Trusting Heroes? David Miller, Israel and Antisemitism

JVL introduction

David Miller has gained a growing following within the Palestine solidarity movement. His initial contribution was a pungent critique of the networks through which Zionist networks gain influence.

But latterly, as Jonathan Rosenhead’s article demonstrates, his contributions have darkened to the point where his interventions have become a danger to the very movement he claims to support.

You can also read a new JVL statement about Miller here.

RK

David Miller has achieved hero status among many on the left for his attacks on Israel. But increasing numbers of those who have been organising for decades for Palestine are coming to see him as a danger to the solidarity movement. Why?

With governments too supine or complicit to rein Israel in, the world-wide solidarity movement has a crucial role to play in pressing for the international sanctions Israel’s actions call out for. But its unity, at least in the UK, is threatened by the adoption by a growing section of our movement of the divisive and dangerous perspectives now being promoted by David Miller.

Dangerous? Divisive? I will back up the use of these adjectives a little later. But for now, just one example. In November 2025 as Zohran Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York was being celebrated by progressives round the world, what did Miller post up on his Tracking Power blog:

‘Zohran Mamdani is a Zionist and a servant of Zionists. If you want to keep getting mugged by shysters like him while they spit in your face and then stand on your shoulders, good luck to you.’

The pressure against expressing support for the Palestinians has become extreme. Individuals who defy it, who break through the wall of silencing, do so at the risk of exclusion, vilification, loss of employment and more.

Understandably those who endure this and remain standing are widely regarded as heroes of the Palestine solidarity movement. This, literally, is what has happened to David Miller. The weekly Crispin Flintoff Show regularly attracts many hundreds on the scattered UK left who since the defeat of the Corbyn project have few other shared political homes. And it is this constituency which has voted David Miller as one of their ‘Heroes’ for 2025 – alongside Julian Assange, John Pilger, Roger Waters, Pastor Munther Isaac and others. (It’s a very male-dominated list.)

When their heroes are attacked it is natural for the Palestine solidarity movement to rally round, circle the wagons. Antisemitism charges against them are all too common, manufactured by the usual pro-Israel partisan groups, and we know from experience how they deploy twisted logic and guilt by association, and portray anti-Zionism as antisemitism. The accusers are bad faith actors; we have seen all this before with Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, then Jeremy Corbyn and many others. The reflex of rejection, of disbelief, is understandable. But it also reflects wishful thinking. We need our heroes.

It shouldn’t need saying, but it does. There is a clear danger: the fact that allegations come from bad actors does not guarantee that they lack substance. If we find ourselves defending the indefensible it is the cause that we circled our waggons to protect that suffers.

We will come to why Miller’s hero status is now a problem for the left. But we should look first at how he earned it.

The Campaign Against David Miller

David Miller’s research focus for 20 years has been on how public understanding is manipulated by concentrations of power – corporate power, lobbying, public relations, propaganda. He set up Spinwatch as far back as 2005, as well as a related research wiki Powerbase.info, to focus on the networks of powerful individuals and institutions which shape the public agenda. His research focus explicitly included, but was not limited to, the Zionist movement.

Although he had arguably been a target of the UK’s Israel Lobby since 2011, attacks on Miller escalated in 2019 when he moved to take up a chair at the University of Bristol. Complaints were soon made by politically active Jewish students, in particular about a lecture in which he listed the Zionist movement as one of the ‘five pillars of Islamophobia’. The students were backed up in their complaints by precisely the network of pro-Israel PR and influence groups that he was researching, and a firestorm against him was generated among Parliamentarians and other public figures. The senior lawyer Bristol commissioned to investigate the complaints twice gave Miller a clean bill of legal health, but eventually the University sacked him anyhow. They have never explained on what grounds. It seems the heat was too great.

This was the most direct violation of academic freedom in the UK in living memory – a ‘tenured’ professor sacked with only a parody of due process. And sacked as a result of pressure from the Israel lobby for pointing out its existence. Small wonder that Miller was hailed by the movement as a victim. And then Miller appealed his sacking to an Employment Tribunal – and won. The UK Palestine movement had a hero.

By fighting this case David Miller has in effect, if not yet conclusively in law, established that anti-Zionist beliefs are a ‘protected characteristic’ under the Equality Act 2010. This opens up potential legal defences for many other supporters of Palestine. Jewish Voice for Liberation (then Jewish Voice for Labour), the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine and many other pro-Palestinian groups supported David Miller throughout the campaign to dismiss him, and celebrated his victory last year as a landmark for academic freedom.

