The NEU has a blind spot for Antisemitism

Each spring, the National Education Union (NEU) gathers for its annual conference. And each spring, education quietly takes a back seat to a different obsession: Israel.

The NEU is Britain’s largest teaching union, with over 510,000 members. It represents more than half of the profession, and wields significant influence – not solely in classrooms, but across national discourse in general. Despite this mandate, though, its leadership has consistently directed attention away from the British pupils it exists for, and instead rears its colossal head towards a relentless fixation on the Jewish state. The NEU has become the hard left’s favorite pulpit, and its annual motions often read more akin to international revolutionary manifestos than education policy proposals.

In this year’s international motions alone, Israel is mentioned 20 times. Palestine appears 33 times. There is, though, not a single reference to Syria, Sudan, Cuba or Yemen – nations where educational and human crises unfold daily away from the so-called ‘watchful’ eye of the media. China receives no mention, despite its repression of Uyghur Muslims. Only Russia rivals Israel or Palestina for attention, with 16 mentions. That is three times less than the combined topics of Israel or Palestine.

This pattern is not accidental, nor is it new. The union’s general secretary, Daniel Kebede, exemplifies the problem almost perfectly. In 2021, Kebede told a rally that it was time to ‘globalize the intifada.’ This is, contrary to what those who cry it beneath the keffiyehs that grant them anonymity, not simply a cry for ‘resistance’ or ‘uprising’ as its Arabic translation suggests. Instead, it invokes the waves of suicide bombings and knife attacks that terrorized Israeli civilians throughout the Intifadas: in the First Intifada between 1987 and 1993, around 200 Israeli casualties were recorded, while in the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, 1,100 Israeli fatalities were recorded, of whom 741 were civilians, and 8,000 were wounded.

To ‘globalize the intifada’ is a clarion call to import the very tactics that left a trail of Israeli blood, many of them civilians torn apart on buses, in cafes, at weddings. To invoke such ‘resistance’, while posturing as some sort of champion of justice, is to dance on the graves of victims in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, and S’derot.

If such rhetoric did not prove enough, his record extends beyond his speech. In 2023, he marched at a Palestine Land Day event beside Raghad Altikriti, chair of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which Michael Gove described as a British affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Sunni Islamist organization, whose self-stated aim is the establishment of a state ruled by shariah law under a caliphate – indeed, its most famous slogan is ‘Islam is the solution.’

Kebede also posed at a conference in Argentina with Saed Erziqat, head of the Palestinian teachers’ union, who in October 2023 following the massacres and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians into Gaza described Hamas’ slaughter as a ‘bright day.’

These are not isolated incidents by any means: the NEU leadership’s links to extreme anti-Israel figures are repeated and consistent. In 2021, Kebede attended a rally with Ismail Patel, a British Islamist activist who once visited Gaza to meet Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Patel has praised Hamas as a ‘resistance movement’ and, following the murder of Jewish tour guide Eli Kay in Jerusalem, expressed his views on the killer as a ‘martyr.’

Since the October 7 massacre and the war that resulted, the union’s ties with anti-Israel activism have intensified. Research by journalist Nicole Lampert reveals that NEU officials have appeared as speakers at 23 major pro-Palestine protests between October 2023 and November 2024. That is more than any other union, being nearly double the next most represented. The union’s logo, too, has appeared at demonstrations sponsored by CAGE International and 5 Pillars, both of whom are organizations frequently accused of promoting Islamism.

Meanwhile, the NEU’s official channels have offered no meaningful condemnation of Hamas. No statement of sympathy for Israeli hostages. No outreach to Jewish teachers and pupils, many of whom have reported a sharp rise in antisemitic abuse since October 7. In 2023, the Community Security Trust (CST) recorded a record 4,103 antisemitic incidents in the UK, a 147% rise from the year before. And schools are no exemption: in Jewish schools across Britain, security has been tightened. Jewish teachers in mainstream schools have reported colleagues celebrating October 7 as a blow against ‘colonialism.’ In 2021, even before October 7, at least 25 teachers from a Jewish school in London walked away from the union to protest its call for participation in pro-Palestinian rallies.

The union’s silence on these developments is conspicuous. Worse, it is tacit approval. The NEU’s internal culture appears deeply embedded in the pro-Palestine movement. In 2023, its LGBT+ division passed a motion accusing Israel of ‘pinkwashing’ – the idea that promoting LGBT+ rights in the safest country for homosexuals in the Middle East is a cynical PR ploy to distract from ‘apartheid.’ That same year, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UK, was given a standing ovation at the union’s national conference. Zomlot has called for the return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, being an effective demographic erasure of the Jewish state.

The demographic erasure of Israel is not simply a slip of the tongue. It is the endgame envisioned by many in the NEU, a ‘liberation’ that somehow never gets around to imagining what happens to six million Jews in a country the size of Wales. None of what is spoken exists in isolation, and what the NEU demonstrates is clear: we will not concern ourselves with the safety of the Jewish children in our care. We will, instead, use our institutional voice to vilify their homeland, and lionize those who would see it erased.

This is a betrayal of education itself, not to mention the Jewish teachers and students: essentially, the NEU’s solidarity ends where the Jews begin. A union culture that swaps pedagogy for polemic simply cannot be trusted if we are to believe in schools as spaces of critical thought. For the NEU to regain its moral compass, though, is not a time that has passed. For it to do so, though, it must begin with accountability: it teaches a generation raised in the long shadow of October 7, and it is time to recognize that fact.