Why did it take Starmer so long to say ‘From the river to the sea’ is racist?

What was more shocking, the fact that the UK prime minister gave a straight answer to a straight question for the first time in recorded history, or the fact that he did so when asked about the hot potato of anti-Semitism? Either way, when a reporter from the Jewish Chronicle last week queried whether ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be viewed as anti-Semitic, Keir Starmer simply replied: ‘Yes.’ Stone the crows!

There we had it. No ifs, no buts. Whether Starmer intended to speak so candidly or suffered an unexpected glitch is anybody’s guess. But the consequences are only beginning to become apparent.

What, for example, does this mean for Sir Sadiq Khan? Only a few days earlier, the London mayor expressed a very different opinion on the ‘From the river to the sea’ chant, during Mayor’s Question Time. ‘I don’t think it’s anti-Semitic’, he said. ‘I think it’s all about context.’

Where had we heard that before? Ah yes, it was during that US congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses in December 2023. After being pressed on whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their universities codes of conduct, two Ivy League presidents, Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, claimed it depended on the ‘context’. They were both forced to resign, making Gay the shortest-serving head of Harvard in history.

So will Sir Sadiq now be compelled to fall on his sword in a similar manner? The answer, of course, is nope.

In Britain, where hyper-sensitivity towards everyday rhetoric has reached epic proportions, with 30 citizens being arrested every day for ‘grossly offensive’ online messages and untold numbers being slapped with ‘non-crime hate incidents’, slogans about Jews are judged by a different scale.

Now that the prime minister has endorsed the idea that ‘From the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic, however, Sir Sadiq has surely been outranked. And given the thousands upon thousands who intone the slogan every week, this should be something of a big deal.

The vast majority of those who continue to march against Israel despite the ceasefire, whether in London, Manchester, Edinburgh or elsewhere, enthusiastically indulge the provocative chant. If all of them, according to the prime minister, are indeed expressing anti-Semitism, a great many laws are being routinely broken, from the Public Order Act to the Equality Act and back again.

By Starmer’s reckoning, what we are seeing, in other words, is nothing less than massed criminal hate speech, week after week, with the police standing meekly by.

Does Starmer’s position on the chant remind you of anybody? Step forward Suella Braverman. As home secretary in 2023, she drew much controversy by referring to the Gaza rallies as ‘hate marches’ and accusing the police of ‘double standards’.

Given Starmer’s views, you’d have expected Sir Keir to defend Braverman, right? After all, then as now, ‘From the river to the sea’ was the mildest of the chants deployed by the Palestine mob. Other choice slogans include ‘Globalise the intifada’ and, more recently, ‘Death, death to the IDF’. So surely Starmer would have backed the then home secretary? Wrong.

Here’s what Starmer wrote in the Telegraph at the time: ‘Few people in public life have done more recently to whip up division, set the British people against one another and sow the seeds of hatred and distrust than Suella Braverman. In doing so, she demeans her office.’

How times change, eh? To be fair to the man, Sir Keir edition 2023 would have taken one look at the sea of Union flags at his own conference in 2025 and squealed about the ‘far right’. Flip-flopping has always been his modus operandi.

Nonetheless, I think the prime minister owes Braverman an apology. If ‘From the river to the sea’ is inherently anti-Semitic, then the Gaza marches are indeed hate marches, whatever the mayor of London may think.

So what is Starmer going to do about it? Surely he can’t just do nothing. Admitting to such mob displays of anti-Semitism and failing to stand up to them would be demeaning to his office indeed.

Jake Wallis Simons is author of Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.