‘Palestine’ Invades the U.K.

A recent chance encounter in London’s Heathrow Airport offered a troubling glimpse of the extent to which anti-Israel hate is penetrating youth culture in the United Kingdom.

The encounter in question was not with a person, but rather a newspaper—the latest issue of The Skinny. Distributed free to the more than 200,000 travelers who pass through Heathrow daily—and many others, elsewhere—The Skinny is the second largest magazine of culture and listings in the United Kingdom. Its format and radicalism—political as well as cultural—are reminiscent of The Village Voice.

The anti-Israel trend in the UK music scene has been in the news in recent weeks. The rappers Kneecap and Bobby Vylan stirred controversy at England’s Glastonbury Festival by leading the crowd in chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death to the IDF.” The new issue of The Skinny makes clear that those ugly appeals for violence were far from isolated phenomena in the UK.

The August edition features a two-page spread about “Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine,” which is billed as “a four-day mini-festival of theatre, dance, comedy, food, storytelling, music and poetry created by Palestinians.” The reviewer emphasizes that “each piece [of the festival] is unapologetically political” and promotes “Palestinian resistance” against “Zionist occupation and genocide.” The festival’s approach of “art as politics” is urgently needed “in a moment where international conversations on Palestine are policed, sanctioned, [and] sanitized by mainstream institutions,”  the reviewer asserts.

That’s a curious claim at a moment when supporters of the Palestinian Arab cause are being featured prominently throughout the international news media—including in The Skinny itself.

The “Film of the Month” selected by the editors for this issue is Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, described as “a portrait of resistance amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.” It stars a photojournalist in Gaza, Fatima Houssana, who “tells of starvation, including her own.” Curiously, though, a half-page color still from the film, accompanying the review, shows Ms. Houssana smiling broadly and looking fit.

Another odd accusation mentioned by the reviewer is Houssana’s claim that Israel “appropriated” hummus and falafel from the Palestinian Arabs. That accusation has been a staple of anti-Israel propaganda for decades. But in fact, the roots of hummus trace to the Syrian city of Aleppo, and falafel is believed to be of Egyptian origin.

The intersection of extremism and fake victimhood is amply illustrated in The Skinny’s fawning interview with actor-playwright Khalid Abdallah. His latest work focuses on what he calls “the extraordinarily beautiful” Egyptian revolution of 2011 and “this moment in Palestine.”

Abdallah alleges that when his play was first performed, around the time of the first anniversary of October 7, “the word genocide was difficult to utter inside a theatre,” a claim for which there is no evidence.

The Skinny’s interviewer neglects to mention that the “beautiful” Egyptian revolution in which Abdallah proudly participated helped pave the way for the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood to take power there.

Even the author of a new play about rebels in India in 1857, given a platform in The Skinny, cannot resist pivoting to the Jews. The “horrible [British] colonialism” in India has “parallels with what is happening in Gaza,” Niall Moorjani asserts.

One can hardly turn a page of The Skinny without encountering additional examples of such malevolence. There is a large photo glamorizing a Palestinian rioter. There are generous blurbs for a play extolling the Second Intifada (in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered); an “Embroidery from Palestine” exhibit “with social and political depth”; and a reading by the “incredible” Gaza poet Dareen Tatour, with a photo of Tatour wearing a shirt illustrated by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian cartoonist notorious for using antisemitic imagery.

Yet nowhere in the 128 pages of this month’s issue of The Skinny can one find a single article, interview, blurb or even brief mention of any Israeli-authored play, film, book or poetry reading in the United Kingdom. Which prompts the obvious question: Who, really, is being “silenced,” “policed,” or “sanctioned” ? It certainly isn’t the Israel-haters whom The Skinny is pushing to the forefront of the UK’s cultural scene.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.)