What is happening to our country? When did we give up on truth, democracy and Western values? When did we choose to reward terrorists, butchers, kidnappers and barbarians? Why is Britain turning its back not just on Israel, a democracy on the front line against Islamism, but also, increasingly, against its Jewish citizens?
The explosion in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes in the UK is a national emergency, an existential threat to the liberal society painstakingly constructed since the 1850s, yet, unlike other kinds of racism, it is dismissed or ignored. Why? Is it elite prejudice of the sort Emile Zola exposed in France all those years ago? Is it electoral politics? Can’t Labour see that it is making everything worse with its unfair, mendacious attacks on Israel?
The double standards are sickening. There was anger that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Left-wing president, is in Britain meeting Sir Keir Starmer; yet the PM’s tête-à-tête with the Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas, holder of an anti-Semitic PhD from a Soviet university and proponent of pay-per slay support for the families of Palestinian terrorists, was uncontroversial. How can this be right?
And why doesn’t Starmer put maximum pressure on Hamas to release its hostages and quit Gaza, and make the case for a multinational, Arab-backed temporary government to rebuild it, rather than promising to unconditionally recognise a virtual Palestinian state that would still be committed to Israel’s obliteration? Does Labour only pretend to care about Gazan civilians?
Britain, courtesy of a ruling class that has lost its moral bearings, home of Left-wing broadcasters that no longer pretend to be objective, is now among the global centres of Israelophobia. The Jewish state is always on trial, guilty until proven innocent, its motives inherently suspect, its claims reflexively disbelieved, its every faux pas, real or imagined, triggering an atavistic eruption of “I told you sos” from obsessive haters.
Israel’s enemies, by contrast, are able to plead lack of agency. The savage Hamas blackmailers who were targeted in Qatar rebranded themselves as “the negotiation team”, even though they were the terror group’s most hardline leaders. Each one of their blood libels, of their incendiary calumnies, goes around the world, lapped up by a gullible audience that never learns. A little more mud sticks every time. Israel isn’t committing a genocide, as the Foreign Office has quietly admitted, and yet 45 per cent of voters believe, absurdly, that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.
Israel needs to fight anew for its legitimacy every day, unlike every other country. It is never given the benefit of the doubt. Britain, America, France: all have made terrible errors in wartime, all are plagued by their fair share of rogues, and yet few believe that these nations have forfeited the right to exist as a result.
Israel, uniquely, can never stumble without its very existence being called into question – as we saw earlier this year when it sought to control the supply of food entering Gaza to cut off a key source of Hamas funds, a move that backfired by hiking prices and causing hunger.
There is no empathy, no contextualisation, no historical knowledge, no interest in all the times Israel sought to agree a land-for-peace swap but was rejected. Israel must be perfect, more moral than anybody else, or else it will be demonised, vilified and sanctioned. The West projects upon Israel all of its own demons, every pathology of its own history, every one of its nihilistic ideologies. Our Western-centric, secular intelligentsia refuses to accept that Palestinian elites are rejectionists. They don’t want a two-state solution: they want control, from the river to the sea, with the Jews ethnically cleansed.
The West has forgotten just how destructive wars of national survival, such as the Second World War, inevitably are. We have even memory-holed recent urban conflicts like Fallujah, and view the war in Gaza through inane, semi-pacifist lenses. Hamas pioneered a new form of warfare, squandering billions in aid to build a network of tunnels under homes, hospitals and mosques. This will be studied by military historians for centuries; Israel has so far only destroyed 35-40 per cent of all these tunnels. Gaza’s population is used as human shields, in the hope that as many as possible are killed to score propaganda points, while the terrorists hide in tunnels. It’s an obscenity, and the West falls for it.
There are still those who maintain that the grotesque campaign of defamation against Israel isn’t the latest manifestation of anti-Semitism. That is delusion. Yes, we can and should criticise and scrutinise every country. I slam Starmer’s Government: this does not mean I hate Britain. But the campaign against Israel is something else.
Anti-Semitism is a virulent, ever-evolving pathogen. It is the original conspiracy theory, a demented theory of everything, a shape-shifting scapegoating to bolster the egos of inadequates. As a form of social contagion, it is ideal for social media, with its fake or misleading viral images, incendiary accusations and propaganda campaigns. A world where critical reasoning has been superseded by short-form videos is an ideal ecosystem for the resurgence of a medieval hatred based on rumour, gossip and hearsay.
Anti-Semitism weaponises the moral norms of every age, making wildly false claims to accuse Jews of the opposite of whatever is deemed right and proper. When the West was Christian, the libel was that Jews killed Christ; when the West was racist, Jews fell foul of purity laws. Jews have, at times, been too capitalist or too communist, too “oriental” or too “white”, too introverted or too assimilated, too rich or too poor, too religious or too atheistic.
In today’s post-Protestant woke world, which worships a certain form of weakness and glamourises the oppressed, Israeli Jews are too strong. Their country represents everything the woke detest: a patriotic, demographically healthy nation-state that believes in strong borders and military virtues, all with a biblical backdrop.
The Left, which used to see Israel as a case study in decolonisation and anti-imperialism, a beautiful story of the return of a dispossessed people to its indigenous homeland, has switched sides. It now falsely categorises Israel as a “settler-state”, like the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, countries that it deems to be axiomatically racist and guilty of “white supremacy” and “genocide”.
To the woke, the Balfour declaration, a great moment, was Britain’s original sin. The Labour Government should be fighting this tidal wave of madness; instead, it is trying to ride it. The scale of its betrayal is off the charts.
