You’re already familiar with this story. On 7 October 2023, Hamas militants broke out of the Palestinian territory of Gaza (it’s penned in by an Israeli-constructed barrier to the north and east, a border with Egypt to the south and the Mediterranean  Sea to the west). Dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the attacks killed some 1,200 people, and involved roughly 250 individuals being taken hostage. In a swift and indiscriminate response, electricity, food, medicine and fuel were cut off by Israel to all two million people living in Gaza. Schools, universities, hospitals, homes and infrastructure were destroyed. At the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 40,000 Palestinians. Thousands more lie buried under the rubble, as yet uncounted. Since 7 October, an average of ten Palestinian children a day have lost one or both legs in Gaza, with amputations often taking place without anaesthetic. Holocaust scholars, human rights experts and the states of South Africa and Spain have argued that the ongoing war in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. I agree with them*.

The immense loss of life in Gaza does not come in a vacuum: since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and before the 7 October attacks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced, millions subject to Israeli military occupation and tens of thousands killed. Between 2000 and 2014, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Palestinians have accounted for thirteen out of every fifteen deaths in the conflict.

But in the West, a funny thing has happened. Despite obvious war crimes being committed during Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, media in the US and the UK became relentlessly focused on whether protests against these atrocities were antisemitic. Hours of airtime, and endless newspaper columns, were dedicated to the question of whether the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ was a call for the extermination of Jewish people living in Israel. The American Jewish Committee has condemned the phrase as ‘a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathisers’ in their ‘Translate Hate’ glossary; in the UK, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust slammed the slogan for ‘its insinuation of acts of murder against Jewish people’. Even when explicitly framed as a call for a two-state solution, the mere use of the words ‘from the river to the sea’ was condemned as antisemitic: a Labour MP, Andy McDonald, had the parliamentary whip suspended for saying ‘We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.’

Does the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ inherently call for the elimination of Jewish people in Israel, or threats to the wider diaspora? In a protest context, the slogan ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is generally meant as a call for Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, Israel and Gaza to have their full political rights. It’s incredibly common on pro-Palestinian demonstrations to see a Jewish bloc, where Jewish protesters chant the words along with their fellow marchers. Even interpreting it to mean, as the AJC does, that it symbolises ‘Palestinian control over the entire territory of Israel’s borders’ doesn’t mean that it’s a call to genocide – unless you believe Jewish people and Palestinians can’t exist as equals in the same country. Neither does it condone acts of murder against Jewish people in the diaspora. As Noah Zatz, Professor of Law and Labor Studies at the UCLA School of Law argues, it’s ‘bizarre to read a call to overthrow state-sanctioned Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine as an endorsement of genocide against Israeli Jews; a yet further leap is required to reach Jews like me living in the US, more than an ocean away in an entirely  different geopolitical context.’Indeed, in August 2023, a Dutch court ruled that the slogan ‘relate[s] to the state of Israel and possibly to people with Israeli citizenship, [but not] to Jews because of their race or religion’. In short, it’s not antisemitic, or a call for violence of any kind. 

But the truth doesn’t matter when ‘lived experience’ rears its head. Lived experience is one of those ideas that has become notably voguish in the last few years. In short, it refers to personal knowledge of the world gained through firsthand experience. That’s not a bad thing, and is a source of valuable information. Turning to lived, firsthand experiences of the world has led to important work being done in diverse fields. Lived experience has been the jumping-off point for research into the physical health impacts of chemical hair relaxers on black women, centring patient experience in mental health care, and arguably the #MeToo movement was the product of women sharing their lived experiences of sexual harassment and violence. 

But how this often plays out in practice is that lived experience is presented as an unassailable form of moral authority – when a person makes a statement about the world, and says it’s their ‘lived experience’, you can’t question whether what they’re saying is actually true. If it’s your ‘lived experience’ that a climate activist saying the word ‘cunt’ is threatening, or that an all-white yoga class is traumatic, who is anyone to say that it’s not? And if you’re identifying yourself as being victimised in some way, who can say that it’s not the case? 

The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust blamed ‘from the river to the sea’ for contributing to ‘our communities’ current sense of fear and intimidation’, and demanded that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service look into whether ‘this chant meets the threshold for any criminal offence’.By the time that these organisations were claiming that the slogan had created a climate of fear and intimidation in the UK, 3,785 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since 7 October – more than three times the death toll of Hamas’ war crimes earlier that month, and a toll that has since increased tenfold. I have absolutely no doubt that some people – in particular, those who view Israel as a guarantee of Jewish safety in the diaspora – are made uncomfortable by the chant. They may even feel threatened, and such emotions are sincere. But that doesn’t mean that they should get the final say on whether such speech is criminalised. What’s more, the prominence of this debate during a time of indiscriminate military bombardment of one of the most densely populated territories in the world tells us something disquieting: that the lived experience of a minoritised community can be weaponised by political actors to obscure brutal and bloody injustices. 

