British Palestinians feel unable to speak openly about Israel’s war on Gaza, the director of the British Palestinian Committee has said, amid what campaigners believe is a growing climate of hostility around Palestinian identity and activism in the UK.
Some were afraid to wear Palestinian symbols at work or display Arabic jewellery and keffiyehs in public, Sara Husseini said.
“We have many documented reports of Palestinians and allies being silenced or punished for wearing Palestinian symbols, watermelon pins, or speaking about the genocide,” she said. “Many colleagues across all kinds of sectors feel they are being gaslit while friends and families are being massacred back home.”
Speaking before Saturday’s national march in London commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) – the displacement of at least 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948 – Husseini said many Palestinians felt they were being treated not as victims of mass suffering, but as suspects whose grief had become politicised.
“Cruelty is the word I would use, particularly for colleagues who are from Gaza or have family there, knowing these atrocities are being inflicted on their loved ones day in, day out,” Husseini said.
“And then being effectively told: not only are we not going to acknowledge that this is happening to you, we’re going to disbelieve you, interrogate you, stop you from speaking about it, and if you do speak, we’re going to paint you as the problem.”
Born to a Palestinian father from Jerusalem, and an English mother from Leicestershire, Husseini has spent decades involved in Palestinian advocacy, including advisory work for the Palestine Liberation Organisation during the years of the failed peace process.
“The past two and a half years have been one of daily horror and fear as Palestinians have watched our families and friends massacred, starved and tortured,” she said, describing this period as the darkest chapter in Palestinian history since 1948.
Yet despite her fury at successive British governments, she repeatedly returned to the solidarity shown by ordinary Britons, describing the mass pro-Palestine marches as a source of emotional survival for many Palestinians.
“We feel a great deal of solidarity from the British public,” she said. “What we’ve seen is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of conscience from all walks of life and all backgrounds who have marched, signed petitions, written to their MPs and protested our government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.”
A recent Unrwa dispatch said 111 Palestinians, including at least 18 children and seven women, were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in April alone, bringing the total number of Palestinian deaths since the war began to 72,619. The UN agency said emergency tents for displaced people were now infested with disease-carrying rodents, causing an increase in skin infections.
An estimated 700 Palestinians have managed to flee Gaza for the UK. “Palestinians who came over during this period have had to find specialist nutritional support because they had been starved and couldn’t just take food on normally when they first arrived,” Husseini said. “That’s not to mention the trauma, the psychological damage, that will seep down through generations.”
The Nakba march comes amid mounting tensions over the future of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Britain, with some Jewish groups and politicians calling on ministers and police to impose tighter restrictions on marches.
Husseini rejected descriptions of the protests as “hate marches”, stating: “It’s actually the complete inverse: it’s a protest against the most hateful acts possible: war and genocide.”
Husseini said she attended the protests with her two young children. “We walk alongside people of all faiths, all communities, including 13 organised Jewish blocs. These are all Britons of conscience protesting against the killing of children, the bombing of a captive population, the forced starvation of human beings,” she said.
“I think the answer to why they’re being very clearly misrepresented as hate marches is to undermine the hundreds and thousands of people who are turning up on the street. It’s to distract from the government’s complicity in these crimes.”
While the UK formally recognised a Palestinian state last year, some Palestinians hoped Keir Starmer’s government would take a more robust stance in defence of Palestinian rights.
Husseini said engagement with Palestinians in Britain often amounted to little more than “photo opportunities”. She pointed to Starmer’s visit to a Cardiff mosque shortly after his “unacceptable” 2023 LBC interview, in which he appeared to defend Israel’s right to withhold power and water from Gaza.
“This is part of stirring up communal tensions and a wider culture-wars mentality that frames it as Muslims against Jews,” she said. “That framing is just not right.”
Husseini said she was not surprised by commentary in the mainstream British media casting Palestinian identity itself as suspicious or extremist. “This is part of a broader attempt to erase and invisibilise Palestinians,” she said. “It goes hand in hand with attempts to dehumanise Palestinians, and dehumanisation is a prerequisite for genocide.”
Still, she said, she remained hopeful, linking her people’s struggle to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. “Our freedom is ultimately inevitable.”
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