Was Starmer So Bad for the Jews and Israel?

He cleaned Labour of antisemitism, then guarded Britain’s Jews with record funding — but only after the fires, the stabbings and Heaton Park. A verdict on Keir Starmer as he leaves office.

Barring surprises, Keir Starmer will leave Downing Street on Monday. He announced his resignation on 22 June; he is expected to depart on 20 July, with Andy Burnham poised to succeed him. In his resignation speech, Starmer cast “ripping out the poison of antisemitism” from Labour as one of his defining achievements.

That was not self-flattery. On that narrow but morally central question, he had a serious case.

He inherited a party that the Equality and Human Rights Commission had found responsible for unlawful harassment and discrimination against Jews. He put Labour through a binding action plan, tougher complaints procedures, consultation with Jewish stakeholders and a prolonged monitoring process — one the EHRC concluded in 2023 only after confirming the necessary reforms had been implemented. Mainstream Jewish bodies noticed the change early. In June 2020, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, CST and the Jewish Labour Movement said matters were “moving in the right direction.” After Labour’s 2024 victory, the Board said Starmer had transformed a party once “riddled with antisemitism.”

But that credit sits beside a harsher truth. While Labour became at least a little bit safer for Jews, Britain became more frightening for many of them. On CST’s latest revised figures, annual antisemitic incidents stood at 4,298 in 2023, 3,556 in 2024 and 3,700 in 2025. CST’s 2025 report found that anti-Zionist motivation featured in 48 percent of incidents, and that “Zionist” or “Zionism” featured in 462 incidents, often as a euphemism for “Jew” or “Jewishness” or alongside other antisemitic sentiment. The same report records the fatal attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur as the first lethal antisemitic terror attack in Britain since CST began recording incidents in 1984.

So was Starmer bad for the Jews? The honest answer is more uncomfortable than either his admirers or his critics would like.

Credit where it is due

Starmer did more than issue pieties. He marginalised Jeremy Corbyn — who lost the Labour whip in 2020 and was barred from standing as a Labour candidate in 2024. He rebuilt institutional relations with the Board of Deputies, the JLC, CST and Labour Friends of Israel. In office, he re-established a cross-government Antisemitism Working Group with communal representation, and opened formal fronts in schools, universities and the NHS: a March 2026 review into antisemitism in schools and colleges, a May 2026 call for universities to publish antisemitic incidents and their responses, and Lord Mann’s NHS review, whose recommendations for the health department and NHS England were accepted in full, subject to consultation.

Nor should physical protection be sneered at. His government provided record security funding: a £25 million emergency package after the April 2026 stabbing in Golders Green, then £251.1 million over three years for a sustained policing response, on top of a record £32.4 million protective-security grant for 2026–27. That money will fund more than 500 additional officers, antisemitism training for all police in England and Wales, a central online hate-crime hub and expanded counter-terror capability. CST called the increase “not a moment too soon.” The JLC welcomed it — but added, tellingly, that “security and policing alone cannot address” record anti-Jewish hatred.

That, in miniature, is Starmer’s entire Jewish record in government: real measures, real funding, real seriousness — but usually after events had become impossible to deny. The No. 10 antisemitism forum, the schools review, the university reporting call and the fast-tracked measures against state-backed proxies all came after Heaton Park — and most after the arson attacks in London and the Golders Green stabbing. He protected institutions more confidently than he changed the atmosphere around them.

A country still becoming harsher for Jews

The CST data show why so many British Jews felt that distinction acutely. In 2025 there were 170 assaults, 196 threats, 217 incidents of damage and desecration, and 3,086 incidents of abusive behaviour; in 2024, the comparable figures were 202 assaults, 251 threats and 2,917 incidents of abusive behaviour. Synagogue-related incidents hit a record 227 in 2025, up from 222 in 2024, while university-related incidents — at their second-highest ever total in 2024 — fell by 41 percent in 2025. School-related antisemitic incidents reached 204 in 2025 — double the levels typically seen before 2023.

