Brighton is often called ‘London-by-sea’ but it is also an officially designated ‘City of Sanctuary’. The title, recognising the resort’s commitment to those fleeing ‘persecution and discrimination,’ has meant, at least in recent years, extending the hand of friendship to refugees from all over the world.

But the culture of hospitality and welcome can be traced back, it is widely acknowledged, to the arrival of Jews escaping Hitler’s Europe.

Today, Brighton and Hove – which became a unitary authority in 1997 and a city in 2001 – has one of the major Jewish communities outside London. There is even a Jew Street, its name recalling the resort’s first synagogue on the site.

So, in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when more than 1,200 Israelis were killed and over 240 kidnapped by Hamas assassins, a motion was put before Brighton Council to reaffirm the resort’s status as a ‘City of Sanctuary’ and ‘our position that hate will not be tolerated’.

More than two years on and Jews with stab vests are standing guard outside Jewish places of worship.

Mezuzahs (the prayer scrolls attached to the doors of Jewish homes) are being removed and teams of pro-Palestinian activists, it has emerged, many sporting the emblematic black-and-white Palestinian headdress known as the keffiyeh, are going door-to-door asking households to boycott Israeli goods, leaving Jews feeling fearful and intimidated.

Leaflets with a picture of a watermelon (in the red, green and black colours of the Palestinian flag) urge residents to join the campaign to create an Apartheid Free Zone in the city. It refers to the group’s insistence that Israel is a ‘racist and genocidal state’ similar to South Africa in the pre-Nelson Mandela era.

The pro-Palestinian activists gathered in pink high-vis vests ahead of their door knocking and leafletting campaign

‘It’s bad enough to have to see hateful anti-Israel propaganda and lies written around the streets of Brighton nearly every day, but to come home and find this on my doormat inside my home makes me feel sickened and angry,’ explained a clearly distressed Jewish woman whose home was visited by pro-Palestine activists when she was out.

‘Brighton feels like hostile territory these days and now it just got worse as I don’t even feel safe in my own home.’

She insisted on remaining anonymous, which is telling in itself.

Brighton and Hove is not alone. Sheffield, Bristol, Manchester, London and Edinburgh are also being targeted in what is turning into a coordinated national campaign. But it is on the south coast – in the so-called ‘City of Sanctuary’ – that the activities of the Apartheid-Free Zone movement have caused most concern.

‘This is reminiscent of a very dark time in European history,’ said Fiona Sharpe, community liaison officer for the Sussex Jewish Representative Council, who believes a wave of thinly disguised anti-Semitism has spread through her home town and the country.

Recorded incidents of anti-Semitism in Brighton, logged by Community Security Trust, a charity founded to protect British Jews, has risen by 150 per cent since the end of 2023, with 52 offences of abusive behaviour, threats and damage and desecration in 2025.The real figure is almost certainly much higher.

One of the most shocking examples of this hatred is the frequent targeting of a memorial garden for the victims of October 7 which has been vandalised more than 50 times – yes, 50 times – daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti and smeared with excrement. There is nothing to suggest, it must be stressed, that the Apartheid-Free Zone campaign condones acts such as these.

But it’s little wonder Jews increasingly have come to view their home town as ‘hostile territory’, a phrase that cropped up again and again, as we spoke to Jewish people this week.

Leaflets encourages residents to join their pro-Palestinian campaign and boycott businesses with Israeli links

You might have seen a report about what is happening in Brighton on Sky News earlier this month. The door-knocking team could be seen working their way through a list of addresses led by a bespectacled young man who did not wish to give his full name. In fact, he was subsequently identified on social media as Seymour Millen, 35, something our own inquiries had already established.

Mr Millen is ‘comms officer’ with the local branch of Unison (more of him later). Behind the Brighton Apartheid-Free Zone, however, is the Brighton wing of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which boasts of being the ‘biggest organisation in the UK dedicated to securing Palestinian rights’.

It is also among the most controversial. Many of their marches through London have caused outrage. The first request for a national demonstration against Israel came from the PSC at 12.50pm on October 7, 2023 – hours after the Hamas attack started, the Met revealed. Later, at another PSC rally, the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’, widely interpreted as a call to drive Jews out of Israel, was beamed onto Big Ben.

In Brighton, the group has 10,000 followers on Facebook and 400 members, reportedly.

The PSC has a regular stall in George Street, Hove, in the heart of the Jewish community, close to one of the city’s four main synagogues, and the scene of recurrent protests – which, says Fiona Sharpe, Jewish residents ‘doing their shopping find deeply unsettling’. How could they not?

We were given the names of two of the activists, a woman and a man both in their early 70s and both veterans of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

The Mail on Sunday is not naming them.

They were surprised and less than happy to see me on the doorstep of their smart Victorian terrace. He wanted to know how we knew his name (someone tipped us off, I told him) and his address (answer: from the electoral roll).

An altercation in Sheffield between a member of Apartheid-Free Zone (AFZ) and an opponent, who accused the leafleteers of ‘Jew hunting’

Both he and his wife said I had no right to turn up at his house (and should have gone through the ‘proper channels’ to contact the PSC) even though he and his fellow PSC stalwarts were doing exactly that to residents in Brighton and are planning to continue to do so. ‘You do know we weren’t targeting Jewish people,’ he added.

Nevertheless, Jewish people felt they were being targeted and the PSC, as previously mentioned, is manning a stall in the Jewish quarter in Hove with anti-Israeli posters and leaflets as well as staging demos in the neighbourhood.

Isn’t this the glaring double standard at the heart of the controversy setting neighbour against neighbour in Brighton?

