As such, while promoting An American Pickle, Rogen remarked that the State of Israel “makes no sense”. He despaired that, “as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life”. But he was also fed pickles: proper, New York, dill-and-garlic, half-sour, girthy, lacto-fermented pickles. Not the small, wrinkly, saltier-than-the-Dead-Sea variety you get in Israel, locked up in austere metal cans. No, it is in these old-world, Pale of Settlement pickles, the sort you’d find in a good pastrami on rye or speckling lumpy chopped liver, that Rogen invests his Jewishness. It is to this pickle that he writes his Jewish love-letter.

He is not the only one. The American actress Hannah Einbinder caused a stir when she said “Free Palestine” at the Emmy Awards last year. Her speech rapidly became a symbol of a much-touted rupture between American Jews and Israel, or else the pro-Israel old guard in America, who still think wistfully about their years on kibbutz in the Sixties, and the younger “anti-Zionist” whippersnappers, for whom Israel is an irrelevance at best and a painful embarrassment at worst. Einbinder is adamant that her activism, including her rejection of “liberal Zionism”, is rooted in her Jewish values and upbringing. “Something actually Jewish to cleanse the stories,” she captioned a picture on Instagram of a handsome platter of pickles: pickles, you see, are actually Jewish, while Zionism is not. “Lotta Zionists sayin im not Jewish,” she posted on a different occasion in gratingly Zoomer style; “well then explain why im drinking electrolytes out of a pickle jar ive been reusing for half a year!”

Now consider, against this vibrant, self-confident culture, the pickle of Anglo-Jewry. Our haimisha cucumbers, delicious though they are, wither at the comparison. They sexed her up, Mrs Elswood, a few years ago; and in so doing, I am sorry to say, they made her appear less Jewish. The gherkins are drenched in vinegar instead of being allowed to ferment in their own fluids: it is like making champagne with a SodaStream. There is no fresh, citrusy dill in those glass jars. There are only indeterminate “flavorings”, and a handful of mustard seeds wafting around pointlessly like dust caught in the light.

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When the English ate the rich

By Samuel Rubinstein

It is a perfect symbol of Anglo-Jewry. There is no nostalgia in Britain for the early-20th-century pickle vendor, and still less for the shtetl; there is no great longing for the old times. It is no accident that the “Els” in “Mrs Elswood” comes from Elstree, the apogee of Jewish embourgeoisement. Elstree is a leafy, affluent, commuter-belt suburb, only a 25-minute train ride from St Pancras, but tucked away safely in the Green Belt, out of Sadiq Khan’s maw. Nothing interesting has ever happened there: even Elstree Studios, where bits of Star Wars and the music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” were filmed, is really in Borehamwood. Elstree suits the purposes of a parochial, inward-looking community; 18% of all working Jews in Britain work professionally for a Jewish organization, and there’s no shortage of Jewish organizations nearby. It would be quite pleasant, I think, to begin one’s life at Barnet Hospital and end it at Bushey Cemetery; to be always tethered to this stolid patch of the world, where London meets Hertfordshire, except maybe for three enervating years studying politics at Nottingham. Britain gave its Jews all the good parts of shtetl life — the gossip, the match-making, the comforts and excitements of community — without any of the persecution and penury. It gave the Jews Elstree, and the Jews are grateful.

“I like Britain”, says Anglo-Jewry’s Nestor, Lord Finkelstein, “and its suburbs and its boring democracy and its middle class gentility and its small ideas”. What makes Britain a great place for Jews is its “bourgeois complacency”. The heartbreak of the recent antisemitic attacks in Heaton Park and Golders Green and the wider rise in hate crimes is compounded by the sense that this complacency is no longer possible. Jewish suburbia will endure, but it will have to be more vigilant, more suspicious of the outside world.

England’s bourgeois life has always appealed to Jewish immigrants. The great historian of Tudor England, Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Twenties Germany, dedicated his last book to The English, whose bourgeois ways had convinced him that he “had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born”. Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, did not, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, go berserk in the summer of 1968: “I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.”

It is interesting that, where Anglo-Jewry does produce genius, it tends not to be avant garde. Elton was an old-fashioned historian, and Stoppard quite an old-fashioned playwright. Both men had a soft spot for Thatcher, whose own affection for British Jews is well known: many Jews numbered among her constituents in Finchley and her colleagues in cabinet. Elstree’s seat is Conservative and always has been. There have been Jewish socialists in Britain too, of course: Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband. But as Britain’s Jews shifted Rightwards, they became peripheral to the community. In 2015, only 15% of British Jews wanted to make Ralph’s son Ed Prime Minister, only slightly more than would vote for Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years later. (He is probably even less popular among British Jews today, in light of his policies as Foreign Secretary.) The paradigmatic Jewish public intellectuals of this era were rather men like Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, nobody much to the Left of Isaiah Berlin. The historian William Rubinstein (no relation) wrote in his 1982 book, The Left, the Right and the Jews, that, once British Jews had entered the upper-middle class, “the old Leftist enthusiasms of the shtetl are abandoned for the warm security of the center Right”.

Anglo-Jewry flourishes in the warm security of the suburbs, and it flourishes in a suburban kind of way. The British rabbi Lionel Blue once quipped that “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. Among British Jews there is a high degree of characteristically British social anxiety, tending towards conformism. This probably is not conducive to creativity and artistic experiment. Except, perhaps, for Howard Jacobson, British letters lack a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer. Roth himself seemed to grasp why. His alter ego in Deception complains about the English character of England’s Jews. England was missing something that he was accustomed to in New York: “Jews with force…, Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.” He finishes on that familiar American note: “New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not.”

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when British Jews chafe against this bourgeois conformism — or when they express disdain, in particular, for its attachments to Israel — they are quick to look to obstreperous America. If the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, and the British middle classes on the whole are “America-brained”, then British Jews are the most America-brained Britons of all.

In his much-discussed polemic Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel testily declares that he does not care about Israel “more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…” None of these things, he concludes this rant, “has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”.

Most of the things on Baddiel’s list — six, by my count — do, however, have something to do with a North American country 3,500 miles away. For those British Jews who wish to forego Jerusalem, New York is the only possible alternative. It’s an increasingly attractive proposition. However Right-wing British Jews may be, four in five dislike Benjamin Netanyahu; looking only at Israel’s demographics, the trends that Netanyahu embodies are only going to get stronger. Nine out of every 10 Jews in the world live either in America or in Israel. The rest of us, the one in 10 Jews who don’t live either in America or Israel, simply choose which of those poles to look to.

If Netanyahu can be said to represent one pole, then perhaps Larry David, who appears twice in Baddiel’s list, represents the other. One thought kept coming to me while reading Blake J. Harris’s weighty new tome, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David: there could be no Larry David in Britain. Perhaps that is why British Jewish comedians like David Baddiel admire him so much. Bourgeois conformity is not kind to “social assassins”. Elstree’s no place for eccentrics.

The biography doesn’t dwell much on David’s Jewishness, but it doesn’t have to: it is simply self-evident that David is a product of a quintessentially Jewish world. Before he made his name with Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, David was best known to the American public for playing an Orthodox rabbi on the sketch show Fridays in a fictional low-budget TV show called Matzoi!. The premise is that he is some kind of kung fu master, who shouts out “Oi!” in place of “Eee-ya!”; he is protecting the world from a sinister group called “Global Organisation of Young Irrational Maniacs” (GOYIM).

Curb (much more than Seinfeld) is chock-full of Jewishness. Its soundtrack is infused with klezmer. Plotlines often involve Passover seders, Friday Night Dinners, shivas, minyans, and bat mitzvahs. There is lots about the Holocaust: the classic “Survivor Fight”, or the scene where Larry steals a pair of shoes from an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.

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And yet what is striking about Larry David’s Jewishness, in Harris’s biography as much as in Curb, is the conspicuous absence of Israel. Only one episode of Curb features Israel prominently, “Palestinian Chicken”, and it ends with Larry stuck in the middle between a pro-Israel crowd on the one side and an anti-Israel side on the other. He, like Baddiel, is basically indifferent to this “Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”. David is not anti-Israel, by any means: he recently irritated some of his fans by mocking the anti-Israel politics of the DSA. But it seems that Israel does not play an especially significant role in his Jewish identity.

Now compare him with the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — at whose birthday party (one learns from the new biography) David was introduced to his now-wife. Here Israel is inescapable. Often, while playing his characters, Baron Cohen slips into Hebrew. He also has an enduring fascination with the Mossad, exhibited in The Spy (2019) and his character Col. Erran Morad, now starring in the new Ali G film. Larry David’s Jewishness is American and diasporic. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, looks to Israel.

That is quite typical of British Jews. There is, in Britain, extremely little home-grown Jewish “anti-Zionism” to speak of. While 37% of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist, 66% of British Jews do. Even among young British Jews “anti-Zionism” is practically non-existent: one is far more likely, in my experience, to be regaled with tales about “antisemitism on campus” than to encounter young Jews saying words like “genocide”, “apartheid”, or “Ben Gvir”. It is telling that the main Jewish spokesperson at the now-proscribed Palestine Action, Max Geller, is American.

The independence and assertiveness of America’s Jewish community is something that Jews in Britain have historically envied. British Jews may cling to the warm security of its boring suburbia, but they have also always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing. It was a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot” to refer to American multiculturalism. “Ah, Vera”, says a character in his 1908 play of the same name, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!”

But even in America, pickles and “anti-Zionism” won’t be enough. There are pickles aplenty in Curb Your Enthusiasm — there is even “the pickle boy” — but there are not only pickles. Larry David’s Jewishness draws from deeper sources. It helps that he is old enough to remember the old-timey “Noo Yawk” Yiddishkeit in its pomp. It is not clear that younger American Jews have inherited much of this, nor that their attachment to the superficial trappings of Jewish culture, abstracted to such a degree that it could be practically any Eastern European immigrant culture, can sustain a community indefinitely. America’s Left-wing Jews also face a steep demographic decline. Zangwill envied America for “looking forward”, but the “anti-Zionist” American Jews today seem to prefer looking back: at the shtetl, the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking pickle man. The Jewish community in Britain today is frightened, its suburbs most of all, and less sure of itself than usual. But it is, in its humdrum way, resilient and durable.

The word Zion occurs more than a hundred times in the Hebrew scriptures. In 587 BC, the Babylonians conquered the land of Judah and expelled its people; the psalmist describes their despondency and their yearning for a return home. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This lament is a recurrent feature of the Hebrew scriptures. And later, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the same desire for a return home, to Zion, was the defining feature of what came to be called Judaism. Zionism was not invented in 1895. It is as old as the psalmist, even older.

But the arrival of Christianity did something very particular to our understanding of all religions and has distorted the way we understand words such as Judaism and Zionism. For Christianity, and especially protestant Christianity, religion is essentially a system of belief. So successful has this idea become that it is often impossible for people to understand that a religion can be anything other than a system of belief. Yet to be Jewish is not just about what you believe, it is also about where you come from, where many yearn to return to, who your mother is, what practices you have. For the vast majority of Jews, then, Zionism is not simply a political philosophy that was invented in the years before the First World War. It is a way of life that is fundamentally constitutive of what it is to be Jewish.

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Which is why, in passing a motion that “Zionism is Racism”, the Green Party has done something profoundly wicked. Those who scream “from the river to the sea” — though they probably couldn’t tell you the name of either the river or the sea — have decided to describe the safety that many Jews seek in Israel as a hatred. To condemn Zionism is to seek the destruction of Israel and open Jews up to a danger that has followed them around since forever.

This idea that Zionism is a racist and colonialist enterprise is absurd. The yearning for Zion long predates the Holocaust, but the murder of six million Jews by a European civilization gave that yearning a new urgency. And yes, there were Jews who, before the Second World War, believed that they could make a safe home for themselves in Europe, fearing that Herzl’s new political version of Zionism would destabilize the assimilation into that society they had done so much to build.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Samuel Friedeberg, ran the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool. In 1917, his community debated Herzl’s proposal, many worrying that the foundation of a Jewish state would “prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation”. The motion was defeated 39 votes to 30. The result was a reflection of how safe many well-to-do Jews had come to feel in England, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria. As the then Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, put it in 1898: “Our faith teaches us to seek the welfare of the nations under whose protection we dwell, to take part in their national efforts and to work for their success, and to wait silently for the day when the prophets will be fulfilled.”

Adler’s message to Herzl was that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Yet after the Second World War, Jews could no longer count on being protected by European nations. The “nations under whose protection we dwell” no longer protected them, indeed turned against them with diabolical and murderous consequences. Zionism wasn’t revived as a political reality by Herzl; it was revived by the screams of six million souls murdered in Europe. That was real genocide. A Jewish homeland could no longer remain a yearning.

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The state of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations. But Israelis were left fighting for their lives the very next day, for that was when the armies of neighboring Arab nations invaded. And the Israelis have been fighting for their lives ever since, against the Palestine Liberation Organization, against Hamas, and now against a ridiculous cohort of student politicians who like to cosplay as radicals by draping themselves in Palestinian colors and shouting empty words about colonialism — none of which will help the Palestinians.

What might help the Palestinians is a two-state solution, the land divided fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, giving both the right to self-determination. And, to be clear, to believe in a two-state solution is also to be a Zionist, because it is also to allow the Jews a safe space in their ancestral homeland. Zionism isn’t a movement owned by Jewish settlers who want to push Arabs off their land and pull up their olive trees. It also represents the desire of Jews not to be murdered — by Cossacks, by Nazis, by Hamas. A one-state solution would expose them to precisely the kind of murderous reality from which they have long been seeking to escape. If you think I’m being dramatic, recall what happened on 7 October 2023.

I am flying back to Israel later this month with my family so that my wife can add her vote to those seeking to get rid of the wretched Benjamin Netanyahu.She still cares deeply for her home, because human beings are creatures of place, called to care for our places, be it Judah or Jarrow. When Chaim Weizmann was asked by a British politician why the Jewish people insisted on safety in Palestine, rather than someone more convenient, he replied: “That is like asking you why you drove 20 miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living in your street.” Place matters. In the Hebrew scriptures, we are creatures of place, called to love and care for our little plot of land, just as Wendell Berry loved and cared for his little bit of Kentucky. This is the real philosophy the Greens should be defending, the fact that we are creatures of the earth. But this means nothing to our current generation of Greens, who are now a dark perversion of what that party was born to defend: our rootedness; our love of place. 

On 10 November 1975, under pressure from heavy KGB propaganda, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Later that day, the Belfast born Israeli Ambassador, Chaim Herzog, stood up and contemptuously ripped the resolution in half. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Sixteen years later, the resolution was revoked.