So what’s the problem?

Jews are sensitive to antisemitic inflections that others might not notice. Some Jews undoubtedly detect antisemitic content on next to no plausible grounds. But there is, of course, a reason why Jews tend to be sensitive when it comes to antisemitism. Few British Jews are more than two generations away from the gas ovens.

The other reason that Jews notice antisemitism is that it is there. I am not talking here about the in-your-face Jew-hatred of the far fascistic right. (This is rare, if growing.) Antisemitism has been endemic across Europe for centuries, and Britain was no exception. It has left an embedded legacy of often unspoken assumptions about what Jews are like, part of the fixtures and fittings. Not all are entirely negative, but most are at least less than flattering, and all are racist in assuming that all Jews are the same. And after centuries of sometimes murderous persecution Jewish antennae have been tuned to expect and detect it. This sensitivity of course has been ruthlessly exploited by the official, that is Zionist, Jewish establishment to persuade much of UK’s Jewish population that critics of Israel are indeed motivated by antisemitism.

It was traces of this endemic low-level antisemitism that comrades in JVL thought we saw in some of David Miller’s public statements. We maintained our public support against the campaign to get him sacked; indeed in February 2021 I myself spoke at a meeting of the Defend David Miller campaign. But at a zoom meeting that same month he talked about the need “to end settler colonialism in Palestine, to end Zionism as an ideology, the functional ideology of the world”.

Really, Zionism? Other ‘isms’ are available. Not capitalism? Not imperialism? Not neo-liberalism?  For the majority of Miller’s audience, likely unaware of the fact that most Zionists are Christians, his centring of Zionism locates Jews at the plumb centre of the world’s problems and implicitly their cause.

Two members of the JVL executive committee, both anti-Zionists, engaged with him around that time in an effort to convince him that by appearing to assert the hegemonic power of Jews he was providing live ammunition to his enemies as well as damaging the cause of Palestine. It seems that we were not persuasive. Indeed since Bristol sacked him in October 2021 his public statements have become progressively more trenchant with a developing concentration on the role not only of Zionists, but of Jews.

Tracking David Miller

David Miller’s public pronouncements in the past couple of years have come largely in the form of social media posts, short video clips and contributions to video discussions (including sessions on the conspiracy-heavy US-based Stew Peters Show). Connected-up expositions of his position are infrequent. And the most startling and far-reaching conclusions often come as plain assertions free of evidence or context. Many of his postings concern Jews or Zionists. Or both – the loose structure of these postings frequently leaves open a range of possible interpretations.

Consider this. Earlier this year Miller posted on Tracking Power that colonists from round the world “should cease stealing their [the Palestinians’] land and homes and simply leave… the answer is to go home”. ‘Home’ is not specified – is it, for example, Brooklyn or Byelorussia? Does he mean the removal of all 7 million Jewish Israelis, or ‘just’ recent settlers? There is a slipperiness about resounding statements like this, and he chooses not to exclude racist interpretations.

Miller’s postings, whether by accident or design, often leave a crucial ambiguity. I have made an attempt in the next sections to disentangle his views on Jews from those he holds on Zionists.

Jews

Miller’s output has a large component of free-standing assertions about those who present themselves as supporters of Palestine. Especially if they are Jewish. Warming to his topic, in early March this year he posted “It is doubtful whether there are more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere. After all, how many Jewish martyrs have there been in the past 140 [sic – presumably 140 years] on the path to liberate Palestine from Zionism? How many Jews have engaged in military action against Zionist targets in that period? We can talk about ‘Jewish anti-Zionism’ once there are organisations at war with the Jewish state…”.  I am not aware of Miller having himself engaged in armed struggle. It seems that in his view there is a higher bar for Jews than for others. We Jews need to take up arms to prove that we are comrades; non-Jews get a pass.

David Miller’s assertions are often evidence-free. But there is counter-evidence. The spontaneously formed Jewish Bloc at UK national rallies for Palestine has sometimes been over 1000-strong. The Jewish Bloc’s day meeting on Anti-zionism and the Jewish Left on May 18 in London attracted close to 200 participants. In April in New York City over 1000 Jews mustered by Jewish Voice for Peace held a Passover service outside the offices of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), opposing the deportation of foreign protestors against Israel’s genocide. Not anti-Zionists?

A Miller obsession with the positions occupied by Jews in the world emerged in August 2023, in a series of posts full of statistical evidence that have nothing obvious to do with Israel or Zionism. The summation in his concluding post said

“The facts:

1. Jews are not discriminated against.
2. They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.
3. They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.”

