences of Mrs Braverman, The Police Foundation, 9 November 2023).
In January 2024, the Zionists and our government ministers also arranged a subsequent arrest of some of my Party comrades as they were distributing a leaflet and other political literature. Again, they were arrested without any cause whatever – this time under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000 which can be used to allege ‘support for a proscribed organisation’ – namely HAMAS. This provision may be invoked for so slight an act as wearing a watermelon badge, and any support for Palestine is equated with support for terrorism, not just by rabid Zionist activists, but the mainstream monopolist press, which has framed the entire Israeli-British-US genocide in Palestine as an ‘Israel-Hamas-War’. Priti Patel signed a decree outlawing Hamas in November 2021, by virtue of which it is a criminal offence to be a member of, or invite support for the group, with those found guilty facing up to 14 years in prison. ‘Labour’ home secretary Yvette Cooper, not to be outdone, infamously signed a similar decree designating the direct action group Palestine Action a terrorist group in June 2025, an absurdity that has now been confirmed by the Court of Appeal whose judges have completely abandoned the rule of law and their own common sense under the political pressure of the imperialist state.
When I went to the police station to secure the release of our comrades and enquire into their wellbeing, a group of around nine Met police officers again surrounded me, assaulted me, handcuffed me, and dragged me into the police station – Hammersmith Police Station, a designated centre of ‘anti-terrorism’ policing of British workers – leaving my then 4-year-old son on the street. Fortunately, he was immediately looked after by my friends and comrades – but I was ignorant of this fact when they seized me, also under the flimsy grounds of suspected breach of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Although never ultimately charged with any actual ‘crime’ – or indeed given any concrete reason for my assault and detention, the police reached out to my employer at the hospital where I work, and to the General Medical Council, in order to state that I had been “arrested on one occasion due to ‘racially aggravated’ charges of ‘breaching the Public Order Act’, and had been released with bail conditions that included ‘being forbidden to carry or display ‘Nazi symbology’ [as if I were some kind of card-carrying fascist!] and arrested for a second time ‘under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000’.” The police copied a letter to me they had written to the GMC disclosing their “statutory right/duty” to inform the GMC that I “might be placing patients at risk” (!!!) on the basis of my standing against genocide!
In response, the General Medical Council (GMC), again using the IHRA definition of antisemitism as its ‘lodestone’, then subjected me to a year-long witch-hunt in which my conduct – standing against genocide, against militarism, against imperialism, against fascism, and against Zionism – was alleged to be “bringing the medical profession into disrepute”, and therefore a potential reason to strike me off the medical register and stop me working as a doctor and a surgeon.
My Communist Party has made the decision that we will publish my full response to the GMC, together with their disgusting action against me that amounts to facilitation of the Zionist and government political assault on my rights. We will do so because this episode constitutes a concrete action of our British imperialist government standing with, aiding and abetting a genocide. In conjunction with other doctors persecuted under similar circumstances, I will undoubtedly take action against the GMC. But perhaps it is more pertinent to note that this was far from being the totality of the way in which the IHRA definition of antisemitism has been used to weaponise the state against pro-Palestine and anti-imperialist activists.
Policing of social media
While my case and the repression directed at the CPGB-ML started with the police and spread to encompass attacks on our comrades at work, within the NHS, using the professional regulatory framework of the GMC, using social services against our children, and the schools system and the framework of the Prevent ‘deradicalisation’ programme to confront young communist and anti-imperialist activists, the state in conjunction with Zionist groups Lawyers for Israel, Gnasher Jew, Harry’s Place, the Jewish Medical Council, Community Security Trust and others, has also stepped up the reverse process. They have started by policing personal social media, and then subsequently attempting to build up files in order to complain first to the place of work of pro-Palestine activists, and then to escalate, attempting to increase the strength of their cases by demanding the police take action in relation to alleged similar offences to those fabricated against our comrades – usually under the Public Order Act sections 5 and 18 and the various provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Thus policing of social media has increased dramatically over this period with the anti-Zionist and pro Palestine movement being the particular targets – while much is made in the press of the alleged targeting of the far-right: “Together, the 39 of 45 police forces that replied to the Daily Mail’s freedom of information (FOI) requests arrested around 9,700 people last year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988” (Cameron Roy, ‘Britain’s police state unmasked: Map reveals shocking numbers clapped in handcuffs over “offensive” social media posts’, Daily Mail, 15 November, 2025).
