27.11.2025
Wood for the trees
Fantasies about a Jewish empire have nothing to do with anti-Zionism, argues Tony Greenstein. In fact they can only help Zionism by echoing anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracy theories
David Miller was professor of sociology at Bristol University when he was dismissed in October 2021 after allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by Zionist students - one of whom, Sabrina Miller, infiltrated one of his lectures.
Other partners in crime included the president of the Bristol Jewish Society, Nina Freedman, and her successor. Edward Isaacs, both of whom later became president of the Israeli embassy-funded Union of Jewish Students. In 2021 Isaacs threatened to sue me for calling him a liar. But when I repeated my accusation he backed off!
The whole Miller affair was coordinated by Zionist lobby groups such as the Community Security Trust and UJS. Miller’s expertise was in corporate and political power networks, including the Zionist lobby - which took particular exception to his suggestion that Zionism was one of the five pillars of Islamophobia.
When Miller was being attacked by the Zionists, we supported him. The decision to sack him was an outrageous attack on free speech on the subject of Palestine by an institution that had been cowed and intimidated by a false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. Over a hundred MPs and peers - many of them overt racists and Islamophobes, like Baroness Cox and Bob Blackman MP, but also including the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas - called for Miller to be dismissed. The result was that Bristol University capitulated despite him having been cleared of anti-Semitism by two QCs.
David’s victory at the Employment Tribunal in February 2024, which found that he had been wrongfully and unfairly dismissed and directly discriminated against on the grounds of religion or belief, was welcome.1 The decision established that anti-Zionist views qualify as a protected belief under the UK Equality Act 2010.
However, Miller’s focus on the Zionist lobby has resulted in him beginning to be unable to see the wood for the trees. He is unable to put the power and influence of the Zionist lobby in perspective. No longer is Israel the attack dog of US imperialism: rather it is Israel which is in control of imperialism. Indeed it has become the major imperialist power!
Miller’s political regression can be traced to a tweet in August 2023, where he made three points:
1. Jews are not discriminated against.
2. They are overrepresented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.
3. They are therefore in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.
Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain or Europe. Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice. I could even accept his observations on Jewish ‘overrepresentation’ in positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is undoubtedly true.
However, Miller’s third point - that this enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed - was wrong. If Jews in powerful positions discriminate against others, they do it on behalf of the organisations they are a part of, not as collective Jews.
Miller’s political degeneration was then rapid. On September 21 2024 he retweeted a thread by an open Nazi, Aiden Hunter. Hunter had previously called for the “eradication” of Jewish people as a “moral and racial duty”. In the same tweet Miller copied an article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly, entitled ‘On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain’.
Mankind Quarterly was established in 1960 in order to oppose civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist journal’ and by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as a “pseudo-academic journal ... a vehicle for scientific racism”.
It only takes a minute of research on the internet to establish who Richard Lynn, Mankind Quarterly and Aiden Hunter are. And this casts a shadow over the rest of Miller’s research - especially his conclusions.
When I first saw the tweet, it was obvious that it smacked of the racial sciences. Why was ‘Jewish intelligence’ even a subject for discussion? Miller asked: “Are Jews so (relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and influence of Zionism ...?”
Zionist origins
I explained that Zionism was the creation of British imperialism and Christian Zionism, not Jews.2
A leader in The Times of August 17 1840 called for a plan “to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers”, claiming that this was under “serious political consideration”. When Lord Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones who did not want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on November 7 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it “is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria”.3
In October 1917 the leader of the Board of Deputies, Claude Montefiore, admitted that “if HM Govt is anxious to publish this formula [the Balfour Declaration] for the sake of the country, as well as the Jews, I would, of course, subordinate my Jewish feelings, wishes and interests to the interests of England and the empire”.
The Conjoint Foreign Committee, which dealt with foreign affairs, “appears to have been particularly slow to see the extent to which British imperial interests might ultimately converge with Zionist ambitions”. The British Jewish bourgeoisie were opposed to Zionism in the 19th and early 20th century. It was not until 1939 that the Zionist, Selig Brodetsky, won the presidency of the BoD.
