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That isn’t what happened.
This is a story of amazing incompetence from Bristol University which allowed the judgment to accept from the beginning the fiction that Miller was a man of principle.
The judgment says that a highly constricted version of anti-Zionism that literally no one in the world believes, including David Miller himself, is protected by law.
Here is how Miller described his supposed beliefs for the purposes of this case:
- Political Zionism is inherently racist, imperialistic and colonial.
- This is not opposition to the idea of Jewish self-determination or of a preponderantly Jewish state existing somewhere in the world.
- It is specifically opposition to “the exclusive realisation of Jewish rights to self-determination within a land that is home to a very substantial non-Jewish population.”
- He was not supportive of, or “open to,” the use of violence as a means of opposing Zionism.
- His anti-Zionism is not opposition to or antipathy towards Jews or Judaism.
Miller has two solutions. One is to “de-Zionize” all Jews, to brainwash them to accept their beliefs are racist. If they refuse? We can only imagine Miller’s response to that, and it is unlikely to be non-violent as he claims.
The other solution is for Jews to simply "leave.” What are his models for that mass self-flight? Paragraph 33 quotes his answer from a tweet:
“There is another way that settler racism and genocide ends. That is by decolonisation and liberation. Happened in Algeria Happened in ‘Rhodesia’. #PalestineWillBeFree #FromtheRivertotheSea #DismantleZionism #GazaGenocide”
Both those cases involved extreme violence.
As far as “de-Zionization” is concerned, he describes how it would work in PressTV:
Today there are many Jewish groups that could be encouraged to disaffiliate from the genocidal ideology of Zionism. There is no reason to close schools, synagogues, and student groups that can and should be encouraged to disavow Zionism.
But make no mistake: formally Zionist groups would have to either de-Zionise or cease to exist, wherever they are found.
Miller is saying that every Jewish school, every Jewish organization, every synagogue must abandon any belief that Jews have a right to live in Israel, a basic part of Judaism and something that is prayed for every day — or close down. Return to Zion is part of Judaism; insisting it be excised is antisemitic.
The only way to make his “anti-Zionist” views coherent is if it involves violence or forcibly changing Jewish beliefs. And most of the evidence is documented within the judgment itself, which accepts Miller’s claim that he does not support violence.
Worse than that is accepting Miller at his word when he is a provable liar. He tweeted in November 2023, “Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn’t add up.” Hamas bragged that they killed Jews but Miller denies it and claims that all the deaths came from the IDF. This isn’t a defensible opinion, it is an outright lie.
Miller’s other point that he is not opposed to Jewish self-determination elsewhere in the world is equally incoherent. Jews may exercise self-determination anywhere except their ancestral homeland, but they also may not exercise it in areas where they are not the supermajority — a condition that exists nowhere on Earth. A right that can be exercised nowhere is a right denied, and when that right is denied to only the Jewish people, that is antisemitism.
The real problem is that Bristol University’s lawyers made two very big mistakes at the very beginning. At a case management hearing in September 2023, Bristol’s counsel confirmed that the university did not consider Miller antisemitic, had not dismissed him for antisemitic views, and regarded him as having breached no equality law (paragraph 29 of the EAT judgment). On the first day of the hearing a month later, the same counsel went further and stated on the record that he was “not seeking to go behind what the claimant says his true belief is” (paragraph 63). The EAT found that concession unambiguous and binding, made presumably on the university’s instructions; it noted that the question of Miller’s true beliefs was thereafter wholly absent from the evidence, and it refused to let Bristol resurrect the question on appeal (paragraphs 134–136).
This means that Miller got to define his own beliefs, and there is no problem if they are incoherent or inevitably lead to violence or are antisemitic: he must be taken at his word claiming to be against both of those, based on the University’s own counsel. This undercut the entire case.
The reporting is also wrong about what the ruling actually decided. At paragraph 138(iv), the EAT wrote that it is coherent to describe as racist an ideology promoting a state for “only one race of people” in a territory containing a large number of another, and that an ideology supporting migration backed by an imperial power to dislodge an indigenous population could coherently be called colonial and imperialistic. The EAT stressed in the same paragraph that whether Miller’s beliefs are right or wrong was not the issue; the coherence test asks only whether a belief is intelligible, and a belief can be intelligible and false.
Jews are a people, not a race, and roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from the communities in the Middle East itself, who would be surprised to learn they are racially foreign to the Middle East. The “imperial power” supposedly sponsoring Zionism spent the 1940s blockading Jewish refugees off Palestine’s coast. Indigeneity, in the court’s framing, is a category that includes Palestinians and excludes the people whose religion and language formed in that land. The EAT certified the coherence of a hypothetical ideology that describes nothing in reality, and the precedent protects a belief about that hypothetical. It didn’t rule that anti-Zionism is acceptable; it ruled that a bizarre set of incompatible claims that pretend to be anti-Zionism, that no one on Earth truly believes, is not problematic. Miller’s lawyers and much of the media happily report the case as if it ruled on something that real people believe.
Bristol's surrender extended to his most explicit statements. In tweets quoted at paragraph 23 of the judgment, Miller announced that “Judeophobia barely exists these days” and that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power and therefore positioned to discriminate against marginalized groups. Bristol declined to argue that even those tweets were antisemitic. This is incompetence on the part of the University’s lawyers. All the evidence for Miller’s antisemitism was available and since the initial hearing it has only gotten worse, like describing Chabad-Lubavitch as a “genocidal Jewish supremacist cult” whose theology holds that non-Jews have animal souls. Or his claim that the British state has been “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists.” Or his assertion, “Pears property company was voted by a BBC show some years ago as the worst landlords in the country, living up to the stereotype of the Jewish landlord” (said years before this case.) Nothing about Zionism in any of those quotes. Miller’s hate is explicit.
The case seems to prove that Bristol’s eagerness to accept that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism sunk its case more than any legal arguments. They cut the legs out from under the strong case that Miller is an antisemite and his treating Jewish students with contempt was not an exception but a fulfilment of his bigotry.
The totality of Miller’s record shows that even an anti-Zionist who is the most careful in parsing their words are very often just antisemites hiding behind principles.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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