Last week someone showed me a photograph of a pro-Palestine stall in Cambridge Market Square. What I saw was not angry students or hardened activists, but four elderly women – probably in their seventies – who had chosen to spend their day urging strangers to boycott Israel.

The image stayed with me – and I decided that I wanted a closer look at what was actually taking place. So yesterday I went up to Cambridge to listen to what they were saying.

Selling a Fictional Palestine

When I arrived, the stall was slightly larger than the one I had seen in the photograph, with perhaps six people gathered around it. The women from the original image were there, now accompanied by a couple of younger men. For a while I simply stood nearby, looked through the maps and leaflets laid out on the table, and listened to the conversations taking place with members of the public who had stopped to engage.

At one point, one of the Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists was speaking to three young people, probably in their early twenties. The discussion turned to the word “Palestine” – and it quickly became clear that none of those involved had any real grounding in the history they were attempting to discuss.

For much of the last two millennia, “Palestine” was primarily a geographic term used by successive imperial and colonial powers in reference to the Holy Land. It was not part of the traditional identity of the local Arab population. Yet the subject has become so politically charged that many pro-Palestinian campaigners now tie themselves in ahistorical knots trying to pretend otherwise.

Which was exactly what I encountered.

After the group moved on, and noticing my interest in the stall, one of the women approached me. I deliberately chose not to challenge her or present myself as informed. I wanted to test the depth of her knowledge, so rather than appearing as an adversary, I presented myself as someone open to being educated.

We spoke for around twenty minutes, and almost everything she told me was either misleading, historically confused, or simply false.

Here are a few examples:

Invading armies

I was told that while the Arab armies did invade in 1948, they only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state and did not enter the Jewish enclave. This is simply false. Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese armies all entered areas allocated to the Jewish state. Jordanian forces also captured the Jewish areas within the international zone around Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed them of their Jewish population. At one stage, the Egyptian army was just twenty miles from Tel Aviv.

The woman was not merely mistaken. She was dramatically rewriting the nature, ambition and scope of the invasion.

Unarmed Palestinians

She told me that the Palestinian Arabs were unarmed passive victims of aggressive Jewish militias. This too is historically incoherent. The Arab state armies did not invade until May 1948, but the civil war had already begun months earlier, initiated by local Arab attacks following the UN partition vote.

She spoke repeatedly of “massacres”, yet documents from the British archives at Kew suggest broadly comparable casualty figures between Jews and Arabs during the civil war phase between November 1947 and May 1948.

Local Arab villages write histories that boast about the Jews they killed both before and during the civil war, yet activists standing in Cambridge Market Square erase this violence entirely in order to preserve the fantasy of passive Palestinian victimhood.

Stuttering Over the Sixty-Five Laws

Although I had decided not to push back too hard, I still wanted to test the depth of their knowledge. So when I noticed a reference in one of the leaflets to Israeli laws that allegedly discriminate against Israeli Arabs – supposedly proof that Israel is an Apartheid state – I simply asked for examples.

The response was revealing.

This accusation forms the very basis of their boycott campaign. It is the justification they use for standing in public squares urging people to isolate and weaken the Jewish state. Yet when asked to identify even a single law, there was no answer. She insisted there were “many”, but her voice became hesitant, the sentences started to trail off, and eventually the explanation collapsed altogether.

In reality, the so-called “65 discriminatory laws” – a list compiled by the anti-Israel NGO Adalah – is a political exercise in semantic manipulation. Few people ever read the list itself. If they did, they would discover that Adalah classifies ordinary expressions of Jewish statehood – such as the Israeli flag, national symbols and Jewish state holidays – as evidence of Apartheid.

By that standard, the cross on the Union Jack, Christmas as a national holiday, or religious symbolism in British state emblems could equally be presented as proof that the United Kingdom is an Apartheid state. The entire accusation is built on sand.

The Lies about Al-Ahli Hospital

The material on the table in front of her was no better. Leaflets describing false histories and distorted accounts of modern realities. There was also a newspaper I had never seen before called “Palestine News”. She told me it came from friends in Jewish Voice for Labour (now Liberation), and had been put together by journalists who wanted “the truth” to be known. Another familiar part of the puzzle. She has eased her own discomfort by finding the fringe Jewish group who hate Israel, Zionism and mainstream Jewish identity as much as she does.

And the newspaper itself was simply more amateurish fiction. Its Spring 2026 edition was still recycling stories from almost three years earlier. One page, illustrated with an image from October 2023, continued to promote the lie that an Israeli strike had caused a massacre at the Al-Ahli hospital, when it was quickly clear the explosion was caused by a failed Islamic Jihad rocket launched from Gaza.

Repetition, Absurdity and Pure Nonsense

On and on it went. All the familiar propaganda points appeared in sequence, retelling the fantasy of a passive and peaceful population brutally displaced by European colonists. She returned constantly to one phrase in particular: “European colonial project.” It was repeated over and over again, as though repetition itself could substitute for historical understanding.