One of the earliest supporters of the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine was actually the Protestant evangelical, Lord Antony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. He opposed general Jewish emancipation as a response to anti-Semitism in 1858. It was on Shaftesbury’s insistence that Palmerston in 1838 opened a British consulate in Jerusalem and appointed a vice-consul there, William Young, with the title of ‘Protector of the Jews in Palestine’.
The 1845 Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference had agreed a resolution that “all petitions for the return to the land of our fathers and for the restoration of the Jewish state should be eliminated from the prayers”. The Central Conference of American Rabbis in the Pittsburgh Declaration of 1885 declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
In fact the only member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet to vote against the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu. The anti-Zionist Jewish bourgeoisie in Britain only came round to the idea of Zionism when it was clear that support for Zionism was the fixed position of British imperialism.
Supremacism
On October 21 2024 Miller declared that “the state of Israel is at war with you”; that when activists or Muslims are arrested “that is being done directly on behalf of the state of Israel”.
Having myself been arrested by the ‘counter-terror’ police, I do not consider that this was done on behalf of the Israeli state: I was arrested by the British state. Miller’s answer was: “The challenge is to be anti-Zionist, to materially contribute to the global struggle against Jewish supremacism. Your war is right where you are.”
From 2024 he was tweeting repeatedly about “Jewish supremacism”, going so far as to anticipate that at the impending general election the British state would be “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists”.
No longer was the fight against Zionism, but in Miller’s view, “Jewish supremacism”. On November 14 2025 he tweeted in respect of an interview with Rahmeh Aladwan, the Palestinian doctor working in Britain, that:
Jewish supremacism is the kernel of Zionism, but is also disturbingly common among self-professed anti-Zionist Jews, several of whom are involved in the leadership of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement. This helps to curb the emergence of a genuinely liberatory anti-Zionism, which would necessarily challenge Zionism in Jewish institutions.
He offered no evidence for this attack on Jewish anti-Zionists.
Miller talked about “the global struggle against Jewish supremacism”, not even Zionism. He thus conflated all Jewish people with the Israeli state, as do the Zionists. This verges on anti-Semitism. True, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state, which even Israel’s Bt’selem (also known as the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) acknowledges. But Miller’s call was not directed at Israel, but at Jews everywhere.
Even accepting that up to two-thirds of diaspora Jews identify as Zionists, I doubt if any but a fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as a refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course, a minority are Jewish supremacists, but they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they currently live in. They are also not the problem: the Israeli state and western support for it is.
Miller argued that Islamophobia in the west is a product of Zionism and Israel: “… the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy”.4 Miller avoided telling us how they managed to achieve this remarkable feat.
At a stroke Miller erased the racism of British colonialism. Was Trump’s Muslim ban also a consequence of Israel? Did Trump label all Mexicans as rapists because of the soldiers of Zion? And the deportations to Latin America?
It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiracy theory of an all-powerful Zionism degenerates into anti-Semitism. British fascists used to condemn Israel because in their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted nothing to do with them, but Miller seems to be embracing them.
Racism in the west is home-grown. Islamophobia goes hand in hand with support for Israel - a vicious anti-Muslim state. Attacks on Muslims in Britain are not being done on behalf of Israel, but our own state. The same is true in the US. Miller says: “Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands … Wilders can be said to be a creation of the state of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets.”
Wilders - the leader of the far-right Party for Freedom - is not a creation of the Israeli state. He is a home-grown fascist for whom Zionism is attractive because Israel is seen as the ideal ethno-nationalist state. In an article headed ‘Change Jordan’s name to Palestine’, Gilders was quoted as saying: “If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the west. It is not a conflict over territory, but rather an ideological battle - between the mentality of the liberated west and the ideology of Islamic barbarism.”
Miller therefore exonerated the west by saying that their racism is not the product of their own societies, but that of Israel. He therefore exonerates imperialism.
