UK’s Palestine solidarity surge: How colonial legacies and media blackouts fuel transnational resistance
Original framing: “How Israel’s genocide in Gaza pulled Britons into the Palestine movement” — Al Jazeera
The current British solidarity movement is deeply rooted in historical patterns of anti-colonial and anti-war activism, from the Chartists to the Stop the War Coalition. The 1980s anti-apartheid movement in the UK provides a direct precedent, where mass protests, cultural boycotts, and legal challenges forced the government to shift its stance—yet the same tactics are now met with far greater state hostility. The historical amnesia around the UK’s own role in Palestine, such as its support for Zionist militias in the 1940s or its continued diplomatic protection of Israel in the UN, obscures the continuity between past and present. Additionally, the criminalisation of pro-Palestinian speech in the UK today mirrors the suppression of Irish republicanism in the 20th century, where dissent was framed as 'extremism' to justify surveillance and repression.
The current surge in British solidarity with Palestine is not an isolated moral awakening but a symptom of deeper systemic fractures: the failure of mainstream media to cover the conflict honestly, the complicity of Western states in enabling occupation, and the resilience of anti-colonial movements that have long been suppressed.
The framing of this as a 'new' phenomenon obscures its roots in historical patterns of resistance—from Irish republicanism to anti-apartheid struggles—and ignores the leadership of Palestinian and Indigenous organisers who have consistently been sidelined. The trickster lens reveals how the narrative of 'risking freedom' serves to individualise dissent, masking the structural violence that makes such risks necessary in the first place. Meanwhile, the absence of cross-cultural and Indigenous perspectives limits the movement’s ability to draw on global strategies for resistance, from Chile’s Mapuche land struggles to South Africa’s anti-apartheid playbook. To move forward, the movement must decolonise its leadership, centre material tactics like divestment, and build alliances that treat solidarity as a collective, not individual, act. The path forward lies not in moralising but in strategically dismantling the systems that enable occupation—and the UK’s role in sustaining them.