Sometimes, the claims of being threatened are so out of proportion that it’s difficult to take them seriously. Take, for instance, what happened at a prestigious scientific research institute in London. In March 2024, staff at the Francis Crick Institute organised a bake sale in order to raise money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. What ensued was warfare by the means of HR: management received a slew of complaints from people claiming that the ‘alleged peaceful bake sale’ had made them feel unsafe.No specific threats on the day of the sale were reported. And unless you suffer from a particularly aggressive form of diabetes, no right-thinking person should feel intimidated by a slice of lemon drizzle. But while the substance of the complaints were silly, the consequences were far more serious. Francis Crick staff were initially banned from raising money for Gaza, and told that sharing information about Gaza was in breach of the employee code of conduct. 

This isn’t the first time that Israel’s advocates have borrowed from the liberal identity politics handbook to clamp down on expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. Indeed, presenting Palestinian victimhood as a threat or insult to Jewish victimhood is a core tactic in the advancement of the cause. In February 2023, complaints lodged by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) resulted in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital removing a display of artwork created by Palestinian children. UKLFI claimed that the exhibition of decorative plates – which included depictions of olive branches, fishermen and daily life in Gaza – made Jewish patients feel ‘vulnerable, harassed and victimised’. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what’s more depressing: that people genuinely felt ‘victimised’ by children’s artwork, or that a lobbyist organisation would cynically leverage antisemitism in order to erase the public display of a project that humanises Palestinians. In either instance, it’s a move made possible by dropping what we consider harmful from material impact to a sense of being a victim. 

There are some who’d say that I’ve got no right to say any of this, that it’s up to marginalised groups to define their own oppression. But as Israel’s advocates have demonstrated, oppression can be defined in politically advantageous ways. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism (which has been adopted by the Labour party in the UK, several cities in the US, and according to the IHRA itself, thirty states internationally) is one such example. Nearly half of the examples of antisemitism given in the working definition relate to criticism of the state of Israel. Under the definition, it’s unacceptable to say that ‘the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour’ – even if you broadly object to the ideology of ethnostates. More than twenty Palestinian civil-society  organisations condemned the definition as an attempt ‘to erase Palestinian history, demonise solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality, suppress freedom of expression, and shield Israel’s far-right regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid from effective measures of accountability’. Which minority, then, gets to define the parameters of acceptable criticism of Israel? At some point, we’ve got to admit that identity is a worse form of authority than truth. 

How people feel is important. But it’s not as important as a genocide, ethnic cleansing or ongoing war crimes. It’s not as important as what’s actually happening. The problem for the left is that, by absorbing so much of liberalism’s obsession with subjectivity and the individual, we’ve made it difficult to argue that there’s a hierarchy of harm – and that the material reality outside of our own experience matters more than how we interpret it. 

This is an edited extract from Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar (Bloomsbury). Out now.

*Footnote: Throughout Minority Rule, I call the actions of Israel in Gaza since 7 October 2023 a genocide. At the time of writing, at least 1,410 Palestinian families have been wiped out from Gaza’s civil registry. According to Gaza’s health ministry, an additional 3,463 families in Gaza have lost all but one family member. The UN defines genocide as ‘a crime committed with the intent to destroy
a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part’.

It is my belief that Israel’s ‘concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza’ (see the Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, p.18), Israel’s use of ‘starvation of a weapon of war’ against Palestinian civilians (see Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, p. 2) and Israeli airstrikes on designated humanitarian zones (see here and here), constitute genocidal acts. Furthermore, it is my view (and that of South Africa’s legal team, given in the presentation of their case against Israel at the International Court of Justice) that statements made by Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former minister of defence Yoav Gallant demonstrate genocidal intent: see here, p. 60. I agree with UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese that an analysis of Israel’s policies, patterns of violence and their impact on the Palestinian people of Gaza meets the threshold of genocide (see Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. But beyond the legal case, I believe that we all have a moral obligation to call what’s going on by its proper name – even if international courts have yet to deliver their final verdict. You don’t need anyone’s permission to speak as your conscience dictates.