Miller’s language is sloppy and imprecise, especially for an academic. I suspect this is deliberate. Miller is no anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist. When he says that the British and American states do not do what they do because of capitalism or imperialism, but because of infiltration by Zionists, he is blaming imperialist support for Zionism on individuals, not the architecture of the imperialist war machine. He said:
… there’s no such thing as ‘foreign’ policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by participating so directly in this genocide … The British people will have to repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is deZionised.
A deZionised Britain could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client relationship with the US.5
Not only is Britain “post-imperial”, but its support for Israel is because of a handful of Zionist fanatics. If it wasn’t for them the state would be a benign institution.
This has nothing to do with anti-Zionism. It ignores the economic and political imperative behind imperialism (my response to Miller was published by Jewish Voice for Liberation6).
Attack on left
In another conspiratorial tweet on October 21 2024, Miller wrote that the “global left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics”.
Miller does not understand that attitudes on the left towards Israel have changed. In the wake of the holocaust most of the left saw Israel in a favourable light. They failed to see that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state would become “Hitler’s bastard offspring”.7
The Labour left saw Zionism, Israel and settler-colonialism as positive. The natives were invisible. Trotskyists adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba, seeing 1948 as a conflict between British imperialism, its Arab allies and Israel. Meanwhile, the Communist Party supported UN resolution 181 and the creation of a ‘Jewish’ state. This all changed with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. In 1948 most people knew nothing of the Nakba. They did not see that Zionism had much in common with the Nazis ideologically and had actually collaborated with them.8 Israel’s army had been trained by the British and it easily saw off the ramshackle Arab armies (with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab Legion).
With the rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles in Cuba, Vietnam and South Africa, the left reassessed its position. The Palestine Liberation Organisation emerged after 1967, as the Arab regimes were discredited. Israel was finally seen as an arm of US imperialism. In the Labour Party it was the right wing which had historically been pro-Arab. But after 1982 the right realigned. Support for Zionism was virtually a condition of New Labour.
Miller is simply wrong. He said: “A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion, when confronted by possible agents of empire.”9 But who are these “agents of empire?” He added: “… leftists around the world are constantly deferring to Jewish ‘allies’ for analysis on Zionism … Not only do these leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism: they actively solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist crimes.”
This is clearly anti-Semitic. He is saying that Jews are entryists, and the agents of empire. So anti-Zionist Jews should be treated with suspicion. It is an open call to divide the solidarity movement between Jews and non-Jews: a call to racialise the solidarity movement.
Miller fails to acknowledge that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism. Zionism endangers diaspora Jewish communities through associating them with Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide. We only have to think of people like Moshé Machover, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Haim Bresheeth to recognise the anti-Zionist Jewish contribution to the struggle. It was the Israeli socialist group, Matzpen, which first called Israel a settler-colonial state.
Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace has been organising thousands of its supporters on the streets, Miller has been waging war against Jewish ‘infiltrators’. He is doing the Zionists’ work for them.
In a tweet of March 24 2025 Miller said: “Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them ... there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.”10 He seems to be arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. Are they really responsible for the genocide? Is that how imperialism operates? Would the genocide not have happened but for individual Zionists in Britain? Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists, hunting them down would inevitably be portrayed as hunting down Jews.
If you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected system of war, economic exploitation and political domination, then it is easier to focus on individual Zionists, whilst ignoring imperialism and the complicity of the Arab regimes. Miller fails to understand why western capitalism supports Israel. His views on the relationship between the British state and Zionism are empirical and subjective.
The idea that the west supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s cabinet all infiltrators? Is US secretary of state Marco Rubio a Zionist infiltrator?
Why does the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust-deniers, love Israel so much? Is it because of infiltrators or because far-right and neo-Nazi groups, although they do not love Jews, do hate Muslims. In appearing on anti-Semitic and white supremacist platforms like Stew Peters,11 Miller is mixing with some very unsavoury company.
In his tweet of March 3 2025 Miller dug himself further into a hole. He told us that “there are no ‘Israeli’ anti-Zionists”. Presumably my friends, Ronnie Barkan and Stav Sinai, who are facing trial for being Palestine Actionists, do not exist? (Both of them are Israeli.)
