Does Britain’s largest teaching union have a problem with Jews? Accusations that the National Education Union (NEU) harbours anti-Semitism date back many years. But it is the organisation’s response to the conflict in Gaza that has made this question impossible to ignore.
Jewish members have long complained that the union fails to protect them from anti-Semitic abuse. In 2021, 25 teachers from the Jewish Free School in London quit the union after the then leaders addressed rallies calling for the abolition of Israel. ‘The NEU has picked a side which is not only anti-Israel but indifferent to Jews. I am glad I am no longer part of this union’, said one of the teachers who resigned. Three years later, retired teacher Peter Block was heckled off stage at the NEU’s annual conference after he challenged a motion blaming Israel for the war in Gaza. Block claimed the union had become a ‘hostile environment’ for Jews.
It has emerged this week that a secondary-school teacher from London, a member of the NEU for 19 years and a branch representative for a decade, has left the union. ‘I will not remain part of an organisation whose leadership has created and sustained an environment that is hostile to Jewish members, in breach not only of moral responsibility but of the law’, his resignation letter declared. ‘You have fostered a culture where Jewish voices are delegitimised and silenced’, he continued. ‘That culture is nothing less than institutional anti-Semitism.’
These devastating accusations against the NEU are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. They have prompted the union to go to the extraordinary length and vast expense of employing a top lawyer to investigate allegations of ‘institutional anti-Semitism’, The KC has been brought in as part of a wider inquiry into ‘how debate of contentious issues is handled within the union’ and ‘the processes for member complaints’. Apparently, this internal investigation began more than a year ago but was not made public until this week.
Inquiries are all well and good, but no one needs a law degree to spot that within the NEU, antagonism towards Israel has long since tipped over into outright anti-Semitism.
This week, attention has focussed on the cancellation of a planned visit to a Bristol secondary school by the Jewish MP and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Damien Egan, after plans for protests and potential safeguarding concerns emerged. As spiked has noted, the school capitulated to activists from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the NEU. It gave in to bigots who argued that Jewish MPs who support Israel are ‘not welcome in our schools’. A pastoral support worker at a school in the same multi-academy trust told a local news outlet that people had been talking, in private WhatsApp groups, about ‘wearing keffiyehs to work that day’ and about ‘the work that members could do with students in preparation for that visit’.
Talk of ‘working with students’ takes on a new significance when set against the NEU’s plans, announced last spring, to train members in how to ‘advocate for Palestine’ and to bring the ‘Palestinian struggle’ into schools. A workshop had been arranged by the union to instruct teachers in ‘educational approaches that capture the history of the Palestinian struggle’ and which are ‘aimed at strengthening the movement for Palestinian liberation’. In this context, campaigning against a planned visit from a local MP becomes a means for activists to bring ‘the Palestinian struggle’ into the classroom and offer children a one-sided and negative account of Israel’s history.
A previous success had emboldened Bristol’s NEU members to take action in response to Egan’s visit. Last July, Cabot Learning Federation (CLF), the multi-academy trust that runs the Bristol secondary school, shamefully stopped a speaker from an Israeli-owned cybersecurity company from addressing its summer conference after pressure from union members. Michaela Wilde, the NEU branch secretary for the schools in the CLF, boasted about having had both speakers turned down: ‘Don’t mess with NEU in CLF, we are not here to play’, she wrote on Facebook. Meanwhile, Bristol NEU also took to Facebook to celebrate Egan’s cancellation, ‘as a win for safeguarding, solidarity, and for the power of the NEU trade-union staff group, parents, and campaigners standing together’.
Even before this, on the very day after the 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel, Saima Akhtar, the trust’s inclusion and diversity co-ordinator, took to social media to tell her followers that ‘Palestine is fighting back’ in a ‘war against [its] oppressors’. The day after thousands of people were slaughtered at the hands of Hamas, Akhtar instructed people to ignore ‘media attempts to paint Israel as a victim’.
Despite the pogrom in Israel and the subsequent sharp rise in reported incidences of anti-Semitism in British schools, at no point has the NEU reached out to support Jewish teachers or offer solidarity to Jewish union members. But perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, Daniel Kebede, head of the NEU, was himself filmed addressing a rally organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2021, and proclaiming: ‘It’s about time we globalise the intifada.’
The bigotry in the NEU is there for all to see: no expensive lawyers or lengthy inquiries are needed. The problem is that from Kebede down, so many union members are consumed by loathing of Israel, they are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge what’s in plain sight.
Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.