Mixed into this were moments of complete absurdity. At one point, during her false-history lecture, the CPSC activist brought up the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, only to claim that the British deliberately called it the “Arab Revolt” rather than the “Palestinian Revolt” in order to suppress Palestinian identity. I encouraged her to expand on the point, but once again the lack of any real historical knowledge quickly became obvious. Her argument dissolved into hesitant mumbling before fading out entirely. By this stage, it was becoming difficult to keep a straight face.

I was also told that Hamas was “created by Israel” – another staple of Palestinian activist mythology. Everything bad about the Palestinians is someone else’s fault. The reality is far more mundane. After the Six-Day War, Israel, like many states trying to manage complex multicultural and religious environments, maintained relationships with a range of Islamic charitable and religious organisations inside Gaza. Hamas did not yet exist. However, some of the Muslim Brotherhood figures who would later go on to found Hamas during the First Intifada were part of that broader religious network.

This is how the propaganda works: a limited and historically understandable policy of engagement is retrospectively transformed into a conspiracy theory in which Israel supposedly “created” Hamas. By that logic, Britain would have “created” Abu Hamza’s extremist network simply because he once preached at Finsbury Park Mosque while operating openly inside the UK. States attempting to accommodate or manage religious and multicultural realities will sometimes misjudge individuals or movements within them. That is not the same thing as consciously creating the extremism that later emerges.

From Lies and False History Into Raw Demonisation

This ideology – Palestinianism – has only a black-and-white tale to tell. Its core assumptions are so weak that, to remain coherent, it must continually distort history. Israel must always be wrong, and the Arabs must always have been right. To sustain this worldview, the Jews of Israel – and their supporters – are turned into caricatures of evil. And the more I drew out the thinking of that CPSC activist standing in the street, the clearer it became just how deep into the rabbit hole she had fallen.

She cited just one book: Tom Suarez’s State of Terror. I was told he had spent years researching in the archives, and that the book proved how “every day” the Jews were carrying out killings during the Mandate period. She forgot the name of the Irgun, vaguely remembered the Haganah, and blurred all the groups together into one violent caricature. No context was provided.

This is how the propaganda works. Suarez’s book is built on cherry-picked extracts from archival documents while ignoring the surrounding material that contradicts his argument. I know, because together with another researcher, Jonathan Hoffman, I followed his trail through the archives almost a decade ago and carefully dismantled his claims. Yet the book still circulates because it provides pseudo-historical ammunition for activists who want to believe Zionism is a unique evil.

Conspiracy, Hate and Antisemitism

From here the skies darkened even further. She separated the Holocaust from Zionism by distinguishing survivors from Zionists, part of the puzzle that strips Zionism of all its humanity. And when pressed on the European heritage of Israelis, she doubled down into conspiracies about Iraqi and Yemenite Jews, promoting false stories about Israel bombing the Iraqi Jews into leaving – even though every historical piece of information we possess suggests this is a baseless claim. She wanted me to know that the evil Zionists hated both weak Jews and brown-skinned Jews. This is all about maintaining the illusion that the Jews in Israel are alien foreign imports who are white supremacist Europeans who hate anything with brown skin. The real multicultural cocktail that is Israel – and the incredibly diverse heritage of its citizens – would be unrecognisable to her.

I did not want her to walk away entirely unchallenged, so I tested the logic of what she was saying without revealing how informed I actually was. I returned to the colonial narrative and pointed out that Hamas were hardly moderates. How, I asked, could peace realistically emerge while violent jihadist movements surrounded Israel? Her instinctive response was simply to blame the Zionists again, and repeat the claim that Hamas itself was an Israeli creation.

So I pushed a little further. Israel, I said, was one tiny state, while much of the wider Middle East remained consumed by sectarianism, authoritarianism and collapse. Jihadist groups were everywhere. What was the regional example proving that peace and coexistence were achievable even among the Arabs themselves?

That finally stopped her. And with nowhere else left to go, she reached for the comparison that underpins so much of this ideology. She compared Israeli Jews to white South Africans – implying they did not truly belong there at all. I pushed back to make sure I understood correctly. “So they are like foreign colonists?” I asked. “Like white Europeans in Africa?” Yes, she replied.

And there it was. The Israelis should lay down their weapons before the jihadists because, in her eyes, they are illegitimate people in an illegitimate place. Whatever happens to them afterwards is therefore their own fault.

This is the ideology being sold in Cambridge Market Square: conspiracy, historical falsehoods and antisemitism packaged in the image of a kindly, well-meaning grandmother.

Her knowledge is wafer-thin. What she is selling is incoherent. Yet her new pastime is spreading lies about the Jewish state, demanding its boycott, and pressuring it to surrender to people who openly call for its destruction.

Rarely has antisemitism dressed so sweetly. Rarely has it been so dangerous.

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