The UK government’s terrorism watchdog has criticized British police for not properly enforcing the law against racial hatred when it comes to Israelis, fueling antisemitism.
“The demonization of Israelis matters because it is a vehicle for hatred of Jews,” the appointed independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, said Tuesday in a speech at an event organized by the Policy Exchange think tank.
Hall said that police have failed to enforce anti-hate laws, which also apply to incitement against Israelis.
“My perception is that if you don’t deal with anti-Israeli hatred, you leave wiggle room for those who indulge in antisemitism but formally disavow it,” he explained. “Once hatred to Israelis is tolerated, then it’s carried around like a flame.”
“I do not believe the law is being enforced as it should be,” he said. “I have lost count of the times that hatred against Israelis has been stirred up on British streets.”
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“Ultimately, police have got to be responsible for the safety of their citizens, and I include expressly within that Israeli citizens as well as Jews living amongst them,” he declared.
Screen capture from video of the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, during an event on January 13, 2026. (YouTube)
British Jewish organizations have long been asking the country’s government and law enforcement to take more decisive steps against anti-Israel protesters, whom they say are fueling unchecked antisemitism across the UK.
Hall cited Public Order Act 1986, which bans inciting racial hatred against a nationality, saying that targeting Israelis is a violation of that law.
Police prioritized maintaining public order over applying the law, in particular when pro-Palestinian protests saw chants of “death to the IDF,” “Globalize the intifada,” and “From the River to the Sea,” Hall said, arguing that failure to apply the law posed a national security risk.
Stirring up racial hatred “is a vital precursor offense to deal with some of the public hatred we’ve seen on our streets before it leads to violence or even terrorist violence,” he said.
“Israelis are a group like any other whose individual members, like members of any other group, deserve protection,” he cautioned. “We have lost our collective senses if, as a society, we permit the demonizing of holders of any nationality who live in our tolerant and open society.”
Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters hold placards and wave flags in central London, on October 11, 2025. (HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP)
Noting the spread of anti-Israeli violence around the world, including attacks in London, Hall said, “Hatred expressed to Zionists invites hatred to every Israeli, and to Jews worldwide.”
“The silence from swaths of academia and international rapporteurs at the risk of stigmatizing Israelis and Jews is deafening,” he said.
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, a group of lawyers and politicians who focus on human rights, rejected Hall’s remarks, The Guardian reported.
“Hall’s conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is deeply problematic, a well-trodden line that erases the existence of the many anti-Zionist Jewish people at pro-Palestine marches,” the group’s head of public affairs and communications, Jonathan Purcell, said.
Months of rising fears among the UK’s Jews culminated in October of this year with the Manchester Yom Kippur terror attack, when a man drove into pedestrians outside a synagogue before exiting the vehicle and attacking people with a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed in the attack, Daulby by a gunshot fired by a police officer trying to take down the terrorist.
Then, in December, three men were convicted for plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community in England.
Britain’s King Charles III looks at bouquets of flowers during a visit to Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Crumpsall, north Manchester, on October 20, 2025. (Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP)
According to figures published by the Community Service Trust, a Jewish security charity, antisemitic incidents have been soaring in Britain since the war in Gaza began with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel. Within days of the attack, and even before Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, there were mass anti-Israeli protests in London. Rallies continued throughout the war, which halted in October with a US-brokered ceasefire.
In his speech, Hall also commented on the police ban of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a UK soccer game last fall. Birmingham, the host city and home to a significant Muslim population, had been the scene of regular pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rallies over the two years of the Gaza war.
The contentious decision to ban the Israeli fans from a match against Aston Villa on November 6 was initially made after the West Midlands Police advised the group responsible for issuing safety certificates for the game to ban Maccabi’s supporters over “public safety concerns.”
Hall said that if West Midlands police were aware of intelligence that Islamists planned to attack the fans, they should have acted against the threat as required by law.
“If, according to intelligence held by the West Midlands police, local Islamists were arming themselves and preparing to seek out and attack fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, that can only have been because of their hatred to Israelis,” he said.
In December, police admitted to lawmakers they used fictitious evidence to justify the ban, and then apologized to the local Jewish community after wrongly telling the parliamentary committee that the community had supported the ban.
Screen grab taken from the UK’s Parliament TV of Chief Constable of West Midlands Police Craig Guildford giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on soccer policing, January 8, 2026 (House of Commons/PA Images via Getty Images)
UK Jewish groups have called for the ouster of West Midlands Police’s chief constable, Craig Guildford, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry has urged “accountability” over the affair.
Last week, a British parliamentary tribunal increased scrutiny of the police department’s decision-making, following widespread criticism. At the tribunal, chair Dame Karen Bradley accused the local police force of “scraping” to find a reason to justify the ban.
On Monday, Guildford wrote to the committee to say that some information used in the police assessment, which cited a nonexistent Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer game against the London club West Ham, was automatically generated using artificial intelligence that is part of the Windows operating system.
