The Employment Appeal Tribunal's confirmation that Dr David Miller's antizionism is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010 will unsettle a great many Jews, myself included on a bad day. A senior academic can now hold, and say out loud, that the world's only Jewish state is "racist, imperialist and colonial" and "ought therefore to be opposed," and the law will shield him from being sacked for it. Read baldly, that looks like a defeat.
I don't think it is, and here's why.
A functioning democracy has to protect thought and belief it dislikes, not just thought it agrees with. That protection stops a government, a university or an employer deciding which political views are acceptable to hold. It is not a concession wrung out of the law by antzionists; it is the law working as intended, for everyone, including people who think Miller is wrong about almost everything. Take away the principle that lets an ugly belief be protected, and you take away the same principle that protects a Jew's belief in Israel's religious significance, or in Jewish self-determination, from being treated as a sackable offence by a hostile employer. We should want that door to stay open, even when we hate what walks through it.
But, and this is the part that gets lost, it is a qualified protection, not a licence. Look at what the tribunal actually did in Miller's own case. His belief passed the legal test in large part because, cross-examined under oath, he said he was "not supportive of or open to the use of violence as a means of opposing Zionism", and the tribunal accepted that. Tweets he posted after October 7, including one tagged "#FromtheRivertotheSea," were kept out of the case precisely because they sat outside the narrower belief he had pleaded and defended. Belief is protected – the advocacy or use of violence to realise it is not, and the tribunal drew that line itself, carefully, on his own evidence.
This isn't a novel rule invented for Miller. Islam is a protected belief; a preacher inciting violence in its name is not exercising it, he's committing an offence. Belief in a united Ireland is protected; advocating a bombing campaign to achieve it never was. Antizionism, the belief that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, is now confirmed as protected in exactly the same way. Calling for, or promoting, violence to bring that about is not, and nothing in the Miller judgment says otherwise.
Which is why what I watched happen in Filton on July 23 worries me more than the judgment itself. At a blockade of the Elbit Systems factory, protesters chanted "Smash the Zionist settler state." I have a recording of the police Bronze Commander explaining, live and on the record, why no action would follow: "Antizionism has been held to be a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010… this is a view which can be legally heard and expressed where violence is not incited." He drew a direct comparison to the decision not to charge Bob Vylan over "Death to the IDF" at Glastonbury.
That is a misreading of the very principle it invokes. "Smash the… state" is not a description of a belief; it is, on any ordinary reading, an instruction. A chant doesn't become lawful merely because it sits downstream of a protected belief. The Miller litigation itself draws the line exactly at the point where expression tips into promoting violence. If officers are treating "antizionism is protected" as a blanket exemption for whatever language is used to express it, rather than asking whether that specific language crosses into incitement, they are getting the law wrong, not applying it cautiously. That is an error worth naming every time it happens, through the proper channels: complaints, the College of Policing, the courts if it comes to that.
Here is what should actually give British Jews comfort. If antizionism clears the bar as a protected belief, then Zionism does too, and without serious argument. The belief that Jews, like other peoples, have a right to self-determination in a state of their own easily satisfies the same test. And under the Public Sector Equality Duty, in the very Act that protects Miller, every police force, council and public body must eliminate discrimination against people for holding that belief, advance their equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between Zionists and everyone else. Not merely tolerate our existence at the edge of someone else's demonstration.
The Equality Act wasn't written to make antisemitism respectable, or to give an anxious officer cover for not wanting to pick a side. It was written to protect belief on all sides, and to hold a hard line at violence on all sides. Miller's win shouldn't be read as our loss. Applied honestly, and evenly, it's a floor under all of us. The only real question is whether the people enforcing it, on a picket line in Filton as much as in a tribunal room in London, are willing to hold that line, rather than quietly move it.
Gill Levy is a former Metropolitan Police officer
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