The question that comes to mind is not whether his sums on ‘over-representation’ are correct. It is surely – why on earth did he spend his time in extensive statistical digging into where there were (by implication) too many Jews? The unspoken implication is that it relates to his concern over the hegemonic power of Zionism.

Zionism

As some kind of Marxist I understand much of what happens in the world as resulting from the acting out of tensions, contradictions even, in the overarching, one might say hegemonic, system that we inhabit. That system is capitalism. Critics can analyse its operations to see how its pernicious effects might be moderated, or resisted.

For Miller the irresistible power (which must nevertheless be resisted) that shapes everything is Zionism. I referred earlier to Miller’s February 2021 call “to end Zionism as the functional ideology of the world”. But from other Miller statements it is clear that he sees Zionism as more than a set of ideas, opinions and beliefs. For him this is an ideology that controls an empire.

Israel is one of the smaller states on earth in terms of population or area, and the US one of the biggest. On the most recent figures Israel’s annual GDP at just over US$50bn is one 500^th of that of the USA. Yet the logic of Miller’s postings is that it is the former that in effect controls the latter. In April this year he posted that “Zionism is a maximalist and eliminationist ideology which demands compete submission”; and again that “the Zionist Empire operates by penetrating and subverting Western states, societies and economies to serve its ends.”

Evidently David Miller sees these ideas, this ‘Empire’, that can demand ‘submission’, as staffed and operated by Jews in their own collective interest. Struggling to make sense of his often tweet-sized pronouncements it does seem that for him capitalism, Zionism, the Jews all amount to much the same thing.  We are back to those classical conspiracy theories about financiers, Rothschild, the ‘Illuminati’. He is certainly not afraid to at least skirt this poisonous terrain.

How else are we to understand “The answer is not just to be pro-Palestinian, whatever that means. The challenge is to be anti-Zionist, to materially contribute to the global struggle against Jewish supremacism. Your war is right where you are”. From 2024 he was tweeting repeatedly about ‘Jewish supremacism’, going as far as to anticipate the then impending UK General Election as “the night the British state… [would be]… totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists.“

On occasions he seems to verge on vigilantism: “the perpetrators of this genocide are all around you. Donors to the IDF and to other Zionist institutions may be on your street or in your workplace and certainly in your neighbourhood or your city”. In March this year he was more direct:

“Protests are not enough. Listen to our brothers and sisters in Gaza. Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let’s be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.”

This posting was one of 3 cited by the (so-called) Campaign Against Antisemitism in a private prosecution of Miller initiated in June 2025 for “using a public communications network to send messages of a menacing character”.

Substituting for the Palestinian people

Some of David Miller’s public pronouncements have recently expressed a certainty about what the Palestinian people ought to want. Non-Palestinian supporters generally express their support for the Palestinians’ right to their liberties but avoid telling the Palestinians how to struggle. This is another line that Miller now seems to be crossing.

The Boycott National Committee (BNC) is the body that in 2005, backed by the main organisations of Palestinian civil society, put out the call for global BDS targeted on Israel.  In a post last June Miller took lengthy exception to positions taken by the BNC and its most prominent figure Omar Barghouti. The topic Miller plunged into was a dispute within the Palestine movement broadly defined about whether groups advocating and carrying out direct action could be members of the (non-violent) BDS movement.

There are points to be made on both sides in this dispute – but my focus is rather on the typically aggressive and divisive nature of Miller’s intervention. Its flavour can be judged from its title – Sabotaging the anti-Zionist movement: the role of the BDS National Committee. The document he was pillorying, he says, “shows a level of betrayal which may be shocking to many.” He highlights what he says is “the sinister role played by Barghouti and the BNC in their attempts to squash effective responses to Zionist genocide in Palestine.” And his conclusion from this? That “there is clearly a need for an explicitly anti-Zionist movement to emerge to bypass the effects of the collaborationist Vichy regime running the BNC”.

At very much the same time Miller published a weighty article on Why is the British anti-racist movement weak on Zionism? In this piece he is critical of “significant sections of the Left” which are “inhibited from taking effective material action, in part because they are infested with Zionist entryists”. In the section of this piece that deals with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign he focuses on some statements made by PSC’s Secretary Ben Soffa more than a decade ago, rather than on the politically much more significant figure of PSC’s Director Ben Jamal. The Secretary of PSC has an administrative rather than a policy role, while Ben Jamal has been by far the leading figure in PSC’s evolution over the past 9 years. But Ben J is Palestinian and Ben S is Jewish.