The cases the Mail chooses to highlight are those of anti-Palestine comments made by a retired policeman in Kent, and a couple who emailed their child’s primary school, as well as that of Graham Lineham, the comic writer who posted ‘anti-trans’ comments. They assiduously avoided any analysis of the bulk of the arrests, and it is quite clear that most will relate to this group. Thousands have been arrested over the last two years on pro-Palestine marches and for their social media relating to support and advocacy for the liberation of Palestine – not counting the ‘Defend Our Juries’ arrests, of well-meaning, mostly elderly, people trying to defend our freedom of speech and political opinion by holding up placards stating that they ‘support Palestine Action’ (but who for the most part have never financed it or participated in any of its activities, or done anything any reasonable person would regard as ‘support’).
State persecution of Palestine activists
There is a litany of cases against campaigners. David Miller is notable for his early targeting at Bristol University and his principled stand that led to a key employment tribunal decision that recognised “anti-Zionism to be a protected belief”, and asserted that it met the five criteria set out in the 2009 Employment Appeal Tribunal case of Grainger plc v. Nicholson so as to be accepted as a “viewpoint worthy of respect” and “capable of being upheld in a democratic society”. This set an important legal precedent – although it remains an indication of the level to which political policing exists in our society.
The cases of independent journalists including Kit Klarenberg, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abu Neimah, Sarah Wilkinson, and the cases of pro-Palestinian doctors including Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, Dr Rehiana Ali, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan and Dr Nadeem Crowe have been particularly prominent. All are different and we will not relate the full details of their cases here. Nor do I want to say either that I speak for them or that they would share my world view and understanding of their cases. But broadly they have been targeted for their advocacy of the Palestinian cause.
In Dr Abu Sitta’s case, his crime was being at the epicentre of a startling atrocity committed by Israel at the Ahli Methodist hospital in Gaza, performing humanitarian surgery when Israel dropped a J-dam bomb on the complex, killing over 600 people outright. As the world’s foremost imperialist leaders flocked to ‘lend their support to Israel’, he fearlessly spoke at a press-conference in the damaged hospital grounds, giving a real and true account of Israel’s crime and unfolding genocide. So powerful were his words and the images from the conference, that he has been elected the rector of Glasgow University in honour of his work. He has also been hounded relentlessly by the Zionist lobby and imperialist governments and is currently facing a THIRD GMC tribunal alleging that he is – “an anti-semite”. This practice of continually re-investigating and re-trying workers, making them subject to unending punishment by the very process of the regulatory bodies, all under the terms of the IHRA definition, is indicative of its true use and purpose.
Dr Rahmeh Aladwan is a young woman of Palestinian descent, raised in Britain. Dedicated, humanitarian, astute and intelligent, she studied medicine and trained to become an Orthopaedic Surgeon at Bristol University. For the crime of wearing a watermelon badge and supporting Palestine she has faced an escalating 2-year witch hunt. She was investigated locally at the Whittington Hospital where she worked and exonerated of any wrongdoing. Yet she was suspended and prevented from working during the year-long process. The punishment was in the accusation and the institutional response. Taking a principled attitude of activism against genocide, she took individual peaceful direct action against an Israeli Elbit weapons factory in Bristol. She has faced a barrage of repeated and unfounded claims and complaints to the GMC, which took her to an interim orders tribunal to decide whether she could practise pending the outcome of their ponderous and Kafkaesque ‘investigation’. She was then fully exonerated – whereupon Wes Streeting made a personal televised intervention, and the national monopoly press unleashed the full force of their fury and a personal campaign against her.
Wes Streeting and NHS England thus personally intervened both with the GMC and the ‘independent’ Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service (MPTS) which ordered an unprecedented ‘retrial’ of her case, without adding any evidence, but stuffing the panel of the disciplinary process (Interim Order Tribunal) and managing on cue from the ‘Labour’ Health Minster, an avowed Zionist, to suspend her ‘pending further investigation’. She has been arrested at her home by the police on the same spurious charges used against myself and our communist party activists, on no fewer than three occasions – all in order to add ‘weight’ to the disciplinary case. Her IOT suspension has garnered another wave of vitriolic press attacks. Her particular crime is to consistently call out “Jewish Supremacism” – Zionism. And to be a Palestinian. And not to understand, observe and acquiesce to ‘knowing her place’ in British imperialist society.
Streeting’s personal intervention in her case is indicative of the fact that, far from my case and our party comrades’ persecution being an ‘outlier’, it is rather a test case that points to a direction of travel and repressive strategy being adopted by the state.
IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF ‘LALKAR’ Dr Brar will take a closer look at the various Zionist lobbying groups applying pressure for anti-Zionism to be illegalised and persecuted.