Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is no stranger to attacks from Jewish establishment organisations. Now in her 70s, she vividly remembers the first time she was publicly attacked for expressing support for Palestine, after speaking in a debate as a 19-year-old student.

“I was called a self-hating Jew on the front page of a Jewish newspaper in the northwest of England,” she said, adding that the newspaper – the Jewish Telegraph – is still running.

The Jewish Telegraph and other stalwarts of the Jewish establishment, from the chief rabbinate to the Board of Deputies, have sidelined dissenting voices within Jewish communities throughout Wimborne-Idrissi’s life, but she says this repression has only intensified in recent years. 

The period following the 7 October attacks, as Israel carried out its genocidal campaign in Gaza, has been a particular flashpoint. Tensions between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews have become near impossible to ignore. Lines drawn during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader have become even more entrenched.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) was founded in 2014 and became a registered charity the following year. The organisation gained prominence – and increasing acceptance within the Jewish establishment – during the Corbyn years, but its controversial tactics have led the Charity Commission to open several investigations into its work.

Bull in a china shop

Despite the charity’s stated aim of tackling antisemitism, many leftist Jews fear CAA’s actions have the opposite effect. In response to CAA’s calls to ban marches for a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023, the campaign group Na’amod told the Independent: “Pitting Jewish safety against Palestinian freedom doesn’t make Jews safer; it makes fighting antisemitism harder.” 

It isn’t only anti-Zionists who have taken issue with CAA’s rhetoric. In 2018, a parliamentary report commissioned by John Mann, now Labour’s “antisemitism tsar”, criticised CAA for not “seeking to avoid undue panic and alarm”, and for conflating protests against Israel’s actions with antisemitism.

In an article for Vashti, Joseph Finlay has suggested that CAA wants British Jews to be afraid – creating the market for an organisation that preys on their fears. 

It seems no coincidence that Jewish fear in the UK and other parts of the diaspora shore up both support for and possible emigration to Israel. CAA has spent years breathlessly asserting (on the basis of misleading self-selecting surveys) that a sizable portion of Jews are considering leaving the UK due to rising antisemitism. Gideon Falter, who leads CAA, is also a vice chairman of the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) UK arm: a non-profit with the explicit goal of encouraging British Jews to emigrate to Israel.

After a complaint to the Charity Commission by CAGE International, CAA is being forced to take steps to improve its management and governance if it wants to maintain its charitable status. The complaint argued that CAA is less concerned with furthering its stated aim of tackling antisemitism than with promoting Israel’s interests on British soil, and shielding the country’s government from accountability for the genocide in Gaza.

Wimborne-Idrissi is a member of Jewish Voice for Liberation, formerly Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), which has also made complaints about CAA abusing its charitable status. She says the charity “uses the IHRA definition [of antisemitism] to justify filthy statements about anybody who supports the Palestinians, and yet calls itself an educational charity supporting Jewish people in the noble fight against antisemitism”.

CAA takes a zero-tolerance approach to what it labels as antisemitism, no matter how unintentional. In May, it led calls for sports presenter Gary Lineker to be fired from the BBC after he shared a video about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat. He deleted the post, his agent said he was unaware of the antisemitic connotations, and Lineker apologised “unreservedly”. Still, within a week, he was gone.

Just this past year, CAA has trumpeted the proscription of Palestine Action as a campaigning success, pushed the government to enact yet more anti-protest legislation (supposedly in response to the Heaton Park synagogue attack) and called for the BBC’s licence fee to be suspended after it broadcast the documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, narrated by the 13-year-old son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

It is unclear how much influence CAA really has on the British government. While it heeded CAA’s call to ban Palestine Action - today ruled unlawful by the high court - it ignored simultaneous appeals to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Ansar Allah (otherwise known as the Houthis). But whatever its level of influence, CAA’s unabashed calls lend a progressive sheen to Labour’s authoritarian turn: cracking down on antisemitism sounds a lot better than cracking down on free speech.

The charity has also initiated various private prosecutions against people it deems antisemitic. In December, CAA’s attempted prosecution of comedian Reginald D. Hunter was thrown out, with the judge ruling: “I have no doubt the prosecution is abusive”, and criticising CAA for “its wilful, repeated failure to meet its disclosure obligations”. Attempted prosecutions of former BNP leader Nick Griffin and academic and conspiracy theorist David Miller, both for posting antisemitic content on social media, are ongoing.

Wimborne-Idrissi believes CAA’s aggressive approach does more harm than good. “Who learns from that? Nobody,” she said. “In fact, people just double down . . . I know a lot of people whose attitude is: ‘Call me an antisemite then. See if I fucking care.’”

She also questions the group’s intentions. “CAA have legitimate charitable goals that they’ve written down,” says Wimborne-Idrissi, “but what they actually do in practice is skewed heavily towards demonising people who support Palestinian rights. That’s their modus operandi. That’s their USP.”

A better approach

JVL, which CAA has repeatedly called an “antisemitism denial group and sham Jewish representative organisation”, has a very different approach to addressing antisemitism. It facilitates open discussion in workshops, starting from the premise that many people – like Lineker – lack awareness of common antisemitic tropes while holding no ill will towards Jews. 

CAA appears to view this work as a threat. Wimborne-Idrissi recalls running a training session at a London university several years ago. The session had begun with facilitators saying it was important no one recorded the session so people could speak freely. They proceeded with an educational session about antisemitic tropes, using examples of cartoons to guide the discussion.

Wimborne-Idrissi recounts that during the break, a student told her: “‘Somebody has offered me £50 to record this session and report back to them afterwards, but when you said it was important that people shouldn’t record I decided not to do that.’” The student then revealed the person who offered them money for a recording was Stephen Silverman – CAA’s director of investigations and enforcement.

