The next time the BBC’s news division is recruiting reporters, they might like to give a Year 8 student in Manchester a call. On Sunday, at a march through the city in solidarity with Palestine, 13-year-old Josh armed with a microphone weaved his way through the crowd with the confidence of a seasoned journalist.

The crowd – chanting anti-Western sentiments – felt “hostile” at times, but he selected people whom he thought might be good to interview while his father, Nick, filmed the exchanges on his phone. 

“I wanted to document it,” says Josh. “If I was just speaking to them normally, and they said anything overtly anti-Semitic then it wouldn’t be recorded. I wanted to be able to keep it somewhere.” 

Nick had recently been to a march in London “trying to understand the depth of anti-Semitism”, and (a self-confessed frustrated journalist) took a microphone with him to interview people. Josh was “a little bit jealous” and asked if he could go to a march himself. 

At the Manchester march, Josh, who is from a Jewish family, approached a woman holding a sign emblazoned with the words: “End the power of the Zionist lobby.” A video of their exchange has gone viral, earning Josh praise from Israeli commentators and British journalists including Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan. “Brilliant interview by this young man,” wrote Neil on X. “Brilliant. Confident. Clear. Informed. Polite (note how he just walks away at the end). And he’s done his homework, which is increasingly rare these days.” 

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.” 

Josh is only 13. He has grown up in modern, multicultural Manchester. This is his first experience of that “jolt” his father speaks of. “Since October 7 there’s just been this huge wave from most of the people that you thought were your allies,” says Josh. “I haven’t felt anything like that before.” It’s an articulate way of describing what so many British Jews have experienced since October. 

Nick recalls the day Josh came home from school having seen a line of Palestinian flags hung up on his school bus route. “He said it made him sad to see all these Palestinian flags and he wanted to put a flag up, not that he did. You wouldn’t feel able to put up an Israeli flag because it would be a lightning rod for hate.” 

Not every 13-year-old would take it upon themselves, in the face of that knotty, uncomfortable feeling, to get educated. “I’ve spoken a lot with my dad about it,” Josh says. “And we have discussions about history. I’ve looked at a lot of debates online.” 

Still, he was shocked by what he found at the march. “I think one of the chants was ‘Joe Biden you can hide, how many babies have you killed tonight?’” says Josh. “And they were also expressing support for Houthis. I just found it crazy in a Western democracy that has given most of them their lives and their livelihoods that they’re just expressing this anti-Western rhetoric.” 

Nick is impressed by how his son has handled some of the more negative reactions to his video. “They were calling me an ‘extremist Right-wing white boy child’,” says Josh. “99.9 per cent of those comments are just angry that what I’m saying doesn’t fit their narrow view of the world. They’re saying ‘oh he’s lying, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about’. And they have no evidence.” 

The people Josh admires in the world of commentary (Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro – for his views on the conflict but not “all his other politics” – and Piers Morgan) could probably teach him a few things about how to handle trolls. 

What does he plan to do with his newfound taste for reporting? He plans to keep doing interviews. “And not just about the conflict. Maybe about something else.” Anyone planning on attending the next march might want to look out for a small red-headed boy with a microphone.