There once was an academic who – struck by the representation of Palestine in her home country of Britain, and prompted by a festival of drama being run by a fellow literature academic – spent a few days trying to work out what was going on.

Over the past three years she had noticed that artistic representations of or by Palestinians, and expressions of support for Palestine, though numerous, had faced distinctive pressure.

In February 2023, the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital took down ‘Crossing Borders – A Festival of Plates’.[1]

This was an exhibition of twenty-one photographs of plates which had hung at the entrance of the children’s outpatient department at the hospital since 2012. The exhibition was the outcome of a collaboration between children of Chelsea Community Hospital School and children of Beit Lahiya Girls’ School and Jabalia Boys’ School in Gaza. For the Chelsea school this was one of several cultural collaborations with schools worldwide.

Three members of the Chelsea school staff had visited the Gazan schools when they reopened in 2012, after bomb attacks of three years prior in which thirty-two people had been killed. After the visit, the Gazan children made pictures, of which they emailed the scans to the Chelsea children, who transferred them to plates, which hung for a time at Leighton House, before photographs of them were turned into a captioned exhibition at the Hospital.

The exhibition was removed following a representation to the hospital that certain patients and their families felt threatened by aspects of it, although a subsequent FOI request revealed that no patients or their families had complained to the hospital.

Soon after Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers in October 2023, Conway Hall cancelled a book launchfor Jerusalem-based Jewish American author Nathan Thrall’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of Palestinian life under occupation, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, on instructions from the police, who cited security concerns.[2]

In the same month, Southwark Cathedral postponed for thirteen months the ten-year anniversary concert of the charity PalMusic UK, which supports the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza and the West Bank, citing ‘concern for the safety of the audience, musicians, and Cathedral staff’.[3]

In November 2023 the Arnolfini Theatre in Bristol cancelled two British Palestine Film Festival events: a screening of Farha, concerning a Palestinian girl coming of age during the Nakba, and a poetry event featuring the rapper Lowkey – saying that it: ‘could not be confident the event would not stray into political activity’, and that it lacked the resources to assess the risks. Both events moved elsewhere.[4]

Over a thousand artists then refused to work with the venue until, in May 2024, it apologised for what it called ‘anti-Palestinian censorship’: ‘It was a decision based on the information and understanding we had at the time, but now believe it was wrong.’[5]

In February 2024 the Barbican cancelled a London Review of Books-sponsored lecture by the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra entitled ‘The Shoah after Gaza’.[6]

It was later moved to St James’s Church Clerkenwell. The lecture, as later published by the London Review of Books,[7] explores the history of Jewish people’s revulsion from the use of the Holocaust to justify oppression, starting with evolutions in the attitudes of Jean Améry, pen name of Hanns Chaim Mayer, and Primo Levi, in the 1970s and 80s. Artists withdrew their work from the Barbican in protest at the decision.

In April 2024 the Home Theatre, Manchester, cancelled a show called ‘Voices of Resilience: A Celebration of Gazan Writing’, after accusations of anti-Semitism, citing concerns for safety and the maintenance of political neutrality.[8]

Nearly a hundred artists in an exhibition hosted by the venue then removed their work in protest, stating: ‘If political neutrality is the stance that HOME wishes to move forward with then we envision that your gallery walls will be bare, your cinema screens blank and your stages empty. Artistic expression is inherently political: you only need to look at the work in the HOME Open to evidence this.’[9] The event was later hosted at the Barbican and elsewhere, and the pressure to depoliticise art was that winter scrutinised by a festival of short plays at the Arcola, in which Palestinian and Jewish playwrights collaborated: ‘Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art’.[10]

In the summer of 2024 the Royal Academy removed two works from its Young Artists’ Summer Show, including a photograph of a pro-Palestinian protest placard, and a painting of a screaming woman under a swastika, citing concerns for the safety and well-being of the artists, and stating that a young person’s exhibition was an inappropriate environment for ‘volatile public discourse’.[11] Over seven hundred artists signed a letter in protest.[12]