That article was just the beginning. In May this year Miller published an extended and savage attempted character and political assassination of Ben Soffa which is clearly based on a bad faith political inquisition conducted by email. I say ‘bad faith’ because Miller is evidently not interested in Soffa’s responses except in so far as he can twist them to his overall purpose. Repeatedly Soffa’s actual words are claimed by Miller to say something more or different from their evident content; and things Soffa hasn’t said are treated as admissions of guilt (because he hasn’t explicitly denied them in his replies).

Here’s just one example of the Miller method. The title of his piece is UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign Official Admits Working With Former Israeli Spy. Soffa’s day job over several years was as head of digital organising at the Labour Party. He was appointed under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and fired during the Starmer purges. Towards the end of that period Labour employed Assaf Kaplan, an ex-Israeli spy (for reasons that have never been publicly explained). Soffa clarified to Miller that they were in different teams, the Labour Party had hundreds of staff, they had limited interactions, and that he, Soffa worked from home. In Miller world this constitutes an ‘admission’ (see his piece’s title) that Soffa worked with a former Israeli spy.

The article, in short, is a master class in intellectual dishonesty. It deploys the techniques of guilt by innuendo and association usually associated with the worst excesses of tabloid journalism. Those looking for comparators might consider the BBC Panorama programme Is Labour Antisemitic? that John Ware cobbled together to undermine Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to the 2019 election.

It seems that David Miller sees in Ben Soffa the enemy in full view – a Jew in a leading role in an organisation, PSC, that pursues a strategy of mass mobilisation rather than of ideological warfare. Proving himself right at least in his own eyes and of those who see him as a ‘hero’ seems to be more important than mustering the pressure, in the UK and more widely, to bring Israel’s reign of terror and illegality to an end.

A dangerous moment

Over the years since his sacking David Miller’s ambiguous statements with an element of Jewish subject matter have become progressively harder to explain away. It is as if there might previously have been an element of restraint while holding on to his university appointment seemed still to be a possibility – but this is of course speculative. We have the problematic statements but not access to the motivation behind them.

Unease has more recently given way to concern and controversy. Two substantial articles in the early months of this year were highly critical of David Miller’s online activity since he was sacked by Bristol. Tony Greenstein, a veteran and redoubtable critic of Zionism, has concluded that Miller is now a liability to the Palestinian cause. The Weekly Worker, like Greenstein formerly a staunch Miller supporter, describes his more recent output as counter-productive and divisive ‘rantings’. This article is a contribution to this reassessment.

David Miller’s fiery outspokenness, for which he has suffered both vilification and loss of livelihood, clearly speaks directly to some of those outraged: outraged at the silence of the UK’s political class, outraged at the muzzled media, outraged at the daily barbarities of Israel. It has gained him a growing following. Its members seem to find nothing to worry about in Miller’s increasing focussing of blame for the atrocities endured by Palestinians not on Israel and Israelis, but on Jews.

It is no exaggeration to say that this now poses a significant threat to the cohesion and effectiveness of the UK’s Palestine solidarity movement, which has been one of the strongest in the world. Miller is now mobilising his supporters against, not Israel, but the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. PSC is the central pillar in the architecture of organised support for Palestine in the UK. As just one example, without PSC the formidable series of national marches in solidarity with Palestine could not have happened.

Miller has anger in plenty. Anger however is not enough. What can we, Jewish or non-Jewish campaigners for justice, liberty and rights for Palestine, actually achieve that benefits Palestinians? Precious little while those who could stop Israel in its tracks look the other way or worse. But what we can do we must. We need to build the strongest movement for Palestine that can be achieved, till the revulsion at our government’s complicity overwhelms it.

To achieve that momentum requires mobilisation of a movement that must be broad if it is to be strong. In Britain we have such a movement. It consists not just of one organisation but of multiple groups small and large, both national and local, whose views resonate with the general public. It is this strength that is on display in the extraordinary and continuing sequence of spectacular marches, with a lusty Jewish Bloc as one of its components. It is this diverse movement on which we can and must build.

Israel’s supporters already seize gratefully on the rare examples of anti-Jewish placards to fabricate alarm about our ‘hate marches’. David Miller’s active promotion of the notion of a global behind the scenes Zionist conspiracy plays into their hands. Of course supporters of Palestine are frustrated at Israel’s unchecked violations. But nothing could be more damaging to the Palestine support movement than the spread within it of antisemitic formulations. It would threaten both our internal unity and our principled appeal to the wider public. And it is the Palestine cause that would suffer.