In the wake of the controversy surrounding Green Party leader Zack Polanski after he criticised British police for kicking a subdued suspect in the head, growing tension is emerging in the debate around rising anti-Semitic attacks in the UK. The suspect was arrested for stabbing two Jewish men in North London.
There should be no equivocation here. Jewish communities are facing a genuine and disturbing increase in threats, intimidation and violence. The obligation on the state to respond decisively is real. But it is precisely in such moments, when fear and urgency are justified, that the boundaries of power are most likely to shift.
Under Prime Minister Keir Starmer the response has combined firmer policing of protests, heightened sensitivity to speech deemed harmful and increased pressure on institutions, from universities to online platforms, to act pre-emptively. The legal architecture itself has not dramatically changed. What has changed is where and how decisions are being made.
Where questions of unlawful speech or incitement would traditionally be tested through statute and adjudicated in courts, they are now often resolved upstream by police imposing conditions on demonstrations, by university administrators restricting events, or by platforms removing content under the broadest of harm standards. The language of legality remains, but its application is increasingly mediated through discretion and fuelled by outrage.
The framework that has shaped the UK’s institutional response sharp criticism of Israel, its conduct in Gaza, its policies in the West Bank and the posture of its current governing coalition has long been treated as presumptively suspect. That entrenched suspicion has hardened into something more automatic: not judgment applied to specific speech but a reflex that pre-emptively widens the category of what may be sanctioned, without the discipline of legal definition to constrain it.
The result is a subtle but significant shift: from adjudication to designation. Not what a court finds unlawful but what an institution, a lobby group or populist sentiment deems unacceptable.
South Africa should recognise the terrain. Our constitution protects expression robustly, yet we see decisions about harmful speech or acceptable protest increasingly made outside courts by administrators, regulators and police operating in fluid environments
The data, briefly considered, is telling. Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK are fewer in absolute number than those targeting Muslims, yet strikingly, Islamophobic incidents affect a far larger group, if more diffusely. These are distinct phenomena, each warranting clear-eyed attention. What serves neither is the transformation of speech regulation into a flexible instrument, calibrated not by legal standard but by institutional anxiety and political pressure. The risk is not in holding the line where the law is clear. It is in moving that line.
The Polanski episode mirrors this broader condition. A video of the police kicking the suspect prompts an immediate moral claim; the response insists on context. Beneath the surface lies the same question now confronting speech. What is the principle at play here?
South Africa should recognise the terrain. Our constitution protects expression robustly, yet we see decisions about harmful speech or acceptable protest increasingly made outside courts by administrators, regulators and police operating in fluid environments.
That said, the response to anti-Semitism risks normalising a mode of governance that is less transparent, less consistent and ultimately less accountable — because discretion, once expanded, does not confine itself to one cause, however justified. It travels. It accumulates. It is is turned to target foes, to push an agenda.
A response to urgency outside the law undermines the purpose of law by replacing established, predictable legal frameworks with arbitrary, personalised or politically motivated discretion. While intended to solve immediate crises, such actions often damage the legal system and the rule of law.
A society that allows principle to yield too easily to urgency may find it has protected neither.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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