Summary
By July 2024, two-thirds of British Arabs surveyed reported experiencing racism and prejudice; four in five believed that political and media discourse around the protests was divisive; and 69% described it as outright dangerous, saying politicians and the media were "using the Palestine issue to fight an unrelated culture war." Within days, far-right Islamophobic riots swept across the United Kingdom. Britain's Arabs were not surprised.
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This paper summarises research and perceptions of anti-Arab prejudice in politics and the media since the start of Israel's war on Gaza and the West Bank in 2023. This is now widely recognised as a genocide by Palestinian, Israeli and other scholars, with the International Court of Justice also noting that a genocide is plausible.
- Political and media responses to Israeli attacks on Gaza left Britain's roughly 400,000 British Arabs feeling isolated and abandoned. The psychological toll on British Arab communities—particularly those with family in Gaza—has been severe.
- British Arabs believe that Labour and Conservative politicians mischaracterised protests and handled them badly. Conservatives in Government reinforced tropes that the display of Palestinian identity was somehow subversive or extreme (the Leader of the Opposition has since described them as “carnivals of hatred”). Even sympathetic politicians overwhelmingly framed the conflict in humanitarian terms or as a domestic Israeli concern.
- Media reports repeatedly dehumanised Arab men, women, and children with no accountability. Anti-Palestinian bias in the media was widely documented, principally by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) whose studies found that Palestinians have been “muffled”: their lives devalued and their words misrepresented, if not vilified, by media outlets, perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
- Media outlets routinely cast doubt on Palestinian casualty figures, a pattern examined in detail in Part 2. This false narrative presents Palestinians as unreliable chroniclers of their own fate, misleading the British public about the scale of the killing. At the time of publication, the Israeli army has accepted the Gaza Health Ministry's death toll of over 71,000 — a figure that remains a conservative estimate, excluding deaths from starvation and comorbidities.
- Political and media framing worsened social cohesion and was exploited by far-right actors to paint protesters as one or more of the following: Muslim, violent, anti-Semitic, or a threat to national security.
- In August 2025 a visiting Saudi student was killed on the streets of Cambridge. In October 2025 two congregants of a Manchester synagogue were killed in a terrorist attack. Political statements in the aftermath of the Manchester attack pressured anti-genocide protest organisers to cancel protests, made references to the perpetrator’s race, and implied a link between anti-genocide protests and racist/terrorist attacks. This polarises British Jews and Arabs and feeds the myth that Palestinian and Jewish safety are at odds — a position that is wrong, immoral, and corrosive to social cohesion.
- Political and media narratives continue to endanger British Arab communities. Incidents of anti-Arab racism have increased since October 2023, with a majority of those surveyed reporting direct experience of prejudice.
- These mischaracterisations have pushed British Arabs away from historic party loyalties. In the 2024 General Election, British Arab support for Labour collapsed, while the Conservatives lost 80% of their British Arab vote.
These are distinct failures with a common effect. Taken together, they have deepened the isolation of British Arab communities and put them at increased risk of harm. This paper is a first attempt to bring these issues to light.