A prominent UK legal advocacy group has launched formal legal proceedings against the British government over its policy urging all schools and further education institutions to adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, raising widespread concerns that the framework conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli state actions with anti-Jewish bigotry and erodes free expression for students and educators.
The Good Law Project, a non-profit organisation focused on public interest litigation, announced the launch of its legal challenge on Monday. Its executive director Jo Maugham emphasized that his group fully acknowledges the very real, documented rise in antisemitic hate across the UK and globally, and stands in solidarity with Jewish communities targeted by this bigotry. However, he warned that policies that blur the line between anti-Jewish discrimination and legitimate critique of Israeli government policies could paradoxically fuel, rather than reduce, antisemitism, while unjustifiably restricting the public’s right to robustly debate state actions in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territories and beyond.
The government’s push for schools to adopt the IHRA definition stems from the recently published independent review of antisemitism in UK educational settings led by senior education official and academic Sir David Bell. But the Bell report has faced scathing criticism from multiple quarters for methodological flaws, including a severely limited sample size for its headline claim about the prevalence of antisemitic incidents among Jewish students. The review claimed 60% of Jewish pupils had experienced antisemitism in English schools, a figure derived from a total student survey of 5,000 respondents that included just 92 Jewish participants aged 16 to 18. Of that small subset, only 70 answered questions about personal or witnessed antisemitic incidents, with 29 – equating to roughly 41%, or two in five, rather than the widely cited three in five – reporting such experiences. The Bell review itself acknowledged the low sample size required cautious interpretation, and even noted that explicit anti-Jewish attitudes had remained relatively stable, while critical stances toward Israeli state policy had grown more widespread in recent years.
Criticism of the IHRA definition predates the current school policy push: the framework was originally drafted in 2004 as a non-binding guidance tool to help institutions track antisemitic incidents, but 7 of its 11 illustrative examples of antisemitism reference actions related to Israel, leading longstanding free speech advocates to warn the document is poorly suited for use as a disciplinary or regulatory standard. Notably, Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the original IHRA definition, has repeatedly cautioned against deploying the framework as a legal or punitive instrument, warning it risks penalizing legitimate political speech. In 2018, leading human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson published a formal legal opinion concluding that the definition would in practice chill free expression by incentivizing spurious complaints against people exercising their right to criticize Israeli state policy.
Na’amod, a British Jewish anti-occupation group that has long opposed mandatory adoption of the IHRA definition, stressed in a statement to Middle East Eye that the community is fully committed to protecting Jewish pupils from harm and taking all forms of antisemitism seriously, but the IHRA framework fails to deliver on that goal. “Its examples conflate legitimate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jewish people, and in university settings it has overwhelmingly been deployed to censor speech about Palestinian rights rather than to protect Jewish students,” a group spokesperson explained. “In K-12 schools, this forces teachers to police children who discuss the Nakba or the humanitarian situation in Gaza, rather than focusing their resources on addressing real, tangible anti-Jewish racism. It also lets down many Jewish pupils who do not see their Jewish identity as tied to active support for the Israeli state.”
While the IHRA definition has now been formally adopted by 47 countries globally, the National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has slammed the Bell review’s recommendation to create separate, bespoke anti-hate policies for antisemitism distinct from existing cross-cutting anti-racism and anti-bullying frameworks, warning that such a structure risks creating an unfair hierarchy of victimhood for different marginalized groups facing discrimination. Both the Good Law Project and Na’amod are calling on the UK government to apply consistent, universal standards to all forms of hate speech and bigotry, rather than creating separate special rules for antisemitism that isolate Jewish safety from broader anti-racism efforts that benefit all marginalized communities.
Cross-party political consultant Gary Spedding, a leading expert on Israel-Palestine policy in UK education, argued that the Bell review is “sloppy, misleading and inaccurate” and represents part of a broader systemic effort to dismantle space for pro-Palestine advocacy, education and discussion of Palestinian history across the UK education system. He noted that for more than a decade, successive UK education secretaries from both major parties have pressured headteachers to enforce so-called “political impartiality” rules around classroom discussions of Israel-Palestine, following sustained lobbying from major pro-Israel advocacy groups including UK Lawyers for Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Community Security Trust. These interventions have had tangible impacts: in 2021, the BBC removed a seven-part educational video series about Palestinian history from its popular GCSE Bitesize learning platform following pressure from pro-Israel legal groups. Spedding pointed out that this regulatory regime creates a clear double standard: “Palestine is framed as a divisive partisan issue that triggers mandatory school neutrality rules, but Zionism and advocacy for the Israeli state are never treated the same way.” He added that dozens of well-funded pro-Israel groups, including StandWithUs UK, the United Jewish Israel Appeal and JNF UK, are regularly granted unchallenged access to UK schools to deliver educational resources, host speakers and arrange subsidized trips to Israel for students and teachers, with no equivalent government scrutiny of their advocacy activities. Teaching staff, meanwhile, report high levels of anxiety about covering Palestinian history or addressing student questions about Israeli state actions, for fear of facing formal complaints of antisemitism. “Protecting the space to openly and vigorously criticize the Israeli state’s appalling human rights abuses is not just a minor priority,” Maugham emphasized. “It is a non-negotiable requirement for any functioning moral, democratic society.”
In response to questions from Middle East Eye about whether the Department for Education had considered the well-documented warnings from the IHRA definition’s own author and free speech experts about its chilling effect on pro-Palestinian expression, a DfE spokesperson defended the policy, stating: “Antisemitism is a growing societal problem that extends into our schools and colleges, and no Jewish child or member of education staff should ever face hatred or prejudice in their learning environment. That is why we have accepted all 27 of Sir David Bell’s recommendations, including encouraging educational institutions to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. This framework, adopted by 47 nations and countless public bodies across the world, provides a clear, practical tool for teachers to identify and tackle antisemitic prejudice wherever it arises.”