This attempted spying shows that CAA views anti-Zionist Jews as enemies. The charity called for actress Miriam Margolyes to be stripped of her OBE when she compared Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the Holocaust. When Green Party leader Zack Polanski said the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, Ephraim Mirvis, had overstepped in claiming to speak for British Jews while defending the interests of the Israeli government, CAA called this “a direct assault on British Jews.” Mirvis is a patron of JNF UK.

Polanski responded to CAA’s allegations by questioning the group’s true intentions. “Here's your problem,” he wrote, “there's so many British Jews who are speaking out against the genocide.”

The enemy within

Wimborne-Idrissi believes the charity’s animosity towards anti-Zionist Jews is part of what makes it so dangerous. She said: “One of the most important things about the work of CAA and others is that they undermine non-Zionist Jews so that we don’t get a media hearing. That’s really important because your run-of-the-mill Brit quite honestly believes that Jews love Israel and everything that Israel does is endorsed by Jews.”

She estimates that more than half of the times she and other members of JVL are asked to speak on mainstream media platforms, the invitation is rescinded. She also points out the invisibility of the sizeable Jewish bloc on pro-Palestine marches in most mainstream coverage of the protests.

Wimborne-Idrissi was elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee in 2022, but was quickly suspended and then expelled from the party for attending a meeting organised by Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW), which Labour had banned the year before her election. 

In response to her suspension, the CAA said: “Ms Wimborne-Idrissi has no place in the Labour Party . . . but it should not take all of this negative public attention on the Party to bring about that outcome.”

She isn’t the only Jewish politician whose expulsion from the party was cheered on by CAA. 

Jo Bird, now a Green councillor, is another Jewish leftist who was expelled from Starmer’s Labour. Like Wimborne-Idrissi, her expulsion was for historical association with LAW. Bird attended a meeting organised by the group in 2018 and signed a petition organised by it in 2020. LAW was not banned by Labour until 2021.

CAA had its eye on her as early as 2019, when she gave a speech using the pun “Jew process” to describe Labour's seemingly arbitrary approach to suspensions and expulsions relating to antisemitism. She was then temporarily suspended.

Though Bird was reinstated after nine days, CAA continued to use the pun to call her an antisemite – often omitting her Jewishness in the process. In the same time period, CAA successfully pushed the Equality and Human Rights Commission to open an investigation into the Labour Party’s failure to tackle antisemitism, increasing pressure on the party to take action against people like Bird.

After three further suspensions, Labour ultimately expelled Bird from the party in 2021.

She told Vashti the “media witch hunt” which precipitated many expulsions from Labour, including of leftist Jews like her, was “often fuelled by quotes from the Campaign Against Antisemitism”, alongside other groups like the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Against Antisemitism.

After her expulsion, Bird told the BBC she was “delighted” to be “free from the Labour Party’s hostile environment, where Jewish people like me are 31 times more likely to be investigated for talking about the racism we face.” As of 2023, at least 67 Jews had been expelled or investigated by the party for reasons relating to alleged antisemitism.

Complaints have stalked Bird into the Green Party, though her new political home has treated them with greater scepticism. The Jewish Labour Movement produced a dossier on what it considers a disturbing trend of people expelled from Labour joining the Greens, and CAA have continued to pressure the Greens to expel Bird, referencing the same complaints it has used against her since 2019.

She told Vashti: “[Groups like CAA are] at the forefront of continuing to smear good people who are now in the Green Party. But the difference here is that instead of suspending me like Labour did, the Green Party defended me.”

While the charity is more than happy to target left-wing Jews, it is often silent on antisemitism coming from the right.

Nigel Farage’s history of racist school bullying that targeted Jewish, Black and Indian pupils revealed by the Guardian in November has provoked no response from CAA, even as he has refused to condemn antisemitism. A Jewish former classmate recalls the Reform UK leader telling him “Hitler was right” and “gas them all.” 

This week, at a launch of Reform UK’s Jewish affiliate group, the meeting’s chair, Jewish Reform councillor Alan Mendoza, dismissed the allegations against Farage, saying: “There is not an antisemitic bone in this man’s body.” Rather, he said, Farage will “chase the antisemites out of this country and make sure British values return.”

In 2017, CAA called out Farage for spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories about a “Jewish Lobby” influencing the US government to support Israel. Now Farage is aligned with Israel, and CAA is silent. 

In October, Tommy Robinson, in the middle of being feted by the Israeli government, went on an antisemitic tirade against the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD). The far-right activist evoked the antisemitic and Islamophobic great replacement theory, by blaming the BoD and the Anti-Defamation League for “mass immigration”. CAA was silent.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has called the great replacement theory “the actual truth” and made antisemitic posts practically unavoidable on X since his takeover of the platform. CAA has said nothing, even as Musk has intervened in British politics in favour of Farage, Robinson, and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe – whose antisemitism CAA has actually called out, albeit tepidly.

It is no coincidence that these figures all toe the line when it comes to Israel. CAA is happy to ignore a teenage Farage hissing to simulate a gas chamber at a Jewish boy, so long as he keeps denying the genocide in Gaza. It can temper its criticism of Lowe calling for a ban on kosher and halal meat because he publicly fantasises about Palestine Action members being shot. And it won’t say a word against Robinson while he’s in Israel’s good books.

When a group says Polanski is a threat to British Jews but treats Robinson like he’s beyond reproach, it begs the question: what is CAA really campaigning against?▼

Campaign Against Antisemitism did not respond to requests for comment.

This article was updated at 11.15 GMT 13 February 2026 to reflect the breaking news that the high court has ruled Palestine Action ban unlawful.