Today, the accusation Herzog tore apart has returned, dressed in the language of a new generation of radicals. So stuff the Greens, their vacant student posturing, and their cosplaying as Hamas terrorists from the safety of Brighton. Because Zionism is not racism: at its heart is something far older even than the state of Israel. And because today that desire to be safe from the dangerous racism of others has become urgent once again — including, now, from the Greens themselves.

These different aspects don’t always work in tandem. Indeed, the Brotherhood sometimes finds itself on different sides of political conflict. But such ambiguity can work to its advantage, creating leverage to maximize its interests and undermine its real enemies: to turn them against themselves and each other.

After decades of large-scale Muslim immigration, the Brotherhood as a movement, ideology and style is now firmly established within Western countries. Its positions on such things as decolonization, Islamophobia and Palestine-Israel are now mainstream positions in the West. But the Brotherhood itself, as a body, remains under the radar, clearly present but rarely overt. It operates in the shadows, with assertions about its influence easily written off as conspiracy-mongering.

Yet sometimes this influence becomes visible. In November 2015, former prison governor Ian Acheson wrote to the Ministry of Justice about how a review team he was leading had found numerous examples of Islamist extremist texts in British prison chaplaincies. In evidence to the Commons Justice Committee the following July, Acheson said the books contained “sometimes sectarian, homophobic and incendiary information that was freely available to vulnerable prisoners in many prisons with no obvious control over it”.

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Acheson’s review team looked at eleven prison chaplaincies and found inflammatory texts in nine of them, including titles from some of the main ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Way of Jihad from Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna; Milestones by Sayyid Qutb (also author of Our Struggle with the Jews); and The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Acheson submitted his final report to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Justice, in March 2016, with a stripped-down summary released in August of that year. Behind the scenes, he had also written to Gove highlighting what he calls a “significant finding”, beyond his terms of reference. This concerned the Senior Muslim Advisor to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which makes sure convicted criminals serve the sentences and orders carried out by courts. The advisor was Ahtsham Ali. Acheson stresses now that he was not making any specific allegations. However, he noted that Ali had appeared on platforms with extremists and had attracted complaints from Sufi imams who felt unfairly discriminated against in the prison appointments process.

Following Acheson’s warning, Gove launched an investigation into Ali. According to the Sunday Times, it found that 140 of the prison imams Ali had overseen the appointment of (around 70%) were from the Deobandi tradition, a conservative Sunni denomination prevalent in British Pakistani communities that has influenced the Taliban and has significant ideological commonalities with the Brotherhood. However, by the time the investigation process was completed, Gove had been sacked and Acheson’s term had ended.

Following the investigation, Ali was exonerated and he remains in his position today. The Ministry of Justice now issues the statement: “There is no evidence that Ahtsham Ali was responsible for extremist texts identified in some chaplaincies.”

But he certainly has strong ‘links’ to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai, Ali’s long-term teacher and guide, was a founder of the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), part of the inner network of Brotherhood institutions in Europe. Qaradawi, author of one of the texts that Acheson’s team warned about, was a co-founder of the ECFR and led the organisation for many years. The Iraqi-born Judai is involved in other institutions of that network too: the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), also formerly led by Qaradawi; the charity Islamic Relief, recently deselected as an aid partner by the Swedes but retained as such by the UK; and the European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS), the main branch of which was dissolved by the French government last year for promoting radical Islamic ideology and justifying armed jihad. Signaling that you are a longstanding pupil of someone with such connections sends quite a message to those in the know.

It is worth taking a moment to discuss Qaradawi, the foremost Brotherhood ideologue of recent times, who died in 2022. Qaradawi acquired a certain notoriety in the West for stating that Islam will conquer Europe via “da’wa [the Arabic term for proselytizing] and ideology” and for advocating a “jihad of necessity” against Israel, including civilians and the “innocent child” as legitimate targets. He also praised violent jihadists in the West for their aims if not their means, for their love of truth and the concern they show for Muslims.

Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam, one of the texts found in British prisons, is an interesting case. Effectively a handbook of Islamic law for Muslims and potential converts in the West, most of it is emollient and even ecumenical, far from being inflammatory. However, this stance emerges from a standpoint of necessary Islamic supremacy. As Qaradawi says, “Islam came to be followed, and not to follow; to be dominant, and not subordinate.”

Among non-Muslims, Jews and Christians at least deserve protection and even love from Muslims, he says, drawing extensively on the Qur’an and hadith — but only if they defer to Muslim dominion. “Neither rabbis nor priests, kings or sultans, have the right to prohibit something permanently to Allah’s servants; if someone does this, he has certainly exceeded his limits, usurping the sovereignty which, with respect to legislating for the people, belongs to Allah … alone.”

Jewish people present a difficult case here. On one hand, Qaradawi says, they deserve respect as People of the Book. But he also condemns them several times for their “rebelliousness”, their deviousness and a tendency to inveigle wealth from others.

Notwithstanding its generally peaceful tone, the book contains a clear threat. If non-Muslims resist the imposition of Islam and its codes of halal (lawful) and haram (prohibited), the latter including such things as the consumption of alcoholic drinks, homosexual marriage and uncovered women in public, then they may be fought against.“In order to keep the Muslim society purified,” he says, “a continuous war must be waged against all belief-systems which originate in man’s ignorance of the divine guidance and in the errors of idol worship.” And it is imperative, he adds, for the Muslim Ummah “to muster military power to the utmost extent of its capacity in order to defend itself.” This is the responsibility of every Muslim, not just governments.

Here we might see the origins of what some observers call the Brotherhood’s “double discourse”; also its “obfuscation” and “dissembling” on such matters when challenged. On one hand there is plenty of generous, peaceful language in Qaradawi’s book to demonstrate how Islam is not a threat to non-believers. On the other hand we find exhortations to violence against those who fail to submit to it.

Whether or not Ahtsham Ali had anything to do with this and other Brotherhood texts being present in British prisons, it is remarkable that someone with such links maintains an overseeing role in those prisons, including over the appointment of imams (leaders) who minister to prisoners.

Ahtsham Ali and Sheikh Judai were both offered the right to reply to the facts and assertions above which concern them, the former via his employer the Ministry of Justice. However, no response was forthcoming from either.

In recent decades, British prisons have become notorious for the domination of Muslim gangs. A Ministry of Justice report in 2019 noted that staff and inmates referred to the gangs as the “Muslim brotherhood”, with former prisoner Steve Gallant, hero of the 2019 London Bridge terrorist attack, describing it as “less an organisation than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups”.

This reflects a wider reality of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, as a style and source of inspiration as much as anything. The organisation has grown some serious wings.

***

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, 1928, which was then nominally independent but dominated by the British. Banna was consumed by the colonisation of his homeland and much of the Muslim world by Western powers and Western modernity. He attributed this partly to non-Muslim strength — but also to Muslim weakness, which he attributed to the abandoning of Islamic principles. Real Islam, he said, was about fighting and defeating non-believers.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian nationalist, revolutionary and President from 1954 to 1970, was briefly a member of the Brotherhood in the Forties. A friend and associate of Nasser’s in the Free Officers movement recounted their initiation into the “secret apparatus” of the organisation: “We were taken into a totally darkened room where we heard a voice and, placing our hand on the Quran and a gun and repeating after the voice, we took an oath of obedience and total allegiance for better or worse, to the Grand Master [Banna], swearing by the Book of God and the sunna of the Prophet.”

Nasser soon turned against the Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic), rejecting its insistence on shari’a law in favor of secular nationalism. In response, a Brotherhood member shot at him in 1954 as he was celebrating the withdrawal of British forces from the country. He was not hit. But the pattern was set for Egyptian politics: on the one side, secular nationalists who could draw upon the backing of the military; on the other, the Brotherhood, who drew their strength from within Egyptian society as de facto representatives of Islam. At times, the two forces have cut pragmatic deals with each other. However, their visceral opposition meant this never lasted: witness the coup that overthrew the Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 — and the Rabaa massacre of protestors that followed.

Meanwhile the Brotherhood expanded internationally. Under Nasser’s rule, some members fled: to Saudi Arabia, where they began to exert particular influence in the universities, on Osama bin Laden among others; and to Europe and North America, where they started to pitch up in the Fifties and Sixties.

The institution-building they engaged in on arrival is one of the defining traits of modern Islamism, going to the heart of the Brotherhood’s style and success. For it is fixated on achieving things: on power, strength and winning. In The Way of Jihad, one of the books found in British prison chaplaincies, Banna wrote: “Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded.” In another text drawing parallels between Islamic law and Italian fascism, he presented jihad as “the highest goal of humanity in this life.” Islam, he said, “urges its followers to be imbued with the military spirit in war and peace … Therefore, Signor Mussolini is not the only one who calls for this, and these are not the principles of fascism alone.”

A military-style approach to both war and peace has certain implications, including treating those who discard Islam like deserters and encouraging deception, a crucial tactic in war. Such traits don’t mean that the Brotherhood is against peace; nor that it won’t compete in elections — and win them, as it has in Egypt and Tunisia. It is more that peace appears for Islamists in its tradition as a situation that occurs after Islam has won, following the submission of its enemies. Until then, they are always pushing, always contending, seeking to increase their power.

Interpersonal and family relations are as important to this struggle as anything. Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam describes how Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men, yet Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, just as long as their wives’ beliefs do not influence the rest of the household. This law, if implemented, ensures that Islam prevails in the family environment wherever at least one partner is a Muslim, continuing through the generations.

Needless to say, this is not the law of a private faith that lets everyone choose their own path in life. Such law, if followed, effectively mandates that Islam can never decline; it can only grow. If followed consistently in the West, as it appears to be for the most part in Muslim communities, then the West will become more and more Muslim over time, making Qaradawi’s prophecies come true.

As founder of the Brotherhood, Banna had developed an ideology with a simple and effective good-and-evil dichotomy, whereby Islam is “the solution”, the source of good which must triumph. Western modernity, by contrast, is the source of evil, which should — and will, inevitably — be defeated. This framing was attractive for many — and the Brotherhood’s reach grew rapidly in the years following its founding. In the Indian subcontinent, it greatly influenced Abu Al-A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Two of Jamaat’s members set up the Islamic Foundation, which named one of its halls in Leicester after Banna. Ahtsham Ali of the Prisons Service has spoken there, on the subject of converting prisoners to Islam. The then Prince Charles opened a part of its campus in 2000.

“Banna isn’t talking about a religion in the sense it’s understood in the West,” Shadi Hamid, writes in  Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, “but about a program to be applied and implemented.” There is no separation between religion and secular politics here like that which emerged out of the Christian tradition. One serves God by maintaining one’s devoutness, but also by winning territory, imposing Islamic law and drawing converts. As Hamid says, the Brotherhood recognized that achieving these things would require patience. “They believed that history — and God — moved with them, and so it was never a question of whether but when they would prevail.” Here we can see the apparent paradox of “Islamo-progressivism”, in which an Islamist movement that appears to be anti-modern is also consumed by “that most modern of assumptions: that history moved with purpose and that progress was inescapable.” As Banna put it, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Like other revolutionaries, the Brotherhood learned to protect itself through secret methods, establishing the usra (“family”) cell structure and being careful about introducing new recruits. Lorenzo Vidino, who has written two books on it, says: “We have to remember that the Brotherhood is a very selective organization. No one applies to be a member. You are selected based on a variety of skills that the spotters within the Brotherhood identify — and being extremely clever, extremely well-educated, extremely driven are some of the key features they look for. It’s an elite group.”

Once a potential member has been selected, he (always a he, it seems) is given tasks to fulfill in his specialist area — whether in education, politics, finance, media or, nowadays, social media. As recruits prove themselves reliable and trustworthy, they rise up through the different layers of the organization, becoming more distanced from everyday operations. The organizations that members create in turn establish centers of expertise to advance the purposes of the center, operating in unison but without public deference to an orchestrating force. This in turn conveys a crucial appearance of strength and weight — as if its objectives are shared by all Muslims when in fact, a relatively small group of people are behind it all.

It is worth emphasizing the scope and sophistication of this approach. Indeed, Banna even showed signs of digesting Gramscian political ideas, writing of the need to change al-rouh al-’am alazi uhaimin (the hegemonic public spirit) in Muslim countries before targeting state power. The Brotherhood’s aim is to maximize its freedom and therefore the power of Islam wherever it finds itself. It has learned to be flexible and make alliances which help to consolidate its position. As a result it has thrived in the countries that it saw as its principal enemies.

***

On 7th June 2016, just a few months after Ian Acheson submitted his report on Islamism in British jails, Dr Ibrahim Mounir, the elderly Deputy Supreme Guide of the global Muslim Brotherhood, sat in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Westminster as part of its investigation into political Islam. The Brexit referendum campaign was in full swing. In his native Arabic, Mounir told the committee, “What we are hoping for is to achieve Islamic unity. A parallel of that is European unity.”

The Committee investigation came shortly after David Cameron’s Government published the main findings of its review into the Brotherhood. Within 24 hours of Cameron announcing that review in 2014, the Brotherhood had appointed a legal team including the former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord (Ken) Macdonald and threatened legal action against “any improper attempt to restrict its activity”.

Sitting alongside Mounir in Portcullis House were three others with associations to the Brotherhood: Dr Anas al-Tikriti, chief executive and founder of the Cordoba Foundation; Dr Radwan Masmoudi of the Ennahda party in Tunisia; and, in hijab, Sondos Asem, who used to serve as media advisor for President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and is now a senior news editor for Middle East Eye.

When pressed on how the Brotherhood legitimates and uses violence, each of the witnesses pushed back. Tikriti said there was no evidence for it. Asem stated that such claims were “unsubstantiated” and “misleading”. One might counter that the fact that Hamas was formed as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, or that the Brotherhood’s logo features two crossed swords, or that its leading ideologues like Banna and Qutb frequently invoke violence, speak for themselves. But the four held the line, not giving an inch.

Step forward to the present day, Britain looks like something of a redoubt for the Brotherhood and its wider movement. Salah Abdel-Haq, acting leader of the whole organization, has reportedly been resident in London since 2023. Highly-organized marches and protests for Palestine and against “Zionism” have attracted large crowds ever since Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel in October that year. On one occasion, organizers celebrated their success in being allowed to march down Whitehall again with the statement: “We are pleased to report that the police have yielded”: a telling way of framing it. Among the signatories of this statement, we find the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), founded by Tikriti, who described it to the Select Committee as “the closest there is to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Britain. Another signatory was the Palestinian Forum of Britain, one of whose officials was Zaher Birawi, a Palestinian-British journalist who was recently sanctioned by US authorities for his role “clandestinely acting on behalf of Hamas.”