CST is careful on an important point, and so should we be: not every pro-Palestinian protester, anti-Israel slogan or harsh criticism of an Israeli government is antisemitic. CST explicitly distinguishes between anti-Israel advocacy and anti-Jewish hate. But it also says that shouting “Free Palestine” at Jews because they are Jews, driving Palestinian-flagged cars through Jewish neighbourhoods to harass residents, or sending anti-Israel material at random to synagogues can constitute antisemitic intimidation.

That is exactly where Starmer’s government too often seemed hesitant: not in condemning abstract antisemitism, but in naming the moment when political mobilisation curdled into collective blame and menace directed at Jews.

Reuters captured the community mood after the Golders Green stabbings: Jews describing themselves as frightened, angry and wondering whether they needed to leave Britain; victims and residents demanding action on the “root causes” rather than another round of official sympathy. Starmer himself admitted in May 2026 that Jewish communities were asking whether Britain was safe for them. He was prepared to guard shuls, schools and ambulances. He was much less willing to conduct a sustained political argument against the anti-Zionist culture that had made such guarding normal.

Israel pushed to arm’s length

On Israel, the chronology is plain. Within weeks of taking office, Labour restored UK funding to UNRWA and dropped the previous government’s challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction over warrants sought against Israeli leaders. In September 2024 it suspended around 30 of roughly 350 arms-export licences to Israel, while exempting F-35 programme licences. In May 2025 it suspended negotiations on an upgraded free-trade agreement and put cooperation under the UK–Israel 2030 roadmap under review. It then sanctioned Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in June 2025, formally recognised Palestine in September 2025, and in June 2026 announced a fourth sanctions package against networks enabling settler violence.

To say this damaged the relationship is not to say every step was illegitimate. Governments may restore aid, sanction violent incitement or criticise Israeli operations without being anti-Israel. Starmer continued to insist that Israel’s security remained a British interest. His government said recognition of Palestine was “not a reward for Hamas,” demanded Hamas’s disarmament and exclusion from governance, condemned Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel, and moved in its final week to ban support for the IRGC and an Iran-linked proxy after attacks on Jewish and Israeli-linked sites in Britain. Trade did not collapse: official UK figures still put bilateral trade at £6.0 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2025.

Still, the overall direction was unmistakable. Britain’s own ICJ submission in 2025 noted that the UK had voted for UN resolution 79/232 while insisting the vote did not detract from its commitment to Israel’s security. That caveat was revealing. Under Starmer, Israel increasingly looked less like a democratic ally to be defended and more like a diplomatic liability to be managed, rebuked and progressively distanced. Recognition of Palestine was tied to conditions on Hamas and a two-state future, yes — but it was not ultimately conditioned on a negotiated settlement, the release of all hostages, or any reciprocal Israeli–Palestinian agreement.

Why the minimum became the method

The most persuasive explanation is not malice but method. Starmer’s record suggests a lawyer’s instinct for process, institutional cover and late intervention once the evidential threshold had become overwhelming. That style helped him clean up Labour after Corbyn. In government, it produced a reactive politics: funding after the stabbings, reviews after scandals, stronger language after arson, legislation after Iran-linked proxy attacks. At the same time, Labour’s bruising experience with Muslim voter anger, pro-Gaza independents and internal rebellions over ceasefire policy created strong incentives to be visibly tougher on Israel in public.

So the final judgment should be balanced — but clear. Starmer was not Jeremy Corbyn. He was not personally antisemitic. He did not deliberately abandon British Jews, and he deserves lasting credit for rescuing Labour from the moral collapse of the Corbyn years.

But in office he too often settled for containment rather than confrontation: ready to protect Jews as a vulnerable minority, less comfortable defending Jews as a people whose mainstream communal life includes an open attachment to Israel and Zionism.

He removed antisemitism from Labour’s leadership. He leaves office without having removed the fear it unleashed from the lives of British Jews.