Miller posted this: “It is doubtful whether there are more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere ... After all, how many Jewish martyrs have there been in the past 140 [years] on the path to liberate Palestine from Zionism? How many Jews have engaged in military action against Zionist targets in that period?”12 One wonders whether Miller’s strictures apply to himself!
Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole, but a Zionist one too. Despite being a professor, Miller is ignorant about the history of Zionism. It is often said that, the higher you rise in academia, the more you know about less and less. Miller is a perfect example.
Israel does not control either British or US foreign policy. Support for Israel is deemed by our own ruling class to be in their interests. David consistently looks down the telescope from the wrong end. Israel is a Jewish supremacist state. The majority of Jews in the world support it, though there is a growing and vociferous minority, especially among young Jews, who do not. A poll in 2021 found that 25% of American Jews see Israel as an apartheid state, climbing to 38% of under 40s.13 According to a more recent poll, today 39% say Israel is committing genocide and 61% say they are committing war crimes.14
Jews function as the moral alibi for imperialist support for Israel. That is an entirely different thing from saying they are responsible for Britain supporting Israel. That is political autism - an inability to see that support of diaspora Jews for Zionism/Israel does not lead to imperialism’s support for Zionism and Israel. Evidence of A does not lead to B. B is independent of A, but B might make use of A as a justification for its imperial project (wrapping their imperialist project in the clothes of the holocaust).
Jewish empire
David Miller, not content with arguing that the Zionist tail wags the imperialist dog, has gone one further. It is no longer a Greater Israel within the Middle East, but the rise of a global Jewish empire. He wrote on April 26 2025: “The argument that the ‘state of Israel’ exists today solely as an extension of western imperialism is outdated. Now, Israeli state capture has taken place within the United States and most western governments.”
So Miller rejects the idea that support for Zionism in the USA is because of the Zionist lobby. On November 15 2025 he explained how anyone who thinks the US empire is distinct from or in charge of the Zionist project is at least 25 years behind reality.15
He wrote on November 16:
The ‘lobby’ thesis also completely fails to account for entryism, penetration and subversion of US imperial institutions, which is an essential Zionist tactic globally and has been as long as Zionism has existed. Mearsheimer claims ‘the lobby’ tries to exert influence on the State Department and the Department of Defence. The ‘lobby’ in the US is a tiny part of the wider Zionist movement, which in turn is a part of a far broader, global Jewish empire with interests stretching from Argentina to Azerbaijan, to Australia.16
Miller claims that John Mearsheimer is ignorant about Zionism and “hasn’t been in touch with the reality of American politics since 1945”. The arrogance is breathtaking, given that Mearsheimer is widely recognised as the world’s leading realist scholar of international relations.
Between July 19 2023, when Miller wrote about ‘How Israeli lobbying drove Britain to adopt an anti-Palestine policy’,17 and November 2025 there has been a major shift in what he states. On August 16 2024 he wrote: “In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population.”18 And then he concluded that it would be a wonder “if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power ... It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts”.
This is an example of Miller’s flawed methodology. He leaps from the fact that Jews in the west are relatively privileged (I accept that Jews in Britain are not victims of racism and discrimination and that anti-Semitism in Britain is marginal) to the conclusion that that is why Britain supports Israel.
On November 16 2025 he wrote that Zionists:
are groomed and radicalised from an early age, not just to support the Jewish colony in the Levant, but to infiltrate their host society and to influence it in Zionist interests ... a fundamental strategy of the transnational Zionist movement and it has been since it was encoded in the Jerusalem Program in 1951 ... Jews are the most advantaged religious/minority group ... There are 276 Jewish billionaires in the world, in 2025, according to Forbes [out of] a total of 3,028 billionaires in the world. In other words, some 9.1% of the world’s billionaires are Jewish; compared to 0.2% of the global population.19
Now it may well be true that Jews are statistically overrepresented in certain sections in proportion to their numbers in society, but it is quite another thing to suggest that they act collectively.