Tikriti, who described the mass slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 as “a lie” and the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance”, has also been advising The Muslim Vote (TMV) organization. He and his sister both signed an open letter released by TMV before the 2024 election, urging Muslims to “unite behind the single Muslim vote candidate” that it had chosen. The organization came from nowhere to back four Muslim “Independent” MPs who were elected to Westminster, also backing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and various candidates from other parties.

London’s Metropolitan Police recently noted that the marches have “routinely seen arrests for racially and religiously aggravated public order offenses, for stirring up racial hatred and for supporting terrorist organizations. It is not normal to see criminality of this nature or on this scale at what are billed as peaceful protests.” Nevertheless, they have been a significant success for the organizers, mobilizing support from way beyond Palestinian and Muslim diasporas, keeping Gaza at the forefront of public attention, and bringing in support and resources for Muslim Brotherhood causes.

Primarily, the Brotherhood’s influence can be seen in British Islamist networks, which link its own predominantly Arabic speakers to Urdu-speaking and other Muslim groups in Britain. Bodies like TMV and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) share the Brotherhood’s emphasis on Muslim “unity” and on using the weight of Muslim presence to influence and dictate public policy. They have had considerable success. The Labour Government’s long-promised definition of Islamophobia, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hatred”, is a case in point, seeking to protect Islam and what we might call “Muslimness” from negative sentiment. The former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who chaired the working group that developed the definition, previously carried out a review on behalf of Islamic Relief, a charity in the Brotherhood network, following an anti-Semitism scandal. This last Ramadan, Islamic Relief has been soliciting “zakat” charitable donations via adverts featuring the slogan “Zakat is our Sacred Duty”: striking messaging that suggests a religious obligation to give them money, not far away from taxation — and in line with Qaradawi’s instructions on the using of charities where an Islamic state doesn’t exist.

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The French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who says she has received death threats for her work, has developed the notion of “frérisme” to describe how the Brotherhood’s influence works. Translating as “Brotherism”, it describes “a blend of ideological coherence and collective identity formulated around a specific vision of global Islamic hegemony, to be pursued with a strategy of slow infiltration that leverages [all] possible allies.” In a report for the ECR group in the European Parliament, she and Tommaso Virgili suggest that these allies “may include individuals and entities that are not part of the MB in any structural sense but are influenced by its ideology and operate accordingly, as well as individuals completely unaware of their role in the plan and even coming from very distant ideological backgrounds, such as the materialist left.” They point out that the Brotherhood has established religious and cultural institutions all across Europe, claiming to represent the Muslim faith and community before the state and public authorities. It has also founded numerous charities, think tanks and trusts that ostensibly have nothing to do with religion, while training a network of professionals “to penetrate all sectors of public life, including education, health, development, business, law and justice.”

Brotherist politics matches what is sometimes called the “radical flank effect”, by which the more moderate wings of a political movement benefit from the presence of more radical elements. This dynamic is on constant display in Islamist politics, as older, more respectable representatives maximize their bargaining power by emphasizing their ability to prevent street violence and terrorism. In this way, some think the emergence of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State has benefited the Brotherist tendency. Alain Chouet, the former head of France’s counterintelligence service, the DGSE, has even said: “Al-Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience. The wolf knows how to disguise itself as a sheep.” We might also note the Brotherhood’s pragmatic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially via Hamas, currently bringing terror to the West as well as the Middle East.

***

V.S. Naipaul described Islam as “an imperialism as well as a religion.” Its followers are duty-bound to God to impose the ways of their religion wherever they go. Brotherist movements have articulated this commitment through modern ideology and political method. Founded in opposition to Western imperialism, they are now imposing themselves on the West, assisted by naive, unthinking and sometimes self-interested liberals and Left-wingers, including in the present-day Labour Government.

How do you counter something like this, that is both ubiquitous and intangible, that works within the system while eroding it? Some want to follow states like the UAE by banning the Brotherhood itself. However, you might respond: “Ban what?” The Brotherhood’s methods of organizational secrecy hobble such an idea from the start. There is no official organization to be banned. There are individuals who are either likely members of the Brotherhood or have previously been identified as members elsewhere; and then there are the organizations formed by these people, which operate within the letter if not always the spirit of the law.

The strength of Brotherism means something more comprehensive and joined-up would be required. Governments will have to recognize that these movements threaten the foundations of Western civilization, including liberalism, social democracy and conservatism. The Islamist scene is so large, so active and international that it is difficult for even dedicated researchers to keep track of what’s going on even in single countries, leaving policymakers and public in the dark about the organizations and individuals that approach them. In 2020, the Austrian government set up the Dokumentationsstelle Politischer Islam (the Documentation Centre on Political Islam, or DPI) to remedy this, to document and scientifically analyze political Islam, its networks and structures, to raise awareness about religiously motivated political extremism and its threat to democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. We could do with a similar institution in Britain, with strong links to other countries and, if possible, the EU level, where Brotherhood network institutions are prominent lobbyists.

Western governments also need to offer a more convincing, attractive alternative to Islamic rule, re-founding their own weakened polities by gathering around core principles like individual freedom, legal equality and what we might call “civilized tolerance”. State bodies will have to refocus on core tasks, enforcing the law without fear or favor and dismantling the special carve-outs that multiculturalist structures have facilitated — and which undermine the state’s authority. They will also have to recognize that large-scale immigration has a negative impact.

Our governments should say they won’t work with, engage or financially support Islamist-related groups. They should also make it illegal for public bodies to give public goods — including public space — to them. They should reinforce the duty of public sector employees, such as those who work for the prisons service, to serve all citizens, not giving preference to certain identity groups.

Then there is the question of charitable status. In Britain, charities receive Gift Aid from the Government, since religion is recognized as a public good. Mosques, Muslim groups and even individuals exploit this widely. According to some researchers this helps Islamists to engage in political work full-time, giving them a major advantage over secular political movements. We should legislate to change this. Either Islam should be disqualified as a beneficiary of charitable status, or all religions should be.

Qaradawi, as the premier Brotherhood ideologue of recent decades and a keen advocate of using charities to exert Islamic power, called his approach wasatqiyya or the “middle way”, suggesting moderation. Yet this apparently moderate form of Islam explicitly calls for the Ummah to see itself as a military force wherever they find themselves, waging a permanent war against alternative beliefs and lifestyles. There is a clear ideological link here to violent attacks committed in the name of Islam. We are fools to not recognize and act on it.

Western democratic states should not be subsidizing movements that are encouraging war-like attitudes to groups other than their own while working towards their destruction. Unfortunately, unbelievably to many, this is what the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to do.

***

A previous version of this piece wrongly named Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai as an author of one of the texts Ian Acheson warned about. We apologise for the error.

It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

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Graham Platner, gentry liberal

By James Billot

Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

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One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

We were a mile away from the place where, a few days earlier, some Jewish kids had been attacked by older teenagers at a subway station because of their religion — one of them had been kept overnight in the hospital. It was a couple of weeks since the murder of two people outside a Jewish event for young diplomats in Washington, and a few days before eight Jewish people were hospitalized after being set on fire at a hostage vigil in Colorado — in both cases the assailants were “pro Palestinians”.

Sitting with us, unspoken, at the dinner table that night were the quieter, less violent stories of contemporary antisemitism we were all too aware of: in schools, universities and in the NHS, the Israel-obsession of the unions and the arts organizations where Zionists are increasingly being told we are Nazis. And Nazis deserve to be hurt, don’t they?

As Greta dusts off her keffiyeh hoping to land in Gaza (I hope they give her the same welcome they’d give me), pro-Palestinians are burning synagogues in Australia, shooting at Jewish schools in Canada. In Poland, a community event with Holocaust survivors was attacked, while in Berlin the police chief admits the city is not safe for Jewish people. Even America — once the golden medina for diaspora Jews — holds no promise of succor. And so, there is Israel. Despite the terrorists, the almost daily Houthi missile attacks and Iran threatening nuclear annihilation: antisemitic anti-Zionism only makes us more Zionist. Will we all have to move to the Jewish homeland because we are so unwelcome elsewhere?

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By Nicole Lampert

Debate is what Jews are best at. Our earliest texts are filled with Abraham, Moses, Jeremian and Job arguing furiously with God. As former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “In the Mishnah the rabbis argue about Jewish law and in the Gemara they argue about the arguments of the Mishnah. In the 12th century, Moses Maimonides did the most daring thing of all; he wrote a code of law with all the arguments removed. This generated more arguments than any other text for the next 800 years. Other people have conversations. Jews have arguments.”

But our arguments have become increasingly shrill and painful. There are those who want to denounce Israel and those who want to protect it, and those who want to protect it by denouncing it. They are, like the ongoing divide in the Middle East, intractable. Rows have broken up families and friendships, divided synagogue congregations, and even shattered the unanimity of the normally staid Board of Deputies of British Jews.

And in the background, increasingly the foreground, drowning out our pain and fanning the flames of anger, a chorus of anti-Zionism gets louder and louder. Things have hardly been easy since the October 7 massacre, but Jew hatred seems to be reaching terminal velocity — the likelihood of more violence only a matter of time. There has been an avalanche of public letters since war broke out, three only last week by lawyers, writers and actors, each aimed at outdoing the previous one in its ramped-up rhetoric. The most self-important people of the lot, the actors, stated dramatically that “290,000 children are on the brink of death — starved by the Israeli government for more than 70 days. They cry until they can’t cry anymore — until hunger takes even their voices.” This is a dangerous new libel, exceeding even the lie of UN’s Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours if humanitarian aid wasn’t let in. But the new normal is lies.

The rhetoric is being fanned by a compliant media who willingly parrot Hamas propaganda and only ask questions of Israel — which wants to ensure all the right checks and balances are in place before it gives a confirmed reply — later. As President Trump’s press secretary pointed out this week, the BBC started Sunday telling one story and ended with another. The headline, “At least 15 killed in Israeli fire near aid center, says medics” was changed to “26 killed in Israeli taken fire near aid center, medics say” then “medics” were changed to “health ministry” and then to “Hamas-run health authorities” until, at the end of the day, you had the Israeli denial of the attack. While live reporting often involves changes, this is the first war where the word of a proscribed terrorist organization is taken as gospel.

It doesn’t help that the Israeli government is remorselessly providing the haters and the casual bystanders with ammunition. The Zionist dream echoes the biblical demand of Jews to be “the light among nations”, yet our nation is feeding the fire. Innocents are being killed. Yes, because there is a war and, yes too, because Hamas hides behind and below civilians, but also — it is still killing children. It may be the only democracy in the Middle East, but it is also one that is led by a coalition involving genuine and unashamed racists. Israelis have long boasted that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, but the IDF is still made up of humans, some of whom are criminals. Should I feel shame (just as I would if this was the British army)? Sometimes I do. I am also scared.

We all are. So backwards and forwards we go, like a tennis match, with these debates in our siloed WhatsApp groups where we can drive each other to distraction, posting stories of antisemitism, all while tears and the rows get ever fiercer. You can both want Israel to let Western journalists in and also see why the excuses not to — it is dangerous urban warfare and journalists could also unwittingly help out the enemy — also make sense. You can both see why the Netanyahu government, after letting in extra aid during the ceasefire, had attempted to force Hamas to a better ceasefire deal by forcing a siege and also see it both as morally unconscionable and a terrible PR move. You can feel the horror of the dreadful images coming out of Gaza, while also reminding yourself that all war is awful and that this one could be stopped by Hamas. You can feel for the hostages and the people of Gaza. You can hate the extremistsSettler movement and the free reign they are given, you can hate the venality of Netanyahu in his determination to keep power — but also understand that until Hamas is deposed from power in Gaza, Israel will never have peace. On and on, round and round. It sends us mad, and leads to sleepless nights. And, still, there is no right answer.

As diaspora Jews, we feel uneasy, queasy, untethered from our moorings — feeling despised in the countries we call home. But Israel, devastated not only by the 1,200 killed on October 7 and the 58 hostages still being held in Gaza, but also the 420 soldiers killed since the ground invasion of Gaza, is torn too. It is split by those who hate Netanyahu and believe he is prioritizing his coalition over the hostages and ending the war, and those who believe the war has to continue until Hamas is fully removed from power. All seem to agree that there is no viable plan for what Gaza might look like in the future. And meanwhile the problem of Iran — which has threatened to annihilate Israel once it can get its hands on nuclear weapons — is a real and present threat.

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By David Samuels

In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where I stood at a rally a few weeks ago, the sharp anger towards the government was palpable. At one point all the names of the hostages were shouted out with the crowd screaming “bring them home NOW”. While posters of the hostages are still all over Israel, some, on the Right, have crossed out the word “now” as beating Hamas is seen as the first priority.

And amid all of this, Hamas just rejected a new ceasefire deal. The terrorist group is the ghostly spirit of Gaza, not once mentioned in a single one of those letters denouncing Israel. Their “resistance” might be celebrated on weekly marches in cities across the world, but what happened on October 7 is, they say, “a false flag”. In this world of fantasy terrorists and conspiracy, they believe that Israel chose to kill its own. The Palestinians are never given their own agency in this war. That they fight and kill, and are still fighting and killing Israelis: this is never mentioned. That Hamas is also killing its own people who dare to rebel against these fascist Islamists goes unreported by most Western media.

For neither the people of Gaza nor the world’s 14 million Jews, now living in a new age of violent antisemitism, there is no end in sight. Just debate, death and hatred. It is exhausting. One day the war will end — I hope it is one day soon — but for diaspora Jews in this new age of antisemitism it may be too late. The genie is out of the bottle. Conspiracies merging medieval antisemitism of “bloodlust” with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion descriptions of Jewish power and Soviet era libels of the enemy within have merged with today’s obsessions so that the Jew, maligned for millennia and murdered in our millions within living memory, have become the ultimate white supremacists and the most evil colonialists. And, once again, as we have throughout our long history, we are wondering: is there anywhere in the world that is safe for us?

Yet amid that nightmare was something miraculous. I saw friends spontaneously arrange accommodation for refugees from the south, people they’d never met. I saw a drama school, converted into a charity centre, filled with clothing, toys, books and nappies. I saw volunteers establishing makeshift schools, babysitting, offering free counselling. 

I saw solidarity: passionate, tenacious, resourceful; solidarity in a free society. Liberality in its oldest King James meaning, of unasked-for generosity, given in freedom. Today’s liberal societies encourage any number of virtues. But truth be told, solidarity is not among them. 

Quite apart from the academic evidence — James Davison Hunter is just one of the scholars to persuasively detail just how depleted American democratic solidarity has become — how could it be otherwise? Isn’t liberalism about individual freedom, even as solidarity involves committing to the other? Doesn’t liberalism take shape around carefully defined rights, while solidarity grows out of deeply subjective feelings? 

