An armed Israeli settler blindfolded and detained a Palestinian man near the village of Beit Iksa in the occupied West Bank, dragging him onto a road as Israeli forces stood nearby. The Palestinian farmer was reportedly trying to reach his land before he was captured.

Jabalia, Gaza – Inside his partially destroyed home in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, 85-year-old Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi sits beside a small fire brewing coffee, staring at what remains of a life, now surrounded by rubble.

Next to him sits his wife, Aziza, also in her 80s, whom he married six decades ago. Despite years of trying, the couple was never able to have children.

Today, they live together with the five sons of Abdel Mahdi’s late brother. They were children when their father died, and Abdel Mahdi raised them and helped them to marry and start families of their own.

Born in 1940, Abdel Mahdi was only a child when the 1948 Nakba – the mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their home at the founding of the state of Israel – unfolded. And yet, despite living through that pain and trauma, he says that what Palestinians are enduring today, brought on by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, surpasses anything he has ever witnessed.

“We are from Bir al-Saba [Beersheba] … that was our homeland,” he says in a tired voice. Bir al-Saba is the largest city in the Naqab Desert. It was captured by Israeli forces in 1948, forcing much of its Palestinian population out.

The original Nakba

Abdel Mahdi’s sharp memory carries him back to his childhood, living with his parents on their land, among their livestock and property – a normal life, before everything changed.

Abdel Mahdi says he still remembers the heated discussions among families in Bir al-Saba when news first spread that Zionist Haganah militias were approaching, with some wanting to flee, and others insisting on staying.

The decision was eventually made to leave for Gaza, to the west, with the hope of returning in a few weeks.

And so Abdel Mahdi, along with his parents, three siblings, and the rest of his extended family, left, carrying whatever livestock, money and supplies they could manage.

“We all left … We walked for days. We would rest, then continue walking,” he says. “We carried some of our belongings with us. We never imagined it would become a permanent exile.”

The family initially settled in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood before later moving to Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the harsh realities of refugee life began.

“We lived in tents. The rain and wind would flood them, the cold was unbearable, then came the scorching heat,” he says. “There was hunger, exhaustion, long lines for food and water, shared toilets, lice, poor sanitation … painful memories.”

Right of return

“I remember my father and grandfather always saying we would return, and they told their children and grandchildren to hold on to the right of return,” Abdel Mahdi says.

But the return never came. Instead, decades of exile, wars and repeated attempts to rebuild life followed.

Abdel Mahdi worked for years inside Israel in construction, during a period when Palestinian labourers were granted work permits.

Together with his brothers, he managed to build homes and buy land, only for the current war to erase everything once again.

“We worked, built homes and bought land,” he says. “We thought we were finally compensating for something after the displacement that destroyed our families and lives. We thought it was over.”

“But this war destroyed everything completely,” he adds. “At the end of our lives, it brought us all back to zero. Nothing is left – no stone, no trees.”

Abdel Mahdi acknowledges that life in Gaza was never truly stable – with several Israeli wars and a years-long blockade – but he says the scale of destruction during the latest war is unprecedented.

“A Nakba at the beginning of my life … and another Nakba at the end of it. What can we even say?” he murmurs while staring at the devastation surrounding him.

The war on Gaza

Abdel Mahdi recounts how his life was turned upside down during the latest Israeli war on Gaza, beginning in October 2023.

This time, he was forced to flee his home as an elderly man, struggling to walk alongside his ageing wife and the families of his nephews.

He was displaced multiple times – once to the Gaza seaport area in western Gaza City, another time to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

Before that, he had sought shelter in a United Nations-run school in Jabalia before Israeli forces stormed it.

He recalls the terrifying moments when Israeli tanks and soldiers entered the school during the early months of the war, as chaos, gunfire and screams erupted while loudspeakers ordered everyone to evacuate southwards.

“They forced us out of the school,” he says. “My elderly wife and I leaned on each other to walk. Some people couldn’t get out and were killed there.”