What is happening to our country? When did we give up on truth, democracy and Western values? When did we choose to reward terrorists, butchers, kidnappers and barbarians? Why is Britain turning its back not just on Israel, a democracy on the front line against Islamism, but also, increasingly, against its Jewish citizens?
The explosion in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes in the UK is a national emergency, an existential threat to the liberal society painstakingly constructed since the 1850s, yet, unlike other kinds of racism, it is dismissed or ignored. Why? Is it elite prejudice of the sort Emile Zola exposed in France all those years ago? Is it electoral politics? Can’t Labour see that it is making everything worse with its unfair, mendacious attacks on Israel?
The double standards are sickening. There was anger that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Left-wing president, is in Britain meeting Sir Keir Starmer; yet the PM’s tête-à-tête with the Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas, holder of an anti-Semitic PhD from a Soviet university and proponent of pay-per slay support for the families of Palestinian terrorists, was uncontroversial. How can this be right?
And why doesn’t Starmer put maximum pressure on Hamas to release its hostages and quit Gaza, and make the case for a multinational, Arab-backed temporary government to rebuild it, rather than promising to unconditionally recognise a virtual Palestinian state that would still be committed to Israel’s obliteration? Does Labour only pretend to care about Gazan civilians?
Britain, courtesy of a ruling class that has lost its moral bearings, home of Left-wing broadcasters that no longer pretend to be objective, is now among the global centres of Israelophobia. The Jewish state is always on trial, guilty until proven innocent, its motives inherently suspect, its claims reflexively disbelieved, its every faux pas, real or imagined, triggering an atavistic eruption of “I told you sos” from obsessive haters.
Israel’s enemies, by contrast, are able to plead lack of agency. The savage Hamas blackmailers who were targeted in Qatar rebranded themselves as “the negotiation team”, even though they were the terror group’s most hardline leaders. Each one of their blood libels, of their incendiary calumnies, goes around the world, lapped up by a gullible audience that never learns. A little more mud sticks every time. Israel isn’t committing a genocide, as the Foreign Office has quietly admitted, and yet 45 per cent of voters believe, absurdly, that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.
Israel needs to fight anew for its legitimacy every day, unlike every other country. It is never given the benefit of the doubt. Britain, America, France: all have made terrible errors in wartime, all are plagued by their fair share of rogues, and yet few believe that these nations have forfeited the right to exist as a result.
Israel, uniquely, can never stumble without its very existence being called into question – as we saw earlier this year when it sought to control the supply of food entering Gaza to cut off a key source of Hamas funds, a move that backfired by hiking prices and causing hunger.
There is no empathy, no contextualisation, no historical knowledge, no interest in all the times Israel sought to agree a land-for-peace swap but was rejected. Israel must be perfect, more moral than anybody else, or else it will be demonised, vilified and sanctioned. The West projects upon Israel all of its own demons, every pathology of its own history, every one of its nihilistic ideologies. Our Western-centric, secular intelligentsia refuses to accept that Palestinian elites are rejectionists. They don’t want a two-state solution: they want control, from the river to the sea, with the Jews ethnically cleansed.
The West has forgotten just how destructive wars of national survival, such as the Second World War, inevitably are. We have even memory-holed recent urban conflicts like Fallujah, and view the war in Gaza through inane, semi-pacifist lenses. Hamas pioneered a new form of warfare, squandering billions in aid to build a network of tunnels under homes, hospitals and mosques. This will be studied by military historians for centuries; Israel has so far only destroyed 35-40 per cent of all these tunnels. Gaza’s population is used as human shields, in the hope that as many as possible are killed to score propaganda points, while the terrorists hide in tunnels. It’s an obscenity, and the West falls for it.
There are still those who maintain that the grotesque campaign of defamation against Israel isn’t the latest manifestation of anti-Semitism. That is delusion. Yes, we can and should criticise and scrutinise every country. I slam Starmer’s Government: this does not mean I hate Britain. But the campaign against Israel is something else.
Anti-Semitism is a virulent, ever-evolving pathogen. It is the original conspiracy theory, a demented theory of everything, a shape-shifting scapegoating to bolster the egos of inadequates. As a form of social contagion, it is ideal for social media, with its fake or misleading viral images, incendiary accusations and propaganda campaigns. A world where critical reasoning has been superseded by short-form videos is an ideal ecosystem for the resurgence of a medieval hatred based on rumour, gossip and hearsay.
Anti-Semitism weaponises the moral norms of every age, making wildly false claims to accuse Jews of the opposite of whatever is deemed right and proper. When the West was Christian, the libel was that Jews killed Christ; when the West was racist, Jews fell foul of purity laws. Jews have, at times, been too capitalist or too communist, too “oriental” or too “white”, too introverted or too assimilated, too rich or too poor, too religious or too atheistic.
In today’s post-Protestant woke world, which worships a certain form of weakness and glamourises the oppressed, Israeli Jews are too strong. Their country represents everything the woke detest: a patriotic, demographically healthy nation-state that believes in strong borders and military virtues, all with a biblical backdrop.
The Left, which used to see Israel as a case study in decolonisation and anti-imperialism, a beautiful story of the return of a dispossessed people to its indigenous homeland, has switched sides. It now falsely categorises Israel as a “settler-state”, like the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, countries that it deems to be axiomatically racist and guilty of “white supremacy” and “genocide”.
To the woke, the Balfour declaration, a great moment, was Britain’s original sin. The Labour Government should be fighting this tidal wave of madness; instead, it is trying to ride it. The scale of its betrayal is off the charts.