Not really. As the Hebrew University political theorist Charles Lesch has explained, liberal societies cannot survive without solidarity. Solidarity helps me see beyond ideology and self-interest. It fosters the empathy and fairness that make me want to ensure others find justice. It saves me from potential tyrannies of family and community by seeing us all as connected. And solidarity helps me develop my own moral self: it isn’t always about me.

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Why, then, do liberal societies have such a hard time grounding their solidarity? Hunter calls for new religiously grounded ideas of hope. To Lesch’s mind, the problem runs even deeper than that: foundational liberal thinkers, from Rousseau to Kant to Habermas, committed to emancipation from traditional religious authority and its many injustices, based themselves on metaphysical ideas of morality that they can’t justify on their own philosophical terms. Abstract ideas like the “general will” or “social contract” or “public reason”— none can spark the lasting social solidarity that pushes us beyond ourselves to the point of sacrifice. None can quite fill the hole left by the pre-modern rootedness of solidarity in the shared humanity of God’s creation and moral laws. 

There is though no easy return to premodern certainties. Lesch’s solution is to draw on the modern Jewish humanist tradition. One lodestar is Emmanuel Levinas. He said that caring for other people, as unknowable as God, is the only way out of an endless, hopeless struggle for power. Martin Buber makes a similar point. Our political and social institutions are shallow human artefacts, working to reflect, but never truly enacting, God’s own standards of justice. Only by relating to others as living, breathing people can we truly live together in the world. It’s by caring for others, in short, that we come to understand our own strengths, and our vulnerabilities too. Solidarity, then, is not just blind loyalty or homogeneity. Rather, it’s a way of life, lived under moral ideals. 

All this was put to the test on October 7. That day, the Israeli state and its institutions failed its people miserably. Yet society pulled together, displaying solidarity at its most profound. How? Two new books offer some insight here, not only into what happened, but what made it possible. 

One Day in October gathers 40 stories of heroism, resourcefulness and self-sacrifice. The editors, Oriya Mevorach and Yair Agmon, took care not to homogenise their examples: we hear the different cadences of troops and civilians, religious and secularists, Arabs and Jews, all featuring in one belief-beggaring, heartbreaking story after another. Taken together it is an unforgettable tapestry of goodness in the very teeth of shocking suffering. Some are first-person tales, others told by those who survive them.  

The ex-Orthodox anarchist who caught and then tossed back seven Hamas grenades before being killed by the eighth; the young father who ran out bare-handed to fight the attackers; the medic who refused to be evacuated so she could stay with the wounded; the eight-year-old girl who refused to be freed if her friend wasn’t saved alongside her; the Bedouin who drove his minivan back and forth under fire to rescue people from harm’s way; the grandfather who, after putting his family in a safe room, sat in his lounge and convinced the terrorists that he was alone, and that only he needed to die — Mevorach and Agmon tell story after story of parents sacrificing themselves for their children, raw conscripts fighting to the death, of civilians rushing into slaughter, never to return. 

Yet not even this epic heroism withstands an overwhelming sense of loss. One member of Zaka, a volunteer ambulance and remains-retrieval organisation composed entirely of Ultraorthodox Haredim, describes the silent dialogues he and his colleagues held with burned, mangled, maimed corpses, promising to keep their dignity even in death, and hearing the dead say “your eyes will be our mouths” in return. 

The heroism here, then, is not triumphal. It’s wrenched from the absurd. A father of two soldiers reflects on how both fought at the same base that day, independent of one another, one dying and saving his brother without even knowing he was there. “So if you want to ask questions,” the father says, “ask, but ask all the questions.” 

Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal  Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, he tells a story at once more sweeping and finely scaled. A Haaretz writer and editor, he powerfully tells the heart-stopping story of one family on one kibbutz — his own — interweaving it with the larger history that brought them to that morning in October.

That kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the border with Gaza, was founded in the earliest days of the Israeli state. It grew, with time, into a strangely Israeli Eden: a close-knit community with echoes of democratic socialism, set in beautiful surroundings with a rich cultural life, regularly at the receiving end of mortar attacks and rocket-propelled grenades. The latter became a regular fact of life after Israel’s clumsy withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, aided and abetted by American misjudgments and the Palestinian Authority’s fecklessness, that ultimately led to Hamas’ seizure of power two years later. 

A crucial point of Tibon’s account, and one too often lost in standard press accounts, is the extent to which the communities abutting Gaza were filled with Left-leaning Israelis, who, when seeking affordable housing, chose to live in the country’s far but unquestionably sovereign periphery — rather than the occupied West Bank. They saw themselves as, and often actually were, the descendants of the Left-Labour idealists of Ben-Gurion’s age. Many moved near Gaza precisely to foster Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and help local Palestinians as best they could, all as committed Zionists fulfilling their democratic principles. 

Tibon very much exemplifies that ethos of Left-Zionist solidarity, which he learned from his father, a retired major general. Like so many others, the elder Tibon grabbed his pistol on October 7 and literally fought his way south, standing alongside soldiers decades younger than himself. Unlike many others, he succeeded in his mission, rescuing his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren from their dark and suffocating shelter.  

The betrayal of Tibon’s title is that of the Israeli government, and in particular of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tibon’s criticisms of Netanyahu are as deep as the commitment to the Jewish and democratic ethos on which he has staked his life. Netanyahu has built his career on a mix of hardline nationalism delivered in eloquent cadences, and brilliant, if infuriating, tactical manoeuvres. Both are aimed at the same goal: ensuring Israel’s immediate physical and economic security while kicking strategic decisions down the road forever. One such manoeuvre involved facilitating the bounteous flow of Qatari cash to Hamas, so that it’d never need to cede control over Gaza to its internationally recognised rivals in the Palestinian Authority.

Not, of course, that Netanyahu was alone here. Many Israelis convinced themselves that Gaza could be contained. As we now see, the price of confrontation was just too frightful to contemplate. 

And, in fact, even if the Hamas attacks had never happened, 2023 would still have gone down in Israeli history for the massive anti-Netanyahu protests that rocked the country last year in response to his programme to roll back Israel’s judiciary. Those rallies galvanised Israeli civil society in ways not seen for decades. And it was, in part, those very same protest movements that pivoted and turned to the other in those awful post-October 7 days. 

The week before the attack, we held dialogue sessions around the country, making an effort to reach across Israel’s bitter political divide. One thing that clearly emerged in those conversations was tremendous solidarity at the grassroots, thinning out the further we got from on-the-ground problems, and the faster we approached the broader ideological chasms dividing society. No wonder the philosopher Hanoch Ben-Pazi has claimed there now exists a “truly incomprehensible” gap between Israelis and their leaders.

As the war grinds on, much of the intense solidarity of its early days has ebbed. A very real flash point is whether the ultimate war aim is crushing the terrorists or returning the captive hostages and displaced communities to their homes. Another, perhaps inevitably, is what you think of Netanyahu. Much of the Israeli public wishes him gone. Yet his hardline coalition partners know that they have nowhere else to go, and his partisan supporters attack his critics verbally and sometimes physically. The miracle of Israeli solidarity, then, is being put to the test anew.

While neither One Day nor The Gates is about solidarity as such, the idea infuses the pages of both. What, then, makes it happen, and keeps it going? The basic structures of daily life are surely important here: public schools; state-funded nurseries and other family-friendly policies; national health and social insurance; and, of course, mandatory military service with reserve duty later. While Israel is a far more privatised society than before, in short, much of the strong collectivist ethos of its first decades endures. 

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Yet more than the socio-economics, Israel is a state with thick webbings of culture, attachment to place and family, and the Hebrew language, whose renewal as a living, spoken language is itself a kind of miracle. 

Judaism, of course, isn’t the only faith here. Nor is Jewishness the only ethnicity. Yet one striking feature of the civilian response to October 7 was the engagement of Israel’s Arab citizens, Christians and Muslims both. Their own entwinements with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank torque their complicated lives all the more. As Rima Farah, a scholar of Israeli Christian history has pointed out, those particular dilemmas offer the most acute test of whether Israeliness, as opposed to Jewishness, can really be a national identity. 

Here as elsewhere, and for all its uniqueness, Israel is also a testing ground for key problems of democracy. Israel is not the apartheid state of caricature — yet the fear that occupation of the West Bank will make it one is much of what drives Tibon and other liberal activists. Resolution of that occupation now seems more distant than ever, and lazy talk of “two states” is wishful thinking. Yet some meaningful path away from the endless grind of military oppression and settler expropriation is key to a decent future. And as October 7 hinted, for just a moment, that future is partly built on solidarity, on people rushing to help their fellow humans without stopping to think of which party they voted for or which language they use at home. More than that, it allows us to honestly ask both ourselves and each other: where did we go wrong?

Once religion ceases to be party political, it can become a way to ground our ties and moral responsibilities to the past, to the future, and to each other. Fortunately, for many Israelis, their faith isn’t merely a matter of spiritual dispensation — but rather a way of anchoring one’s own particular identity in something larger, something which endures once we’re gone. In that way, it is not unlike the caressing solidarities of family. At the same time, and as Levinas and Buber clearly understood, religion hangs an eternal question mark over all our certainties, and all our worldly ambitions, cautioning us against overweening pride, and undercutting the grounds of our cruelty. It makes us at once deeply particular and deeply universal, utterly encased in our particular circumstances and yet entwined with all human beings everywhere, sharing as we do the distinctly human mix of ringing potency and utter vulnerability. It makes possible a kind of solidarity in which we can offer help to others beyond ourselves, without losing ourselves in the process. 

That balance is always there, but it withers and contorts without a welcoming echo. Solidarity is not all sweetness and light. There are solidarities of hatred, enmity, fanaticism and violence, as the last year has terribly shown. But that cautionary knowledge can also guard us from ourselves, guiding us from the seductive lies of “leadership” and towards the tangible, life-giving work of responsibility. 

The quiet stillness of Slim’s villa, its libraries, its garden — all were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Dahieh beyond. Slim, for his part, offered me coffee as we discussed Lebanon’s complex political existence, apparently unconcerned by his powerful armed neighbours. Yet less than two years later, in February 2021, he was dead, murdered by unknown assailants in his car outside Beirut. Though no perpetrators were ever identified, the assassination was obviously carried out by Hezbollah or one of its affiliates. Slim, like every Shi’a Muslim living in Dahieh, was ultimately swallowed by it.

This is the reality for many people in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Lebanon: sooner or later, you’ll either need to tie your existence to the group, or else be consumed by it. This was made plain by Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks last week, when communication devices exploded in supermarkets, offices, homes, and funerals across Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley, leaving no corner of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state untouched. 

Commentary on this revolutionary event has largely fallen into one of two camps. While some have derided the pager operation as an indiscriminate attack on civilians, others have noted that those who carried pagers distributed by Hezbollah were by default bonafide members of the organisation. 

The truth, however, is that both these viewpoints are accurate simultaneously. Hezbollah in 2024 is not just a militia fighting Israel — it is an entire parallel society, boasting a political party, a social welfare system and charitable religious institutions, alongside five hospitals and hundreds of medical centres. Even the Beirut International Airport and the city’s commercial seaport have for years been under Hezbollah’s sway. 

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Altogether, these institutions serve a living, breathing, multi-religious patchwork of communities. As Lebanon has weathered financial ruin, disasters like the 2020 port explosion, and the intransigence of the country’s sectarian politics, the Lebanese government has slowly collapsed, taking many social services with it. This has pushed Lebanese Shi’a, Hezbollah’s primary constituency, even closer to the group, where they’ve been able to provide much more for adherents than the state itself. Examples abound. As pharmaceutical supplies dried up amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hezbollah was able to provide life-saving medication smuggled in from Syria and Iran to people living under its rule. As the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted, it opened supermarkets for its constituents that sold Iranian goods at lower prices than the competition.

The majority of those killed in the pager attacks were indeed Hezbollah fighters. Yet hundreds of people — working as medics and teachers, mechanics and shopkeepers — were wounded too. Though they’d never held a rifle in service of the group, and were by most definitions civilians, they too were caught in the crossfire: Hezbollah’s hold on their daily lives was just too tight. It’s a situation with parallels elsewhere, with Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels in Latin America playing a similar social function.

Nor is all this merely relevant to Lebanon’s internal dynamics. Deciding where to draw the line between combatant and civilian has been and continues to be a vital matter in conflicts involving non-state actors, blurring as they do the line between guerilla movement and quasi-government. But with Israel seemingly setting the stage for an all-out war with Hezbollah — having now conducted hundreds of air strikes north of the border, which collectively have resulted in the single deadliest day in Lebanon since hostilities began last year — this unresolved ambiguity will continue to produce deadly consequences for the Lebanese people. To put it bluntly: many risk finding themselves declared guilty by association with Hezbollah and its vast, multifaceted network.

As the last year of warfare in Gaza has made clear to the world, Israel has little problem with inflicting devastating civilian casualties to achieve its battlefield goals. Indeed, the policy of bringing maximum pressure to bear on Hamas and Gaza was itself born in Lebanon. In 2006, the IDF smashed civilian infrastructure to bring Hezbollah to heel, ultimately producing the infamous Dahieh doctrine. Since the start of the current round of fighting, now almost a year old, Israel has hit Hezbollah-linked rescue teams, as well as the group’s medical services. This suggests that, for Israel, the distinction between civilian branches of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and its military wing is already null and void.

From a purely military perspective, this brutal policy is understandable. All branches of Hezbollah’s network feed into the same coffers. These play a part in funding its armed wing, so working to incapacitate the entire organisation does make sense for Israel strategically, despite the immense ethical caveats involved. But then the question emerges: how far is Israel willing to go?  Who, to put it bluntly, will it decide is contributing to Hezbollah’s operations — and therefore get a target on their back? Nor are random civilians the only ones at risk here. Since 1992, after all, Hezbollah has held seats in the Lebanese parliament, and is currently part of the country’s governing coalition. Though Israel apologised for killing a member of the Lebanese Armed Forces in late 2023, IDF commanders have previously stated that they wouldn’t distinguish between Hezbollah and the formal state in any future war.

Over the past year analysts have often noted that while Israel may have achieved tactical victories against Hezbollah — notably the pager attack or the recent killing of Ibrahim Aqeel — it has no strategic vision beyond these triumphs. The closest thing they have is the belief, apparently held by many within Israel’s national security and military leadership since October 7, that deploying overwhelming force will awe its enemies into capitulating. This calculus has in effect produced a policy of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for their closeness — voluntary or not — to Hamas. As we’re now seeing, Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon are now suffering a similar fate thanks to their (often unwanted) relationship with Hezbollah.