In September 2024 the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre cancelled the five-week run of a drum’n’bass version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream after its preview night.[13] The production included a rap song sung by a trans mechanical that included the words ‘Free Palestine’, which also appeared on the set. The theatre first cited technical difficulties, then ‘other issues’. Over two hundred and seventy artists signed a letter in protest.[14]

In January 2026 the disability- and SEND-inclusive theatre group Razed Roof participated in a Holocaust Memorial Day service in Harlow. Their presentation included a list of what it called genocides: ‘Holodomor, (Nazi) Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Rohingya, Xinjiang and Gaza’, and referred to the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the last.

The next day the local council banned Razed Roof from all council facilities and venues, ended all in-kind support, and referred the group to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Charity Commission, all third party funders who made grants to the group through the council, and the Essex Police – on the grounds of their promotion of: ‘hatred, intimidation or extremist narratives’.[15] Razed Roof was investigated, exonerated by the police and Charity Commission, and returned to the Harlow Playhouse for the first time since January in April 2026.[16]

 

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Performances drawing attention to Palestine or the situation of Palestinians have carried far higher risks when performed outside the venues and ostensible sphere of art. Over three thousand supporters of Palestine Action have been arrested to date (mid June 2026). Their placards, reading: ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’ were speech acts carrying the risk of imprisonment, and intended – conceivably by the authorities as well as protesters – to generate the further, filmed performance of their arrest. Others have risked arrest by signing public letters in support.

Once in prison such performances become impossible.

 

Six of the Palestine Action hunger strikers:

(L-R) Qesser Zuhrah, Amy Gardiner-Gibson, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Lewie Chiaramello

Reproduced by kind permission of Prisoners for Palestine

 

The hunger strike of eight Palestine Action prisoners that started in November 2025 could be visualised only by photos of their pre-strike faces, but for the most part the mainstream media hardly mentioned them at all. They were the opposite of Kafka’s hunger artist; they fasted despite being hidden from view. The last of the strikers, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed, ended their strikes after certain of their demands had been granted on 15th of January 2026, by when Heba’s protest had lasted for seventy-three days.[17]

So the academic wondered what was going on.

 

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It seemed to her that the expulsions of performing human bodies from arts venues – and of protesting human bodies from public spaces, into prison cells, with an ever-smaller volume of space occupied by the bodies concerned – were on a continuum.

That the expulsions relied on a discourse – espoused by or capitulated to by many public and private institutions – which delegitimised representations of, or expressions of solidarity with, Palestine by appeals to political neutrality, equality legislation, anti-racism, and anti-terrorism. Many of the individuals expressing concerns about the events may have been motivated by the desire to oppose racism, and by fear. But the weight of legal and official support given to the delegitimising discourse acted in de facto legitimisation of racism and terror as practised elsewhere.

That the continuum of expulsion reflected the continuum of practice being asserted by the suppressing discourse: that artistic expression opposing violence, and peaceful protest against violence, lead to violence itself.

That imprisonment was the final, rhetorical delegitimization of representation and solidarity, attempting to render them not just unheard and unseen but – to those not yet in prison – unthinkable.

That the term ‘terror’ had become a weapon and a shield.

A shield for states, since Western governments led by the US and Britain had successfully resisted the attempts made by postcolonial and non-aligned governments at the UN in the 1970s and 80s to include states in definitions of terrorism, on the basis of the colonial logic that only those operating outside state frameworks could be terrorists; that states held prisoners whereas non-states held hostages; and that violence on the part of colonisers could be justified as defending civilisational virtue.

A weapon against the colonised, which contradicted international law by denying that victims of illegal aggression had the right to resist.

It struck her that the removal of representations of and expressions of solidarity with Palestine from public places was tracked by the removal of the word Palestine itself – from certain educational materials (as at the Open Universityin December 2025),[18] from museums (as in the Levant and Egypt galleries at the British Museum in February 2026),[19] and from the map of the world.

