The video shows Josh engaging the woman in a conversation about her interpretation of Zionism. He tells her Zionism is defined as “the belief that Jews should have a homeland”. She tells him Israel is “trying to create a state where there are only Jewish people”. He points out “there are two million Israeli Arabs that have the same rights as Israeli Jews living in Israel”. She tells him Hamas was set up by Netanyahu; he says the Iranians financed Hamas.
“No,” she says. “That’s propaganda. Are you Jewish?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Josh replies.
“It does matter. Are you a Zionist?”
“Why does it matter?” he asks her.
“Because I want to know what your agenda is.”
What compelled him to pick up a microphone and head to the march? He says he wanted to cut through reporting which he deemed to be either too partial or too neutral. “We get all this news from social media, like for example the Campaign Against Antisemitism on X – they do these interviews and make everyone look really anti-Semitic. I wanted to go and see what it was like for myself.”
He doesn’t think much of the BBC’s efforts. “I felt like they were being too neutral. For example, they were comparing Israel and Hamas […] and saying ‘this one is making these allegations, this one is making these allegations, which one is true?’ and trying to portray them as equal sides when they weren’t. I felt that was a bit of a problem.”
He was also frustrated with his secular school in Manchester, where talk of what has unfolded in the weeks since the October 7 attacks hasn’t been encouraged. “I felt a little bit confined because we weren’t really allowed to talk about it in school.”
Josh, meanwhile, was learning as much as he could about the conflict in his spare time. “I felt like I had gained a lot of knowledge and I wanted to have a debate with someone.”
We are speaking on Zoom after school on a day when the video of his interview has been viewed 1.2 million times and reposted by the Israeli foreign ministry. A fiercely bright, hard-working boy, who is learning Spanish and Mandarin at school, Hebrew at home, and teaching himself Hindi and Slovak in his spare time (why? “Well Hindi is the language of almost one billion people in the entire subcontinent of India”), Josh developed an interest in the news by reading his father’s X feed and checking the BBC News site.
It has been a strange 48 hours for the family. His younger brother, Isaac, nine, has been telling his friends about it at school. Nick, sitting next to his son, is “dead chuffed with him”.
Nick, who runs his own business while his wife, Johanna, runs a property company, says the October attacks were “traumatic” for his family, because of the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the attacks in this country. “It’s our strong belief that we were heavily integrated into British society. Josh has loads of Asian friends and Muslim friends. I work with lots of Muslim people. But my family has felt a lot more vulnerable because of what’s happened – there’s been a jolt to that sense of security.”