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From Fifties British Kenya, to post-2011 Syria, where powerful actors tried to tame guerilla forces and the restive populations that supported them, history shows that such a strategy is doomed. Basic group psychology agrees. In Lebanon, punishing people who just happen to be under Hezbollah’s thumb will do nothing but strengthen Nasrallah’s authority, and personalise support for a group that was hitherto more abstract. In the event that Hezbollah can be defeated militarily — and with some 20,000 active personnel and over 100,000 missiles, that’s no sure thing — that inevitably means Lebanese antipathy toward Israel will linger. That, in turn, offers space to new rogue actors, especially in the absence of a fully functioning state.

A brave new generation of Lokman Slims can only appear when Lebanese Shi’a can choose which political group they associate with. Hezbollah’s stifling repression is the most significant obstacle stopping this happening — but how Israel behaves is crucial too. If people working regular jobs in suburbs like Dahieh can expect to be attacked no matter what they do, why bother resisting Hezbollah at all?

For Jews, Temple Mount is where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham set out to obey God’s instruction, an angel appeared to stay his hand. A ram is caught and sacrificed instead — a founding event of Jewish theology. This place would later become the site of Solomon’s Temple, the spot where God was called down to be among His people, and where priests made daily sacrifices for the atonement of the people’s sins. Even before the Babylonians destroyed this First Temple in 587 BC, violence and religion sat side by side here.

In 70 AD, the Romans razed the so-called Second Temple as punishment for Jewish rebellion. They built a shrine to Jupiter on the site of Jewish sacrifice, and slaughtered pigs there as an insult. Later, Christians would use the site as a rubbish tip, doubtless for similar reasons. It became a holy space again only with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the seventh century. It remains the oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture. This was where Muhammad was said to have landed on the back of a winged horse to lead Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer. For Muslims, then, this is the spot from where Muhammad ascended to heaven.  

Ever since the Crusaders were ejected from Jerusalem by Saladin, the hill has been administered by Muslims. But when Israeli paratroopers re-took East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war, in 1967, they raised the Israeli flag over the Temple Mount compound. Watching with his binoculars a few miles away, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan ordered the soldiers to take the flag down. “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?” he apparently barked down the radio. The flag was removed. For a brief moment, Jews had taken back control of Temple Mount. But even in the midst of victory, Dayan knew this was a step too far. The third-holiest site on earth to Muslims, the Star of David had the potential to engulf the region in an apocalypse of Biblical proportions. 

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To this day, Temple Mount is administered by Jordan. Even the Rabbis have been remarkably consistent in forbidding Jews from climbing up the hill. The place is just too holy, and without being properly purified according to ancient custom, the very act of walking on the site constitutes an act of defilement. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a very direct statement to his Security Cabinet that there has been no change to the status quo regarding Temple Mount — nor would there be. Even Netanyahu knows how dangerous such a prospect would be. 

But the very fact the prime minister felt forced to clarify Israel’s position is worrying enough. 

After the Babylonians destroyed the original Temple, the prophet Haggai urged his people that rebuilding was an absolute priority: “Is it a time for you to live in your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” He then explains why things haven’t been going well for the people of Israel. “Because my house lies in ruins, while all of you hurry off to your own houses. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth withheld its produce.” 

There have always been Jews who believe this instruction applies to the present as well as the past. Until the Temple is rebuilt, they think, God will not act with favour towards his people. This Third Temple movement has long existed as an extremist fringe. But the Hamas war has emboldened it. 

“Bless the state of Israel, God almighty, please unite our hearts to rebuild your temple,” proclaims Yehuda Glick, a US born rabbi and the most prominent of the leaders of the movement. Previously arrested for trying to go up to the Temple Mount to pray, now he walks there freely with groups of settlers, protected by the very police who would once have arrested them and encouraged by those at the highest level of government. Powerful people are now saying openly what was once one said quietly. As Yitzhak Pindrus, a member of the Knesset, said earlier this year: “We are hoping that soon the Third Temple will be built there, and that we’ll be able to eat there from the Passover sacrifices.”  

Most powerful of all is Itmar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, a man who hands out rifles to settlers and has a picture of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein on his wall. Talking of Temple Mount he recently stated: “If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site.” Since taking office, Ben-Gvir has visited the site at least half-a-dozen times.

Repeatedly challenged if he wanted to build a synagogue there, Ben-Gvir finally admitted he would. Less messianic members of the Israel cabinet have been quick to oppose him. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Challenging the status quo on the Temple Mount is a dangerous, unnecessary and irresponsible act. Ben-Gvir’s actions endanger the national security of the state of Israel.” The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said Ben-Gvir’s actions would “lead to much bloodshed and will change. The face of the state of Israel beyond recognition.”

Yet an article in Haaretz reports that Ben-Gvir and others are secretly planning for a Third Temple. According to biblical instruction, only someone suitably purified can walk up to the Temple Mount to begin the task of rebuilding the Temple. And the ancient ceremony of purification requires a perfect red heifer to be burnt. Today, though, the heifers are being bred, the altar has been built, priests are being recruited, and messianic extremists are gathering: first to pray, but with a longer-term aim of flattening Al-Aqsa and building a Jewish temple in its place. And the people who believe this are the same people with whom Netanyahu has gone into coalition, and together they are running the country.

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This November, The Third Temple by Yashai Sarid, will be published in English. Set in the future, Sarid’s original is narrated by someone whose father “removed the mosques from the top of the temple” — and where, in retaliation, the coastal cities of Israel are destroyed by a nuclear fire. His novel highlights the huge division in Israeli society, symbolised by the contrast between secular Tel Aviv and an increasingly zealous Jerusalem. These imagined future divisions could be seen recently, however, as tens of thousands of mostly secular Israelis protested on the streets of Tel Aviv, furious about the way the Netanyahu government, and their religiously zealous acolytes, seem to have put the messianic narrative about Israel’s place in the world above the desire to make peace with the Palestinians. With men such as Ben-Gvir undermining much of the sympathy many of us have for Israel’s legitimate defence by casting the story of Israel’s purpose as being one of fulfilling some greater messianic calling — rather than as a safe haven for the Jewish people.

This is not to abandon any sense of theology when thinking about Israel. But what many zealots fail fully to register is that peace is the ultimate symbol of the messianic age: the lion laying down with the lamb, as the prophet Isaiah put it. Written after the first destruction of the Temple, Isaiah experienced the full horror of a devastated Israel. “Our holy and beautiful house, where our Fathers praised you, has been burned by fire and all our pleasant places have become ruins.” Sarid’s dystopian novel is a terrifying prophecy of this happening once again.

The book he was promoting was called The Invention of the Jewish People, which argued that the concept of Jews as a distinct people with a shared lineage, culture and homeland didn’t exist until the arrival of 19th-century nationalism. The exile from ancient Israel in 70AD, a central event in Jewish tradition, he called a “myth”. These sorts of claims were, he wrote, thrown together to give the Jewish people a cohesive national identity and, inevitably and tediously, to justify Zionism.

Leaving aside that the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” (“L’Shanah Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim“) — recited at the end of both the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur — dates at least from the Middle Ages, and that the book was intended to provoke, its objective was clear: the delegitimisation of Jewish nationhood and, by extension, any Jewish claims to the land of Israel. It was desperate stuff; even The Guardian’s reviewer wasn’t convinced.

And so, we come to his latest book Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?. Here, Sand “explores” two political solutions for the current conflict: a bi-national federation or what he terms an apartheid-like reality. There is, glaringly, no option of two states. The idea of a state for Jews, the state of Israel, is a non-starter.

It is from this bogus binary that we begin. What follows is expected: the first chapter opens with Sand quoting the Right-wing Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, allowing him to make the case for Zionism being an entirely colonial endeavour. Predictably, there is no mention the continuous Jewish presence in the land since the defeat of the Jewish prince Simon Bar Kochba in AD135 and the fact that, apart from a brief period in the 18th century, the Palestinians who lived there did so as subjects of foreign rulers.

Jabotinsky, by the way, is more comprehensively dealt with by the other Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, in his book Iron Wall. I have my own issues with Shlaim’s work, but he is a harmless man and possessed of magnificent hair. I once sat in a lecture of his at university, marvelling at how it corkscrewed out of his skull in all directions, so white and flocculent you could stuff a duvet with it.

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Sand is a more aggressive polemicist, but he does make some valid points. His youthful activism was, he said, filled with hope that “the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them”. Few would disagree with that. He then goes on to lament that the articles he wrote and the marches he attended didn’t succeed in drilling this notion into the establishment — a sentiment also shared by many Israelis.

He fails to properly interrogate the degree to which the Palestinian side is culpable for the failure to reach peace. But again: fair enough. He’s far from alone in this. No, the bigger problem here is one of intellectual dishonesty. Take this — frankly pretty important — paragraph:

“And then October 7 came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.”

It doesn’t take much effort to parse this sort of guff. The biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is perfunctorily dealt with in a single line, before Sand moves on to invoke a massacre committed by Lebanese Christians almost half a century ago. As it happens, the two events “bear certain similarities” (mark the weasel phrase) to the degree that almost any acts of horrific violence do — and this illuminates nothing. He then castigates Ariel Sharon for literally doing what Sand says he spent most of his youth calling for: withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land. Sand goes on to describe how October 7 “came as an utter shock to the Israeli public”. I’d argue it came as a “shock” to any right-thinking person – unless you believe that Palestinians are savages, which I do not.

He then asks: “So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?” It was “convenient”, he says, “for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din”.

Well, ok. It’s true that Jews tended to fare better in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, but they did so as dhimmis — religious minorities under Islamic rule who could not bear arms, hold various public offices, were generally forced to wear distinctive clothing, and often subjected to pogroms. And then there is the question of Jew-hatred.

Unlike most armchair pundits, I have been to both the West Bank and Gaza. There I have met countless Palestinians who impressed me with their charm, their stoicism in the face of undoubted suffering, and their hospitality. Many Palestinians are absolutely not antisemitic.

But there are also a lot who are; and they tend to be in Hamas. The conditions in Gaza will inevitably create resistance, but October 7 was about something else. Just weeks after the atrocity, I was shown footage of a jubilant Hamas terrorist calling his father after the attack. “Father… I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands,” he roared. “Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!” In Khan Younis, a member of Islamic Jihad told me that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and should be killed.

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These people are of little concern to Sand, whose sophistry leads him to his central concern: “Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future?”

Again, to be fair to him, Sand understands the geopolitical Molotov cocktail that one state would be. But, he says smarmily, “as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said [of the idea of a Jewish state]: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’”. Sand correctly points to the systematic settler theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the reprehensible legal architecture that has sprung up to enable it, giving many incontestable examples of both. These “facts on the ground” make two states no longer viable, he argues. The reality, however, is that there is no “solution” to this nightmare other than compromise, and certainly not self-erasure by one side. Because in the end, when you strip away all the rhetoric, hate, and endless debates about history, the only germane fact is this: the land has two peoples, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Let’s be clear: the one-state “solution” is not an alternative for Israel but an alternative to Israel. To expect the only Jewish state in the world to voluntarily extinguish itself is fundamentally unserious. My family lived as Jews in Iraq for centuries — possibly even before the advent of Islam. But none of that mattered: a few years after Israel was founded, they were forced to leave for fear of facing violence or worse. This is why Israel exists. Against that there can be no retreat.

In a recent update to his book Jerusalem, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proposes a different mental formulation for thinking about the future: “Two nations, two republics.” Two peoples living in two separate sovereign states alongside each other. This is the only viable future. Yes, the settlements must be dismantled (or equivalent land given from Israel). Yes, it will be an immense political (and indeed physical) undertaking, but it happened in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale. It just takes political will. And for now, that is lacking on both sides.

Even so, we must hope that it will come because “one state” is not just delusional, it is dangerous. It helps to keep the conflict alive by making Palestinians believe that no compromise is necessary, which emboldens Israel’s fanatics and undermines its moderates. In the interim, both sides are condemned to interminable suffering. This is what matters. Not that people in Europe or the United States, which really do have long traditions of meting out colonisation and genocide, get to feel better about themselves.

Sand is an Israeli — though he has publicly declared that he no longer wishes to be considered a Jew — so he does have skin in the game. But in the end, one has to ask: what’s the difference between him and Netanyahu? Both are living in an alternative reality, talking about different variations of a one-state “solution” that, practically speaking, will only bring civil war, which the Israelis would win, as they have an army, navy and Airforce. Look around the Middle East and consider how non-Muslims fare in society. Look at Lebanon to see how trying to cram various confessions into a single entity has worked out.

So “two nations, two republics” it must be. It is the only hope of real justice for two peoples who are, however much they might wish otherwise, manacled to each other forever. The road will be long and incredibly hard — but remember, Shlomo, if you will it, if you truly will it, it is no dream.

Lily Moo is a pseudonym; she is too worried to use her real name. When she leaves the house, she wears a disguise. The police have been advising her about how to stay safe. Most recently, she attended a joint Jewish and Iranian event for peace. Since then, she has been “in a kind of prison”.

“It is really horrible to be in London and having to hide from extremist Islamic groups,” she says. “It feels like it was in the days before my family left Iran, when women couldn’t leave the house. I knew the Iranian secret services were already keeping an eye on me — making the odd threat.” But now, other Islamic groups seem to be watching her, which “makes it twice as scary”.

Lily Moo is not the only Iranian who is in danger for speaking up for Israel. In Iran itself, supporters of Israel communicate using secret social-media accounts because they know others have been “vanished” for doing the same. Closer to home, another dissident, Vahid Beheshti, has been protesting outside the Foreign Office for 10 months, in an effort to get the British government to prescribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. Recently, he started flying an Israeli flag alongside his Persian one. One Saturday, as a pro-Palestinian demonstration marched past, someone took his Israeli flag — and as he gave chase he was warned he would be beheaded. The man who is alleged to have made the threat was later arrested by police and found to have a knife on him.

The danger is very real. Last year, MI5 foiled at least 10 potential IRGC plots to kidnap or kill people in Britain. In February, the dissident Persian language satellite station Iran International moved from London to Washington because of threats to its staff.

Both Lily and Vahid are understandably frightened, but determined to keep speaking out at pro-Israel events. “It is a duty,” says Lily Moo, whose family left Iran when she was 13, as the growing power of the “morality police” became suffocating. “The danger people are facing from Iran and its proxies… is not just about Iranian people, it is not just about Israel: it is about all of us.”