Which was why the academic had decided to call her presentation simply ‘Palestine’.

But what of Israel?

Was it right – the academic asked herself – that she had throughout her presentation only mentioned it once? Had it been responsible not to name any of the sources of pressure on institutions to deplatform solidarity with Palestine, some of which related to Israel? Had she reproduced the grammar of the mainstream media by referring to the oppression of Palestinians in the passive voice? Or had she, alternatively, effaced Israel, and the details of the concerns raised by its defenders (Israeli, Jewish or otherwise) to the institutions discussed? After all, some Jewish artists, however pro-Palestinian, had also experienced difficulties in performing their work.

But a consideration of proportionality, and of the use of state control, made visible to her a clear pattern of overwhelming oppression.

Moreover it occurred to her that there were three distinct kinds of effacement – of oppression, exculpation, and tact.

The effacement of oppression colludes with genocide by failing to mention, failing to give voice to, expelling, starving, torturing, or killing the victims. The effacement of exculpation colludes with genocide by failing to mention the perpetrators. The effacement of tact chooses not to name the perpetrators, in cases such as those mentioned above, in order to avoid the appearance of racializing blame.

Because it seemed to her that Israelis were themselves the victims of Western imperialism, having been used throughout modern Israel’s history to further Western imperialist interests, in a way which placed them, and Jewish people around the world, in increasing danger.

So she thought that she would give the last word of her presentation to a religious and socialist utopian, Barnaby Raine, a Jewish PhD student of social and political thought at Columbia University, who in an article of October 2025 distinguished between Jewophobia – which he found to be pervasive – and the ‘New Anti-Semitism’, which criticised Israel.[20]

In it he expressed his understanding of Judaism as identifying – and fixed upon – the deep change that is needed:

‘In Jewish Messianism, the yearning for a totally different future is built into identity in the present. We pray three times a day for that rupture, where the lion will lie down with the lamb.’

 

 

[1] https://cchs.org.uk/schoolnews/crossing-borders-a-festival-of-plates, accessed 16.6.26

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/7007612c-913b-40ce-a627-7df614948787, accessed 16.6.26

[3] https://www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/palmusic-10th-anniversary-concert-11th-october/, accessed 16.6.26

[4] https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/arnolfini-pulls-palestinian-film-over-political-activity-concerns, accessed 16.6.26

[5] https://arnolfini.org.uk/an-apology-from-arnolfini/, accessed 16.6.26

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/06/barbican-backs-away-from-hosting-talk-on-alleged-israeli-genocide-in-gaza, accessed 16.6.26

[7] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza, accessed 16.6.26

[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-68693086, accessed 16.6.26

[9] https://openletter.earth/home-open-exhibiting-artists-open-letter-f7c546c1, accessed 16.6.26

[10] https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/cutting-the-tightrope-2/, accessed 16.6.26

[11] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/18/royal-academy-removes-gaza-inspired-works-jewish-group-raises-concerns, accessed 16.6.26

[12] https://www.artistsunionengland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/AUE-letter-to-the-Royal-Academy.pdf, accessed 16.6.26

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/sep/17/manchester-theatre-cancels-shows-entire-run-over-gaza-and-trans-rights-references, accessed 16.6.26

[14] https://www.bricup.org.uk/news-2/artists-protest-over-censorship-at-manchesters-royal-exchange-theatre/, accessed 16.6.26

[15] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/essex-charity-funding-cut-holocaust-100000284.html, accessed 16.6.26

[16] https://www.yourharlow.com/2026/04/10/razed-roof-issue-statement-as-they-set-date-to-return-to-harlow-playhouse/, accessed 16.6.26

[17] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy1q98qyego, accessed 16.6.26

[18] https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/news/uncategorised/statement-from-the-open-university/, accessed 16.6.26

[19] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/feb/16/british-museum-removes-word-palestine, accessed 16.6.26

[20] https://salvage.zone/what-do-people-panic-about-when-they-panic-about-anti-semitism/, accessed 16.6.26