“We walked long distances until we reached western Gaza, together with what remained of our family, who had scattered in different places,” he adds.

“We were collapsing from exhaustion, but the shelling and fear forced us to keep moving.”

Abdel Mahdi says that he considered staying in his home and refusing to leave, unwilling to repeat what he called “the mistake of our ancestors” when they fled in 1948. But he says the danger eventually forced him to flee.

For the elderly man, displacement itself became one of the cruellest parts of the war.

“When a person leaves his home, he loses his dignity and worth,” he says quietly. “We lived in tents, in the sand, exposed to everything… We lived through famine and shortages of absolutely everything.”

“I wished for death with all my heart,” the octogenarian admits, his eyes filling with tears. “All I wanted was a concrete wall to lean my exhausted back against, but there was nothing. It was unbearable for both the young and the old.”

A taste of return

A small sense of hope came when residents were allowed to return to northern Gaza after the October 2025 ceasefire announcement.

Abdel Mahdi says he had lost hope of ever seeing his home again, but he managed to return to it even though it was heavily damaged.

“A deep pain took hold of me when I saw Jabalia, where I had lived for decades, turned into endless rubble and destroyed roads,” he says.

“Now I walk with great difficulty, trying to make my way through shattered streets with my cane,” he adds, recalling that he has fallen twice while trying to walk through the rubble left behind by Israeli attacks.

Abdel Mahdi insists that what Palestinians are experiencing today bears no resemblance to any previous period of his life.

He has lived through the Nakba, the 1956 war, the 1967 war, the Palestinian uprisings, and previous wars on Gaza, yet says none compare to the current devastation.

“Back then, the Israelis withdrew from our lands,” he says. “Today, more than half of Gaza’s land has been seized … every day we hear gunfire and Israeli military vehicles.

“Even the end of the war they talked about was a lie,” he adds. “We have been living in an ongoing catastrophe for three years.”

Watching events unfold, Abdel Mahdi expresses deep disappointment with the Arab and international response to Gaza, saying Palestinians have long been left alone to face war, hunger and siege.

“History is repeating itself,” he says. “We were abandoned at every stage and left alone against a ruthless military machine. We endured more than human beings can bear.”

That reality, he says, is also what prevents him from feeling hopeful that conditions in Gaza will improve any time soon.

“We hear endless promises about opening crossings and improving conditions,” he says. “But it is all lies … promises that stole years from our lives and souls.”

Yet despite the repeated displacement, loss and wars, Abdel Mahdi clings fiercely to the one thing he says the war could not take from him: his connection to the land.

“Even if they offered me a palace in New York in exchange for this destroyed house, I would refuse,” he says firmly.

What he is living through now, however painful, has not pushed him towards leaving. Instead, he says, it has only deepened his determination to remain.

“Those who left long ago never came back,” he says. “A person should never abandon his homeland. Here I will die, and here I will be buried.”

Sir Mark Rowley’s recent comments that some pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London send a message “that feels like anti-Semitism” are the latest sign of a dangerous trend in British public life: the conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of the Israeli state.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner suggested that some protest organisers deliberately route marches near synagogues in ways that intimidate British Jews. Any genuine intimidation of Jewish communities should, of course, be treated seriously. Anti-Semitism is real, dangerous and rising in Britain and across parts of Europe. It must be confronted clearly wherever it appears.

But Britain is entering troubling territory when protests against the destruction of Gaza, opposition to Israeli state violence, or expressions of Palestinian grief are treated as inherently suspicious, even anti-Jewish, political acts.

The issue is no longer only how Britain combats anti-Semitism. It is whether the country can still distinguish between hatred of Jews and opposition to the policies of the Israeli government.

That distinction matters enormously, not only for Palestinians but for Jewish communities, too.

For Palestinians, there is something painfully familiar about this moment. Many grew up being told that their dispossession was tragic but necessary; that the destruction of their villages, the loss of their homes and their transformation into refugees were justified by somebody else’s need for safety and statehood.