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By Nicole Lampert

“They want to kill everyone who is a non-believer,” adds Vahid, who escaped Iran 24 years ago. “They believe they will go to heaven for doing it. That is their mentality.” He is dedicated to raising awareness of the brutality of the IRGC and its proxies, which include Hamas and Hezbollah. Citing how Iran and Hezbollah are accused of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Centre in Argentina that killed 85 people, he says the brutality of the events of October 7 did not surprise him. “In Iran girls and boys are raped too, people are kidnapped or go ‘missing’ all the time. Torture is one of their tools; they cut off the fingers of people. In the past year alone more than 80 children under the age of 17 have been shot dead.”

Last September, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, was murdered by police for not wearing her hijab correctly. It sparked a wave of Woman, Love, Freedom protests. Since they began, hundreds if not thousands have been shot or arrested. A year ago, Iranian human rights organisation HRANA documented 520 people who had been killed in the first 82 days of the demonstrations — Vahid says he believes the number is now closer to 2,000 people. He adds: “While they say they have arrested 20,000, the true number is closer to 70-80,000.” Even after they are released, Vahid says, some prisoners commit suicide, having experienced such severe torture.

The alliance between Iranian dissidents and Israel is partly a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has Israel-hate at the centre of his world view. His regime funds Hamas as well as Hezbollah, which is threatening war on the Lebanese front, and the Houthis, who have been firing missiles at Israel from Yemen in recent weeks. Iranians are taught to chant “death to Israel” while still at school.

It makes sense that Iranians who object to the Ayatollah’s increasingly vicious crackdown on free speech would stand with the people he hates most. But there is so much more to it than that. Jews and Iranians have ties going back centuries, to before the birth of either Mohammed or Jesus. The Persian King known as Cyrus the Great is celebrated for freeing his kingdom’s Jewish slaves and returning them to Jerusalem in 539BCE — but many Jews stayed in the area.

In 1948, the year that Israel was established, there were 150,000 Jews living in Iran. It was one of the few countries in the Middle East not to throw out all its Jews. But as tensions between Islamicists and the more tolerant Shah loyalists grew throughout the Seventies, Jews started to leave. Then came the 1979 revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini took over, triggering a mass exodus of Jews. Today, there are just 10,000 in the country.

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The longing Persian Jews retain for their former home is depicted brilliantly in the recent Israeli-American television show Tehran, starring the Iranian-Israeli actress and singer Liraz Charhi. Her family fled Iran in the Seventies, after being forced to read the Koran. But long before October 7, Liraz discovered that she can speak to people in the country she has never been allowed to visit. (Iran, like many other Middle Eastern countries, bans people with Israeli passports.) After falling in love with Persian music, she decided to write her first album in Farsi. “Many people thought I was mad,” she tells me. But after its release in 2018, it became a huge hit in Iran. “An Iranian DJ started to play my music and people would send me videos of them taking their veils off and dancing.” Her most recent album was secretly made in Turkey with Iranian musicians who had to remain nameless for their safety.

When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, and five members of Liraz’s husband’s family were killed at Kibbutz Be’eri, she was inundated with messages from new Iranian friends. “Last year we suffocated from this madness when Jina Amini and the others were murdered in cold blood in our homeland,” reads one. Another says: “99% of Iranians are supporting Israel and all of your people in this difficult moment. We stand with you.” Footage has come out of Iran showing students deliberately avoiding walking over Israeli and American flags painted outside their university. Shortly after Hamas’s massacre, a few Iranians brandishing Palestinian flags at a game in Tehran were met with overwhelming resistance from a large crowd of other fans.

In the West, we tend to view the war over Gaza as part of a conflict that started in 1948; in the Middle East, people understand that the roots go much deeper and spread much wider. So, the Iranians who support Israel are not only calling for revolution in their own nation; they are supporting an ally against an evil that threatens the entire world.

“The people of Israel and Iran share the same enemies and we have no choice but to fight together,” says Vahid. But “this isn’t just about us in the Middle East but an ideology that everyone in the West needs to fight.” It is a battle against a fundamentalist ideology, and for freedom and democracy. “We need Israel to win, to beat Hamas,” says Vahid, “because the arms of the Iranian octopus need to be chopped off.”

Two months ago, I would have dismissed this as mere paranoia. To be a visibly Jewish is to live with a constant, low-grade fear that people are judging you, but more often than not, in my experience, that fear turned out to be unfounded. But these days, I believe any Jew who says they feel scared.

In recent weeks, thousands of people have marched through the streets of New York City chanting “from the river to the sea”; posters of those kidnapped in Israel — including babies and the elderly — have been torn down from city lampposts. At a university in downtown Manhattan, pro-Palestine demonstrators beat on the locked doors of a library where Jewish students were holed up. Over the past few days, stickers have appeared on mailboxes in my neighbourhood that read: “Resist the occupation by any means necessary.” What is meant by this, I can only surmise, is that killing children like mine is justified.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen our places of employment and our alma maters issue mealymouthed statements about the October 7 attacks. A friend of mine runs a small business that often donates proceeds to local causes such as food banks — causes that, despite having nothing to do with the conflict in Israel and Palestine, have felt it necessary to state their allegiance on social media. (No prizes for guessing where that allegiance lies.) “I don’t know what’s more painful,” she told me. “Being sad about the actual attacks, or seeing everyone you thought cared about you just disappear.”

We are on our own, we say repeatedly. The feeling is familiar. “It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that God grew attached to you and chose you — indeed, you are the smallest of peoples,” it says in Deuteronomy. Our vulnerability is part of the package; it has, so far, failed to diminish our indefatigability. “All things are mortal but the Jew,” Mark Twain wrote in his 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews”: “all other forces pass, but he remains.” In these last weeks, Jews have rallied to help one another, cooking meals for families with a parent serving in the Israeli army, bussing visitors to those sitting shiva for victims of the October 7 attacks, sending truckloads of supplies.

My family and I are part of a Modern Orthodox community, which is dedicated to the principle of Torah Umadda, which combines the best of both secular knowledge and Jewish practice. A synonymous label, “social Orthodoxy”, has been proposed, because Modern Orthodox Jews have high levels of civic engagement: while we largely keep kosher and shabbat, we also usually attend university, excel in professional fields, and have more diverse social circles than our brethren in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world. Trying to walk the razor’s edge between tradition and modernity, as a neighbour once put it, is challenging under normal circumstances. But lately it’s become a nightmare. “The way things are now, I would never send my children to college,” the mother of one of my eldest son’s best friends — herself a graduate of a prestigious secular university — whispered to me while our children played in the yard at synagogue.

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Not that this would necessarily make them safe. Our Jewishness is on display, obvious from the clothing we wear and the languages we speak; we gather together frequently in synagogues, send our children to Jewish schools, and often live in clusters. If someone wanted to hurt Jews, they’d aim for maximum impact, and target one of these places. Multiple times a week, while shopping or praying or even just ordering something to be delivered (a mezuzah on my door means anyone can tell that Jews live here), I think to myself: “We’re sitting ducks.” Perhaps I sound paranoid, but these things of course do happen.

This feeling of being at risk isn’t entirely new. It’s been three years since we moved to our fairly Orthodox neighbourhood, and this is not the first time the police have been stationed outside my children’s school since then. They appeared in early 2021, for instance, around the time that a local man was arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of synagogues in the dead of night. But this feels bigger, scarier, more isolating. A kosher restauranteur wonders if he needs to hire formal security for his tiny cafe; a friend who describes herself as a “lifelong anti-gun person” has decided to apply for a permit. I was recently thinking about taking my sons for a day out in the city, but then caught myself: what if someone sees their kippot? What if someone says something to them, or God forbid, worse?

Walking down the street recently in a different area of New York City, my infant son in tow, I watched as two well-dressed 20-somethings ripped the posters of the kidnapped off a building’s scaffolding, and I shrunk into myself. A black man stood next to me with his young family. “What are they doing?” he said, enraged. “They don’t have a right to do that!” I said nothing to him, afraid of calling any attention to myself and my baby, and I’ve regretted it every day since. Maybe it’s safer to stay home.

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The shattering of the Jewish world

By Ben Judah

I don’t know how to talk to my sons about this. I was born a non-Jew into a non-Jewish family. I knew only a handful of Jews growing up in the WASP strongholds of suburban Connecticut, and they seemed exactly like me, only with bar mitzvahs: what hardships could they really face? Some of my Jewish friends speak of being harangued by grandparents, throughout their childhoods, to remember that antisemitism lurks around every corner, but until my conversion eight years ago, I had no idea what it was like to live as a member of a visible, hated minority. Even now, I worry that I carry less of the burden than other Jews: for professional reasons, I go by my maiden name, which isn’t identifiably Jewish.

It wasn’t even my conversion that woke me up. Back then, I was living in a fun bubble of quirky Orthodoxy in Brooklyn: attending kosher supper clubs, women-only dance parties and Torah-infused yoga classes. I could be Jewish and modern. Instead, my realisation was like a slow-burn horror film: when we moved to London, we attended a synagogue that checked passports upon entry; after we moved back to Brooklyn, swastikas were chalked onto my neighbours’ doors one night. One day, my son’s Jewish preschool director showed me the new door camera they had installed after a shooting at a kosher grocery store in nearby Jersey City. A few years back, so many Orthodox Jews were being randomly beaten up on the street in New York City that a march was organised across the Brooklyn Bridge. None of my non-Jewish friends offered to join us in solidarity.

Some Jews, it seems, are easier to defend than others. On a few occasions, when the war has come up with my non-Jewish friends, they will lament that a liberal Jewish person has, say, been called a name online because she called for peace. I love my fellow Jews and believe we should strive for unity, and I too desperately want peace in the region. But I can’t help but feel that many people seem eager to deflect attention from the Jews actually harmed — “bad” Jews, because they live in Israel or support Zionism — and towards the less material pain of “good” Jews whose views are more politically palatable in America. I respect the rights of Jews, and of people more broadly, to have different opinions. But in moments of rising antisemitism, and this is most definitely one of them, it is not the secularised Jew who is at real risk — but the observant one.

It is strange, then, to remember that it is Starmer, not his furious critics, who is keeping with Labour’s traditional positioning on Israel. Labour had been the political home for British Jews since the first Labour MPs in 1905 voted against the Conservative government’s efforts to restrict Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. And Labour called for a Jewish state even before the Balfour Declaration. The party’s 1917 War Aims Memorandum called for “a free state, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return”. The statement was endorsed by Labour Party conference, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the National Executive Committee.

Over the next three decades, 11 Labour Party conferences voted to affirm support for a Jewish national home in Palestine before the state of Israel was finally established in 1948. And Labour MPs regularly defended the idea of a Jewish state in public. The former coal miner Tom Williams, who would serve in Attlee’s Cabinet, told the House of Commons in 1938: “When a national home was promised to the Jews, I presume it was not intended to be a home of shifting sands, a home under canvas that could be blown away by any and every large gust of wind… It was to be a home really worthy of a great people.” In a complete reversal of the current political landscape, Labour was confronting a pervasive scepticism towards the Jewish cause that existed on the Right of British politics.

The Conservative governments of the interwar period had become increasingly opposed to Jewish immigration to what is now Israel during the British management of the region, which began in 1919 under a mandate from the League of Nations. In 1939, the Conservative Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald announced that the UK government would cap the number of Jewish migrants at 1,500 per month, with Jewish rights to land ownership also severely restricted. Labour MPs erupted in horror at the proposal. As Left-wingers Michael Foot and Dick Crossman argued: “To limit Jewish immigration just at the moment when Palestine was the sole available refuge from Hitler would be a crime against humanity.” Philip Noel-Baker, a Labour MP who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced the immigration caps as unworkable and immoral, adding that Conservative opposition to a Jewish state “will fail because in the most tragic hour of Jewish history, the British people will not deny them their Promised Land”.

After coming to power in 1945, however, the new Labour government was similarly reluctant to remove immigration controls immediately. As Prime Minister, Attlee was concerned about the backlash from Muslims, especially in India, the independence of which was a key foreign policy priority. With US President Harry Truman, he agreed to an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to decide the next steps. When it reported in May 1946, the committee recommended ending restrictions on Jewish migration and proposed that 100,000 Jews be allowed into Palestine immediately. Attlee’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed the recommendations, saying Americans supported the report because they didn’t want “to have too many of them [Jews] in New York”. This notorious comment would lead to Bevin being pelted with eggs and tomatoes by activists when he visited New York.

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Bevin has gained a posthumous reputation for antisemitism, but his biographers are insistent that his reluctance to support the creation of Israel had more to do with what Tony Benn would later call “the traditional anti-Israel bias in the Foreign Office” rather than hatred of Jews. In keeping with the broader attitude of the Left, as a trade union leader Bevin had championed Jewish organised labour, including those in Palestine. In 1936, he even told the TUC conference: “It seems to me that the new star of Bethlehem now shining over Jerusalem is the star of socialism… We must give these people [Jews] the opportunity of developing socialism… extending to them our blessing and helping them to build a new Jerusalem in Palestine.” Bevin’s later scepticism seems a reflection of the broader opinion of the British elite and Foreign Office, which for decades was pro-Arab.

And from the perspective of realpolitik, support for the Arabs made more sense for Britain, with Zionism seeming the Romantic, utopian cause. Britain’s main interests in the Middle East were tied to oil and trade routes that were controlled by Arab nations and, in a Cold War context, there was little to be gained from offending the Arabs and pushing them closer towards the Soviet Union. The two figures who best personified this division in the British political elite were Michael Foot and his brother Hugh, a distinguished career diplomat. Michael made his first visit to Palestine in 1934 to visit his brother, who was serving there in the British Colonial Service, and witnessed his reactionary sentiments first-hand. Hugh, like most of the Colonial Service, sympathised with the Arabs so much that the Palestinian flag was draped over his coffin at his funeral in 1990.

Michael, on the other hand, took up the cause for a Jewish homeland. As editor of Tribune, he employed staunch Zionists, including Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson, and Tosco Fyvel. In response to Bevin’s intransigence in 1946, he and Richard Crossman composed a pamphlet called A Palestine Munich? which argued that Labour was at risk of adopting a policy of appeasement, as the Conservatives had done, which would again abandon the Jews for the sake of geopolitics. They insisted that “survivors of Hitler’s gas chambers now herded into the displaced persons’ centres should be permitted to join their friends and relatives in the National Home”. They were referring to the unprecedented displacement of Jewish refugees in Europe following the Holocaust, which was compounded by increasing Arab animosity to Jews in the Middle East, with thousands forced to flee their homes in Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere.

For the immediate post-war decades, it was Michael Foot’s idealism which won out. And Zionism was not just associated with the Labour Party but with the most radical wing of the Labour Left. Nye Bevan, perhaps its most celebrated figure, wrote as poetically as anyone of the cause for a Jewish homeland following a visit in 1954:

“When… the Arab says the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so.”