In a statement released by the Brighton & Hove Apartheid-Free Zone, organiser Ori Selkirk said: ‘As a British Jew, I completely reject the false and politically motivated claim that our campaign is intimidating to the Jewish community. At no point in our campaign do we mention Jews in any way whatsoever.

‘Furthermore, I would argue that it is anti-Semitic to conflate a political entity such as the State of Israel, with Jews as a whole.

‘I speak for many Jewish people when I say that we do not want to be associated with an apartheid state, especially when that state claims to speak for us and commit crimes in our name.

‘Boycott tactics have proven historically effective in combatting apartheid in South Africa, and we are applying those same tactics to combat the ongoing Israeli apartheid in the present.’

The Green Party has ideological links with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (a Green motion, for example, to review any investments Brighton Council has in Israeli companies was passed last year) and they used to share the same address near Brighton Station a little over a decade ago.

‘I can fully appreciate why some residents might find this tactic [door-to-door visits] confrontational or worrying… even though I believe those running the campaign are well-intentioned,’ was the response to the criticisms by Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, Sian Berry.

Contrast her nuanced statement with the unequivocal stance of Hove MP and Business Secretary Peter Kyle, who called for the police to investigate the Palestinian activists, accusing them of ‘creating an environment of fear and intolerance’. Police have said they will not be investigating.

Activists, some of whom are veterans of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, systematically moved through the streets to spread anti-Israeli propaganda

Their progress along Ditchling Road, one of the main arteries running through central Brighton, was filmed by Victoria Bhogal, of campaign group Jewish And Proud, and her video provides a revealing insight into their tactics.

‘Make eye contact and smile,’ Seymour Millen, 35, tells his clipboard-carrying troops, who wore pink vests.

‘We are referring to ourselves as neighbours. We are not strangers to these people. We already know them. We live in the same city as them. They should then ask the person who opens the door to sign a pledge online to boycott Israeli goods.

‘Start’ with avocados, tomatoes, potatoes, dill and parsley before ‘moving on’ to hummus’, he says.

No encouragement, though, to boycott one in seven of the medicines supplied to the NHS by Israeli companies.

Should they encounter anyone pro-Israeli, Mr Millen warned: ‘Do not get into an argument with them. There’s lots of doors that are pro-Palestinian … just say “thanks for your time, I have to go now.” Goodbye. Mark the door down as: “Not interested. Do not contact again” – and move to the next door and find someone much nicer.’

The logging of responses has led to accusations Jewish households are being ‘mapped’, but Mr Millen insists it is because keeping a record of responses – ‘No Answer’, ‘Not Interested’, or ‘Supportive’ – means they only return to residents ‘sympathetic to their cause’.

Mr Millen was asked by Sky News if he could understand why people who dispute his view would be uncomfortable if they opened the door to one of his volunteers and he replied: ‘It might be uncomfortable but it’s only a one-on-one conversation. We’re very polite [at] the door. Whatever someone’s background is, we treat them like anyone else.’

Mrs Bhogal, 61, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, is having none of it.

‘They have got a system where they know where the people who support Israel live and where people who don’t support Israel live,’ she said. ‘It made me feel sick to my stomach. I see it as a targeted campaign to turn the people of Brighton against Jews who support Israel. It is chilling.’

She added: ‘We are dealing with a city full of hatred.’

One incident occurred only the other day. ‘Someone called me a c*** Jew to my face, at a rally for Israel, playing Israeli music and flying a British flag with the Star of David on it. We got so much abuse.’

Again, there is no suggestion that the action is linked to the PSC. It is hardly surprising Jewish people hold such events given that their voice is being drowned out – and worse – every day in Brighton.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the memorial to the victims of October 7. It used to be in Palmeira Square but now sits outside the Reform synagogue nearby due to construction work going on in the square.

A poster of one of the hostages was stolen and a laminated book with the names and pictures of hostages was defaced with faeces on the day that the bodies of three hostages, including the loved one of a grieving local family, were recovered from Gaza.

In five of the 50 attacks, the site was completely destroyed. The message ‘Pray for the 30,000 murdered Palestinians’ was once scrawled across the site. A schoolboy was also seen spitting on the memorial garden.

More recently, on the day of the Manchester synagogue attack last October, the Jewish community gathered outside their own synagogue near the memorial.

‘People drove by shouting “baby killers”,’ recalled Heidi Bachram, whose husband’s relatives were murdered and taken hostage on October 7.

Now division, she feels, is again being whipped up against Jews by the Apartheid-Free Zone activists.

‘They say they are just doing what political parties do, like Labour or whoever, going door-to-door canvassing,’ said anti-Semitism campaigner Ms Bachram.

‘But they are not, they really aren’t. What they are doing is very sinister. They admit they are anti-Zionist, which means destroying the state of Israel.’

Anti-Zionism, she says, is just anti-Semitism in disguise.

Another Jewish woman I spoke to anonymously said she and her husband are about to emigrate to Israel because of the toxic atmosphere in Brighton.

‘I don’t think it is safe for us to live here any more,’ she said.

In the early 1980s the National Front marched through Brighton. ‘They were seen for what they were and people came out onto the street and yelled at them,’ recalled Fiona Sharpe.

Now, she says, anti-Semitism is normalised and the ‘level of hate more accepted and tolerated than I have ever experienced’.

Meanwhile, the clipboard brigade will be back on the streets of Brighton again soon.

But many might ask why there are never any protests about some of the world’s truly repugnant regimes. Only Israel.

Additional reporting: Tim Stewart