Entire generations of Palestinians were raised inside this logic. Their catastrophe was acknowledged only insofar as it remained secondary to another historical trauma. In much of the Western imagination, Palestinian suffering occupied a different moral category: visible enough to be discussed, but rarely enough to disturb political comfort.

Now, as Gaza continues to be devastated before the eyes of the world, Palestinians in Britain and across the West are finding that even speaking about their grief, anger and loss is increasingly treated as a source of discomfort requiring management.

For more than two and a half years, the world has witnessed scenes from Gaza that many legal experts, human rights organisations and genocide scholars have described using words once reserved for history books: ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, extermination and genocide.

Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. Families wiped out. Hospitals bombed. Journalists killed. Civilians starved under siege. Children pulled lifeless from rubble in numbers so vast that the scale of the catastrophe defies comprehension.

And yet in Britain, much of the political and media conversation has focused less on the destruction itself than on the supposed threat posed by those protesting against it.

Hundreds of thousands of people have marched to demand a ceasefire, an end to British military and political support for Israel, and accountability for what many around the world increasingly regard as crimes against humanity unfolding in plain sight.

Those demonstrations have included Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, students, pensioners, trade unionists, Holocaust survivors and people of conscience with no personal connection to the region at all. Yet large sections of Britain’s political and media establishment continue to frame these marches as uniquely menacing, morally suspect and inherently anti-Semitic.

The implication is difficult to ignore: pro-Palestinian speech and protest are to be treated as dangerous regardless of content or context, and therefore as something to be contained, managed or silenced.

There is, of course, a legitimate debate to be had about public order, policing and community tensions. Jewish communities have every right to feel safe and protected, particularly at a time when anti-Semitic incidents have risen. No civilised society should tolerate threats against Jews, just as it should not tolerate anti-Muslim hatred or racism directed at any other community.

But there is a profound difference between anti-Semitism and discomfort. There is a difference between hatred and political dissent. And there is a difference between threatening a community and protesting against a state accused by international organisations and legal experts of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

That distinction has become increasingly blurred in British public discourse.

Perhaps most dangerously, the constant framing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations as inherently anti-Semitic risks reinforcing precisely the conflation that political leaders claim to oppose.

To automatically treat protests against Israeli military actions as hostility towards Jews implies that Jewish identity itself is inseparable from the conduct of the Israeli state. That is neither fair nor accurate.

Many Jewish people in Britain and around the world have publicly opposed Israel’s war on Gaza. Many have marched alongside Palestinians. Many are horrified by the scale of destruction and civilian suffering. They understand something fundamental that sections of Britain’s political and media class increasingly struggle to grasp: criticising a state is not the same as hating a people.

Britain ordinarily understands this distinction perfectly well. Criticism of Russia is not treated as hatred towards Russians. Opposition to American wars is not automatically framed as hostility towards Americans as a people. Protest against the Chinese government is not assumed to be anti-Chinese racism.

Only when it comes to Israel does this distinction repeatedly collapse.

That collapse carries consequences.

If people are constantly told that protests against Israeli actions are inherently anti-Semitic, some will inevitably begin associating Jewish people collectively with those actions. Far from protecting Jewish communities, this risks deepening tensions and confusion at precisely the moment clarity is most needed.

Political leaders, police authorities and media institutions therefore carry a particular responsibility to draw careful distinctions, not erase them.

They should confront anti-Semitism directly and unapologetically wherever it appears. But they should also defend the democratic right of people to oppose war crimes, protest mass civilian slaughter and speak openly about Palestinian suffering without automatically being viewed through the lens of suspicion.

Suppressing pro-Palestinian protests will not reduce tensions in Britain. Nor will portraying anti-war demonstrations as uniquely threatening simply because they centre on Palestinian humanity.

What Britain is witnessing on its streets is not simply anger. Much of it is moral horror.

Millions of people across the world have now spent months watching what they believe to be a genocide unfold in real time.

A healthy democracy should be capable of recognising the difference between hatred and the refusal to stay silent in the face of it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.