Tony Benn expressed similar emotions. He had been at the Sha’ar HaGolam kibbutz by the Golan Heights on VE Day when he was serving in the RAF. And he would return in 1956 for Israeli Independence Day, writing in his diary that he was doubly amazed by the social and economic progress of the Israelis because “underneath it all was the tragedy of 6 million dead in the gas chambers and the miracle of a home for Jews after 1,900 years of pogrom and ghetto”. Benn was a greater admirer of the Jewish socialist movement and concluded that “perhaps the kibbutzim have the answer — stay rooted to the soil and pass it on more richly fertile than before to your sons and grandsons”. This was representative of many on the Left who regarded Israel as a great socialist experiment, sowing the desert with the seeds of a genuine egalitarianism.

Such proud and conscious identification with the Israeli state is very rare on the Left today. And the roots of its modern position date to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. The New Left, the strain of identitarian socialist politics then emerging across the West, took the view that Israelis had come not as refugees but as conquerors, anticipating the contemporary framing of the country as a “settler colony”. But the PLP was still decidedly Zionist. In the Sixties and Seventies, over 10% of Labour MPs were Jews; in 1966, 38 Jews were elected as Labour MPs, compared to five in 2019.

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This remained the dominant attitude at the top of the party. During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Harold Wilson wanted to impose a three-line whip on a motion demanding the Conservative government send arms to Israel. Roy Jenkins, Wilson’s erstwhile deputy who had resigned to support joining the European Economic Community, cautioned that it was a bad idea. The Labour leader shot him down: “Look, Roy, I’ve accommodated your fucking conscience for years. Now you’re going to have to take account of mine.” Wilson explained to Jenkins that he cared just as much about Israel as Jenkins did Europe.

Wilson’s leadership, however, was the high point of Labour Zionism. Although the party has retained a sturdy pro-Israel flank, the breadth and depth of the Labour Party’s commitment to Israel has waned in recent decades, while the New Left’s interpretation of Israel has grown in strength. There are multifarious reasons for this: the severity of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (until 2005); the hardline governments of Sharon and Netanyahu; the fading of Jewish influence within Labour and the rise of a Muslim-Labour constituency; and the successful advocacy of groups like the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Among activists, an ambient anti-Israel attitude has become gradually predominant, as the scenes in London over the past three weekends have demonstrated. Israel is now regarded as a powerful and authoritarian military state rather than a refuge for a victimised people. The result is a fascinating sea change in political allegiances. Today, Labour’s historic Zionist instincts have faded. The group which had been so long championed by the British Right — Arabs in Palestine — have become the primary concern of the British Left. Even if Starmer’s beliefs on Israel are as strongly-held as Harold Wilson’s, it seems unlikely he can win his party round to the same position.

Rooney has written another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love-lives. The Israeli state would welcome an edition, but she is withholding it from Israeli readers as a political gesture. Had she written a novel about the suffering of young Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Israeli state sought to ban it, I imagine she would join all right-minded folk in pressing for a Hebrew edition to be produced.

Sally Rooney has not decided to boycott an entire language. Her decision to refuse the Israeli publisher Modan to publish a Hebrew edition of her latest novel is the refusal of a specific Israeli publisher rather than the refusal of a Jewish language. You may argue the two will add up to the same thing – which non-Israeli publisher is likely to want to produce a Hebrew edition? — but the distinction in principle is not meaningless, and it’s the distinction that she herself makes.

In a statement she said she refused to work with a publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, adding: “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”

I think this is a silly move, but it’s not so obviously silly and/or malign as to be slam-dunked in 280 characters. We need to keep this a manageable length, though, so rather than start from 1967, or 1948, or 19th-century pogroms and the birth of Zionism, let’s start from Rooney’s position — which is that Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population, and its illegal settlements, are illegitimate and deplorable. Let’s take that as a given, whether or not we agree with it. And let’s shelve, too, the argument that you’re only allowed to boycott Israel if you also boycott Russia, Saudi, China and any other countries whose human rights records bear similar challenge. It’s not necessarily a trivial objection — a key part of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is holding Israel to a double standard by “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” — but it would be, if we’re to approach this issue (as I’m trying to) on Rooney’s terms, to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Let’s take Rooney’s decision on its own terms. She sees Israel as a baddy. She supports the BDS movement, which holds it legitimate to punish Israel for its badness by economic sanctions and cultural boycotts – on an analogy with the isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. (Is Israel an “apartheid state”? Let’s shelve that one also.) So she won’t let Israel have Beautiful World, Where Are You? because, essentially, they are a baddy and so they Can’t Have Nice Things.

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I’m trying to get to the nub of this, which is the question of what her decision achieves — or hopes to. Sanctions and boycotts are intended to strike a blow against a regime, not against its people. (I can’t speak for Rooney, but I’m presuming she deplores the Israeli state rather than its Jewish inhabitants.) The most powerful arguments against them have always been that in seeking to do the former, they achieve the latter. And, indeed, you can argue that thanks to the backfire effect, they sometimes help the regime by uniting its people in being pissed off about the sanctions.

Still, in economic terms, a successful boycott will seek to hurt a country’s GDP; it will discourage international investment; it may specifically prevent it buying weapons, energy and the other things that a regime needs to thrive. And in cultural terms, it will seek to damage its soft power, and the regime’s internal claim to legitimacy, by signalling its isolation from the international community.

So to take the example of apartheid South Africa, you could make a case for refusing to play international cricket there, or disapproving when major rock stars played Sun City. There’s propaganda value to hosting an international sporting tournament — those who blether on about sport being “above politics” haven’t been paying attention — or having Dolly Parton play your national stadium. It signals, soft-power-wise, that your country, and by extension its government, is a legitimate member of the great family of nations. Bad luck on innocent cricket fans of all ethnic and political stripes; but more infuriating, you’d hope, to the cricket-loving white supremacists in charge of the country who felt humiliated by the snub.

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But books, I submit, are a totally different type of good from weapons, financial instruments, petroleum, sporting events or Dolly Parton concerts. They are no use to a regime; and they can sometimes be a nuisance to it. Reading is a private, rather than a communal event. Governments, as a rule, couldn’t give two hoots about what its citizens are reading at bedtime. You can’t hoist the flag over a scattered population of readers losing half an hour here or there, on a timetable of their own devising, in an imaginary world.

The reason that when states do take an interest in books it’s to ban them is precisely that they don’t fit into an authoritarian order (Israel, I should add, is not in that sense anything like an authoritarian regime). The widespread liberal enthusiasm for the free circulation of books links to this — as well as to the idea, though we shouldn’t push it too far, that fiction is in some way a moral agent. Here we get to George Eliot’s old line that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. Books can change minds, spread ideas and, yes, enlarge sympathies.

So, to repeat, what does Rooney intend to achieve? She’s a bestseller, sure; but not to the extent, I imagine, that missing out on her new paperback will damage the Israeli economy. The publishing house is a private rather than a state concern. There’s no soft-power blow that withdrawing her book strikes to the prestige of the Israeli regime, either. As I say, they couldn’t give a toss which of their citizens get to read about the tangled love-lives and troubled consciences of Rooney’s protagonists.

And in deciding that ordinary Israeli citizens should not get to read her book (my guess, for what it’s worth, is that most of her Israeli readers will be of a liberal internationalist bent in any case) Rooney seems to sell her own work short by indicating that there’s nothing in it that might do the private and disaggregated good of enlarging sympathies, changing minds, expanding sensibilities. That it’s just product, like the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream that you also can’t buy in Israeli occupied territories.

Perhaps, as with Ben & Jerry’s, an Israeli boycott will be good branding for that product in the liberal west. But it’s hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians.

The synagogue was named for the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who led the Jewish community here in the 12^th century, when Cairo was the most important Jewish centre in the Middle East. The building was nothing but a roofless shell, but I discovered a work crew laying planks in one of the rooms, up to their knees in fetid water. It turned out that the Egyptian government — the same regime that took possession of much of the property of the 80,000 Jews who’d been forced out of the country two generations earlier — was engaged in a restoration project.

A polite young engineer on the site showed me the location of the stand where the Torah scroll was once read. Another man, in civilian clothes but with some vaguely military authority, told me not to take pictures.

There couldn’t be anything bad about the restoration of a synagogue, could there? It was hard to explain why none of this felt right; why I preferred to see the building left to rot, rather than see it made up like a corpse at a wake. I had the same feeling when I saw other journalists refer seriously to the “Jewish community of Cairo”, quoting a woman who was its “President”.

There was no community, just a regime-approved simulacrum designed to allow everyone to pretend that an ethnic cleansing hadn’t taken place, and that something dead was alive. It was Weekend at Bernie’s. At the time of my visit, the Egyptian Government was trying to get one of its officials elected to a top cultural post at the UN, an effort hindered by this same official’s past support for burning Hebrew books. A synagogue renovation couldn’t hurt his cause! The real Jews were long out of Egypt, but their imaginary avatars were still hard at work serving the narrative needs of others.

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In Cairo, and at similar sites I’ve visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, I’ve felt — in the words of the author Dara Horn — an “unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off”. Horn has now articulated that sense, and many other important and elusive senses, in a superb new essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. (I should mention that I spent a summer with the author on a youth programme three decades ago, and have remained in touch.) Horn comes at her subject with a deep grasp of history and a personal commitment to the living Jewish tradition, with an acerbic sense of humour that pops out now and then — and also, refreshingly and necessarily, with anger.

One memorable essay recounts a bizarre trip to several “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, China, near the Siberian border. The city is known for its vast Ice Festival every winter, and also for being founded by Jews who were sent there by Tsarist Russia as part of a railway project, but were then dispossessed and driven out by a mix of imperial Japanese occupiers, White Russian bigots, and rapacious communists of both the Soviet and Maoist variety. (Horn quips that “Jewish heritage sites” — a benign term used in many countries for the purpose of multicultural branding and drawing Jewish tourism — sounds better than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”)

The author visits “the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East”, which turns out not to be a real cemetery at all, but just gravestones on empty ground. The original cemetery was re-zoned years ago and the Harbin municipality moved only the markers, not the bodies, which now seem to be under an amusement park.

The names of those Jews have inevitably been forgotten. A very different posthumous fate befell Anne Frank, the subject of another essay in this book, who, in the decades since her murder at age 16, has been turned into a global brand. Horn is cutting about the way her famous diary has been used as a feel-good story that flatters readers in the same way that a renovated synagogue flatters the multiculturalism of the Egyptian state.

The book’s most famous sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — is something we all like to hear. But it obscures the obvious truth of the text, which was written a few weeks before Anne was turned in by Dutch neighbours to die in a German camp. No one was good enough to save her. “It is far more gratifying,” Horn writes, “to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

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And it’s easier to love a Jewish girl who can no longer express her potentially uncomfortable conclusions about her own life than it is to tolerate her annoyingly living co-religionists. In 2018, the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, located at the site of the house where she hid with her family, wouldn’t let a Jewish employee wear a kippah, explaining that this violated the museum’s “neutrality”. The directors changed their mind only after four months of deliberations, Horn observes, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” A similar observation might be made about a place like Belgium, which also has nice Jewish museums and memorials, yet just passed a law banning kosher slaughter, a necessity for those living Belgian Jews who would like to practice their religion.

Looming over Horn’s essay collection is the place that is now home to the largest number of living Jews, the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate demonstration of Horn’s thesis, though she mostly, and wisely, steers clear of the topic. Many people eager to venerate their vanished Jews are simultaneously uncomfortable with the ones who are still alive in the tiny corner of the Middle East where they fled after most other places on earth became unlivable.

Horn skirts close in one moving essay about a group of Yiddish actors and writers in the Soviet Union of the 1940s who were exploited for propaganda, then killed when they were no longer useful. The communists could tolerate Jews, she writes, “provided they weren’t practising the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism” — meaning that nearly all of Jewish life was out of bounds. “The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist.”

This differentiation, which outlived the Soviets and is increasingly popular on the Western Left today, is largely lost on the plurality of Jews who are Israelis, and on the vast majority who think a Jewish state is a good idea. Older people here in Israel still remember how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, just 28 years after the concentration camps closed, the same liberal countries of Europe that were expressing pious regret for the recent extermination of their Jews wouldn’t allow desperately needed American resupply flights to land in their territory en route to Israel, which had just been attacked by two Arab clients of the Soviets and was struggling to recover.

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And in 2021, young Jews can still see how countries like France, Germany, and the UK lay solemn wreaths at Holocaust memorials while participating in the isolation of the Jewish state at the UN, where the Human Rights Council, to give just one example, has condemned Israel more times than all other countries on earth combined. They can also observe how activists in places awash with Jewish heritage sites and Holocaust museums are energetically promoting a boycott of “Zionists” with telling success.

Horn doesn’t go there, in part because she doesn’t need to; her inspired essays say enough. But it is that kind of hypocrisy that’s at the heart of her argument. People Love Dead Jews helps explain the acute anxiety of many Jewish citizens of Western countries in 2021, who feel the ground shifting as old forms of thought reappear in public on both the Left and the Right — and as it becomes clear how few lessons have really been learned.

Now the difference between us is, of course, that I work at a think tank mostly dealing with policy responses to offshore finance and he’s one of the most lauded young — I think he can still pull that one off, at 40 — Jewish writers in America. But that’s not what we are here to discuss. It’s his new book The Netanyahus: An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family.

Upstate New York: there’s snow, an unreformed, old fashioned university and virtually no Jews and here Ruben Blum is making his unhappy way as a Jewish historian — but not, as Cohen keeps on pointing out, nod-nod, wink-wink, as a historian of the Jews. It’s the Sixties. The kind of golf club anti-Semitism that saw a “Jew Quota” put on Harvard is still widespread. Through a series of not particularly funny pastiches of David Lodge, Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful Pnin, poor old Rube swills around pathetically.

The drama kicks in when he’s informed “one of his own” — a Jewish historian and a historian of the Jews — is on his way from Israel for an interview. Would he take care of him? This is where the novel gets interesting. A letter — so well written I thought about it for days — arrives from a certain Dr Prof Peretz Levavi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem warning Blum that this man, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, is a rancid, ideological, venomous ultranationalist. Reject him at all costs. And then crashing into his life come Mr and Mrs Netanyahu and their three sons — Yoni, Bibi, Iddo — for a train wreck interview that leaves Rube feeling like the smallest Jew in the world.

It won’t come as a great reveal to learn that something like this really happened. The Netanyahu, little Bibi, who went on to become Prime Minister, really had a father called Ben-Zion who was a brooding, intellectually menacing historian, obsessed with proving that the conversos — Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Spain and were the victims of the Inquisition — were really sincere converts. And that by racialising them in order to persecute them — by his theory so as to weaken their patrons, the nobility, in the class politics of the day — the Spanish Crown created a world where you could never stop being Jewish. His whole work really a warning to the Diaspora there was no point even trying: you can become a Communist, you can become a Nazi, you can burn an Israeli flag in Time Square — the Inquisition will always come for you.