The whole concept of ‘Jewish power’ is an updated version of historic Jewish conspiracy theories. I am not suggesting that Miller is therefore arguing for a political programme for the expulsion of Jews from western societies (although others will certainly do so). However, it is noticeable how many neo-Nazis and anti-Semites are commenting favourably on his articles.
It is entirely legitimate to ask why Jews are represented in the numbers Miller suggests. I have no doubt that there are historical-materialist reasons. However, it is the conclusions and the use to which Miller puts these which I am questioning.
Conclusion
I also question Miller’s sanity. Such is the delusional nature of his conspiracy theories. It is not as if he has written anything even remotely equivalent to Mearsheimer’s The tragedy of great power politics.20 His theories on the new Jewish empire are grounded in fantasy. There is no overarching framework to what is an obsession with pouring out his latest undigested thoughts on Twitter.
Whereas most of us greeted the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York as a victory over the corrupt Democratic establishment (and Trump), Miller saw no change, writing: “Zohran Mamdani is a Zionist and a servant of Zionists. If you want to keep getting mugged by shysters like him, while they spit in your face and then stand on your shoulders, good luck to you.”21
To see no change at all in the American political climate, or to abuse someone who has been forthright about the genocide in Gaza, is truly amazing. The fact that over a third of New York Jews voted for Mamdani is itself remarkable.
As Jewish Voice for Liberation remarked in its statement of November 14,
You have to be living on another planet not to have noticed the phenomenal achievement of Mamdani winning against all the odds: against the Democratic establishment, against the mainstream Jewish lobbying groups, against the big money, which dominates US politics and countless Islamophobic slurs against him ... Miller’s writings are increasingly shrill, divisive and misleading.
With the creation of the ‘Jewish empire’, there also comes a ‘Pax Judaica’. On April 12 2025 Miller posted that “the Zionist empire operates by penetrating and subverting western states, societies and economies to serve its ends”. He endorsed the far-right Candace Owens in respect of the release of the Epstein files: “The new Jewish empire also seeks hegemony in the digital sphere.”
David Miller is the organiser of the Palestine Declassified programme, which is funded by the Iranian state. Miller is a staunch defender of the clerical Iranian regime. Roshan Salih, editor of the conservative Islamic site, 5 Pillars, wrote: “Sections of the left hold deeply Islamophobic views. This is the section that seems to support Zarah Sultana ... they automatically assume Muslim men are motivated by nothing but misogyny.” Miller responded: “There is a lot of truth in this, and Zarah Sultana’s commitment to the sort of muscular liberalism which was produced by the War on Terror - weaponising feminism, sexuality and gender against Muslims - has done enormous damage to Your Party's prospects to alliance-building.”
This is an outrageous libel. Zarah Sultana is an anti-imperialist, not a supporter of the war on terror. 5 Pillars supports the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan. There is nothing Islamophobic about opposing such oppression by Islamic regimes, be they in Iran or Afghanistan.
But Miller just continues on his bizarre and erratic journey to the right.
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BBC News, 6.2.24, Bristol University academic unfairly dismissed for anti-Zionist views, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-68211872.↩︎
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Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism - Its Roots in Western History, pp58-63, Zed Press, 1983.↩︎
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Ibid.↩︎
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www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/looking-down-the-wrong-end-of-the-telescope.↩︎
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A comment of mine that was not approved by The Jewish Chronicle. See www.thejc.com/news/infamous-anti-israel-activist-tony-greenstein-called-jewish-state-hitlers-bastard-offspring-ypojyokh.↩︎
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See electronicintifada.net/content/how-zionism-helped-nazis-perpetrate-holocaust/37326.↩︎
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mondoweiss.net/2021/07/new-poll-25-of-u-s-jews-think-israel-is-apartheid-state.↩︎
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english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/the-data-on-the-jews-and--discrimination--in-the-uk.↩︎
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See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Great_Power_Politics.↩︎
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www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/about-david-miller.
23. Ibid.↩︎