Ben-Zion’s theories have been called ideological projection. But his impact on the way the Jews would come to see the world was not academic. Small, malevolent, with strangely shaped ears; having felt his Right-wing politics pushed him into American exile when labour Zionists ran the show back in Israel; Ben-Zion really did loom over his son who has ruled Israel for a fifth of his existence, warning that — “Jewish history is the history of Holocausts.” And of course he really was handled by an American Jew, who happened to be Cohen’s friend Harold Bloom, the vaunted literary critic and self-vaunted defender of the Western Canon, when he came to Cornell for his interview.

These clashing ways of Jewishness meeting needed — no, required — a novel. But I feel very torn about the result. It manages to both be the Jewish American novel I’ve been waiting for and a huge disappointment. The most interesting and the most predictable piece of fiction I’ve picked up in a while. The book with the most mediocre windup and the most fantastic — really fantastic — ending I’ve read all year. The often annoying campus comedy is marbled with totally fascinating reflections on Jewish history that merited — I think I counted five — essays on their own. But Cohen the critic, the intellectual, is too distracted trying to be funny.

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This is why I admire Joshua Cohen. It’s been obvious ever since David Remnick (what greater arbiter of bien pensant taste has there ever been than his New Yorker?) left dinner with Ben-Zion Netanyahu in the Old City in 1998 gasping about his outrageously reactionary table talk that there was a brilliant novel here in the encounter — the confrontation — between this avatar of Zionist Israel and one of the Upper West Side. But until Cohen, no American Jew, realised or dared. Instead, the Jewish novels of the last 20 years — think Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated to Nicole Krauss’s Great House — has given us Holocaust pedagogy. Entertaining us, in the third generation, with the comforts of trauma and loss. It’s the opposite of challenging Jewish readers. In fact it’s more like a warm bath. But here’s the thing: I loved those novels as novels from page one. 

The Netanyahus, on the other hand, was one of those highly irritating novels: so interesting I couldn’t stop reading it, without ever being sure I was actually enjoying it. As a kosher smorgasbord of ideas it is wonderful: a car journey to the Catskills’ worth of fun arguments. As a piece of fiction — until the very last, brilliant chapter — it didn’t do it for me. The problem isn’t Ben-Zion: everything about him is fantastically conjured. The problem is Rube, his wife Edith and the whole family of caricatures set up in opposition. This makes the novel mostly a drag. You hardly care when the Netanyahus fuck up their life.

I think these thinly drawn characters — the unassuming, uninsightful Rube Blum, next to the incredible, unforgettable, Ben-Zion Netanyahu — takes us back to Cohen’s obsessions, and mine. We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis. The way The Netanyahus seems to rush through its plot, ticking off what we are supposed to know about American Jews — father worked in the rag trade, tick, daughter wants a nose job, tick — to get to Ben-Zion reflects something much deeper. Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now — from the anti-Zionist polemics in Jewish Currents to the anti-anti-Zionists polemics in Tablet — it is about Israel. Wherever the crazes are — Fauda, the secret missions of the IDF, Shtisel, the secret lives of ultra-orthodox Jerusalem — it is not about us as American, as Diaspora Jews, but them.

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I sometimes marvel, on nights out in Brooklyn, that friends on the new Jewish Left know more about whatever crimes the Israeli army are committing at whatever checkpoints than my cousins who actually refused to serve in the IDF. I meet colleagues in DC who are more militant and seemingly intransigently up-to-date on the security situation in Gaza than my relatives who actually occupied it. It’s almost like we’ve lost interest in ourselves, out here, in America, as a culture. That the Big Jewish Novelists, who decorate Cohen’s endorsement page, have taken to writing about Israel reflects something bigger. That after the big joke in Curb Your Enthusiasm got old — that being Jewish in America after assimilation meant nothing but cringe — there was nothing left to say.

Roth. Malamud. Bellow. They were fascinated by Jews as Americans — it was a constant exploration for them — in a way that Rube feels like homework both for Cohen and for the reader, until we get to Ben-Zion and the good stuff. Maybe those novels of the immigrant experience can’t be written by people like us anymore. Perhaps they can only be written by Mexican-American or Asian-American writers and we should stop trying. We’re just too much a part of the furniture. The elite, the professions, feel if anything WASP-Jewish here in the North East, which is actually a pretty good description of most of our parents or our own relationships after this many generations in the New World. Our Rubes are lifeless. Fake.

We are bored of ourselves. Ben Gurion and Gold Meir. Ben-Zion and Bibi. These are some of the greatest characters in the Jewish story for centuries — if we want political drama like this we might have to go back to the Book of Judges. Israel is a country whose fate is still so precarious, its life so fantastical, or if you look at it from the other side, so cruel. And here we are, in America, in our Think Tanks, Mid Level Media Jobs or MFA-track writing careers: leading some of the most undramatic and tedious Jewish lives of all time. How could we ever write about something else?

Israel-Palestine is a distinctive region because it combines low infant mortality and high female education with high birth rates. As Paul Morland has pointed out, Jews and Arabs in the region have much higher birth rates than their “co-ethnics” outside it. For instance, Arab women in Jordan bear 2.69 children, while those in Palestine have 3.49; Jewish women in Israel average 3.17 children each, compared to 1.5 in the US and Britain.

Why is this? One explanation seems to be that birth rates are higher in regions of religious conflict — a hypothesis that also seems to map on to areas inside Israel-Palestine. For example, Arab women in relatively conflict-prone Gaza average 3.64 kids compared to 3.07 in the more peaceful West Bank. Jewish women in tense, religious Jerusalem average 4.27 compared to a national average of 3.17.

What’s particularly concerning, though, is how these high fertility rates further increase the risk of violence, producing a dangerous, combustible spiral. How so?

First of all, political demographers have long identified a relationship between population composition, politics and violence. Young men, due in part to testosterone, commit a vastly disproportionate share of murders in all societies. Indeed, statistical models show that the higher the share of a nation’s population made up of 15-30 year olds, the greater the risk of a violent conflict.

In Sons and World Power, Gunnar Heinsohn analysed this trend throughout history, arguing that surplus males have always played an important part in spurring conquest and aggression. When only the eldest son inherited land, those with the bad luck to be his siblings had to fend for themselves. And so, he explained, during periods when population growth exceeded peaceful economic opportunities, war, banditry and risk-taking became more attractive.

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That’s why the ranks of invaders, from the Vikings to Conquistadors, have disproportionately featured men such as Pedro de Alvarado, a younger son from a lesser-noble background who had no inheritance and thus decided, in 1510, to seek his fortune in the New World.

By contrast, as the population of the rich world ages, nations such as China, Russia and the United States will become increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their only sons on the battlefield, producing what Mark Haas has called “geriatric peace”. Indeed, Heinsohn argued that a major reason Lebanon did not descend into full-scale war in 2006, but did so in 1975, was age structure: by 2006, its fertility rate had plummeted and its average age had matured considerably compared to 1975.

Back in Israel, the issue of population has always commanded a central role in the nation’s psyche. First, Zionists worked hard to entice and sponsor European Jews to settle in the Holy Land, with the number of Jews swelling from 60,000 in 1918 to 600,000 in 1948. After the creation of Israel in 1948, waves of immigrants arrived, first from Displaced Persons camps in Europe, then from Morocco and, after 1989, from the former Soviet Union. Without immigration, as Paul Morland notes, there would be 250,000 Jews in Israel instead of 6 million.

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And these ethno-demographic considerations are woven into national policy; they shaped Israel’s border wall and helped convince Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza in 2005, which contains just 1% of the territory of Israel-Palestine but over one million Palestinians.

At one time, Israeli planners became concerned that Jews would be steadily outnumbered because of the Arabs’ fertility advantage — a prospect celebrated by Palestinian leaders. In the immortal words of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon”. For American political scientist Monica Toft, the two sides were engaged in “wombfare” for control of territory and power.

But while demographers once thought that Palestinian fertility would diverge from the Jewish fertility rate, Palestinian women have been affected by the worldwide slide in Arab birth rates of the past few decades. Meanwhile, Figure 1 (below) shows that while Jewish fertility was trending downward from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, it has since defied the supposedly iron laws of demography, going into reverse to the point that the Jewish fertility rate has now overtaken the falling Palestinian one.

Yet the rise in Jewish fertility has come at a price. Secular Jews and those from moderate branches have historically made up Israel’s elite, but are losing population share due to their relatively low fertility. Instead, the Jewish fertility rise is largely due to the growth in highly religious Jews, especially the Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. The latter have doubled their share of the adult Jewish population in Israel since 2000, and are extremely young, forming a third of Jewish first-graders — up from a few percentage points in 1960. Though they currently only make up 10% of the American and British diaspora, they are expected to form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

Within Israel, this demographic shift is already starting to cause tensions. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men generally avoid full-time jobs and the military, and are instead encouraged to study the Torah at Yeshivas to fulfil the ideal of a “scholar society”. The Israeli Central Bank, as a result, fears that their growth will ultimately bankrupt the Israeli state.

Modern Orthodox Jews are, by contrast, successful and serve enthusiastically in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). While the ultra-Orthodox are reluctant or pragmatic Zionists, the modern Orthodox are often passionately so, making up an increasing share of IDF officers and serving as shock troops of the Religious Zionist and Settler movements.

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But while ultra-Orthodox Jews rear between 6 and 7 children, modern Orthodox women have 3 or 4 — higher than the secular Jews, who have 2.2. This dynamic is having a number of consequences. First, the relatively poor ultra-Orthodox population is spilling out from concentrated areas such as Meah Shearim, near Jerusalem. A relatively inexpensive option is to move across the Green Line into East Jerusalem or to the Settlements in the occupied territories.

There are political repercussions, too. With their increased vote-share, the Ultra-Orthodox have shifted Israel in a more Right-wing and religious direction, generating increased support for Haredi and pro-Settler parties. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for the Government to trade occupied land — and the settlements of religious Jews which now stand on it — for peace.

Meanwhile, the still-healthy Palestinian fertility rate has resulted in a young and fast-growing population in the West Bank, where the median age is 22, and Gaza, where it is just 18. Indeed, Gaza is the 13^th fastest growing political unit in the world, with a population density of over 5,000 people per square kilometre.

As Figure 2 (above) shows, this, together with Jewish fertility, has resulted in a soaring population in Israel-Palestine. While it is far too crude to describe the region as a ticking time bomb, it’s equally difficult to see how this population boom can continue without resulting in increased pressure on land, as well as producing a surplus of young men willing to join militant groups.

How will this all end? In the long run, it seems possible that the ultra-Orthodox could bankrupt Israel, while Palestine may have to send its excess population to work abroad if Arab countries in the Persian Gulf once again become willing to accept large numbers of Palestinians. The region’s demographic struggle for power is heating up — and, despite yesterday’s ceasefire, it doesn’t look like it will be brought to an end anytime soon.

Raised in ultra-assimilative Budapest Neolog-Judaism, Herzl’s acquaintance with Hebrew and (in adulthood) Jewish practice was minimal, and he was a most unlikely man to spark a global movement of Jewish self-consciousness.

Yet, within eight years of meeting Güdemann, he had created the structures of a worldwide campaign, mobilised a mass following of impoverished Orthodox Jews in Russia and Galicia, and argued his cause in person to the representatives of three world powers. Within a decade he was dead, and since then he has remained in many ways a mystery. It is this mystery that Derek Penslar’s recent biography Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader makes strides toward unravelling, in doing so posing questions for Israel today.

Zionism’s foundational text, the 1896 Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) was born almost by accident. In May 1895 Herzl’s long gathering background despondency regarding the Jewish predicament in Europe was energised by an external shock: rabid anti-Semite Karl Lueger’s election as mayor of Vienna. This would prove the spark for the explosion of creativity that launched Zionism, the fuel being Herzl’s deep emotional unease arising from a fraught marriage and frustrated literary ambition.

“Herzl was in the grip of an existential crisis” Penslar writes: “he experienced a prolonged period of heightened energy that in June escalated into a frenzy… Herzl’s Zionist program emerged as a kind of condensation, in which an effulgence of psychic energy gradually thickened and stabilised.”

He later recalled writing while “walking, standing, lying down, in the street; at table, [and] at night when I started up from sleep.” Herzl needed Zionism as an overarching purpose just as Zionism needed Herzl’s energy to come to life.

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Despite frenzied composition Der Judenstaat’s tone is powerfully controlled. Herzl dissects the “Jewish Question” with forensic rigour, evoking the psychological “de-personalisation” of advanced depression, “standing outside himself” as observer, watching dispassionately. “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers,” Herzl wrote: “Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migration. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.”

Paradoxically, Herzl argued, if Jews embraced the “otherness” gentile Europeans attributed to them, disdaining Jewish assimilation, then reconciliation would follow. Removing Jews en masse from Europe would eliminate anti-Semitism. If Jews “become an independent nation, settled on the soil of their own land and leading the life of a normal people” Christian Europeans would view them as reliable international partners — not “enemies within”. The few Jews remaining behind in Europe would be indulged by Christians as a benign curiosity.

Jews too would be transformed: “We are what the ghetto made us,” but the Jewish authorities would “make it impossible… for those of our people, who are hawkers and peddlers here, to re-establish themselves in the same trades there”. Gentile esteem would ensue. A “blank slate” would facilitate innovation: a seven-hour work day; funded worker education; centralised labour agencies matching need to supply. Success would attract Jewish diaspora migrants and, again, Christian respect.

Though no theocracy, Herzl’s Jewish state would honour religion because Jews “feel our historic affinity only through the faith of our fathers” — even if many Jews lacked faith at the present. Palestine was preferred not because God commanded it but because tradition meant it “would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency”.

Herzl was happy to embrace stereotypes to make the case. “We have attained pre-eminence in finance,” he argued, so Jewish financiers should alleviate Ottoman public debt as the price of statehood. He even sought help from anti-Semites like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, who he hoped could be motivated to pressure Sultan Abdul Hamid II in order to answer Germany’s own “Jewish question”.

Herzl tirelessly promoted his project through speeches, articles, meetings and a futuristic novel Die Altneuland (“The Old-Newland”) which attempted to communicate the texture of lived experience in the hoped-for state. The novel gave Zionism emotional content, offsetting Die Judenstaat’s arid rationalism. Herzl understood that for a political project to succeed it must appeal to the imaginative faculty, yet he rejected categorisation of Die Altneuland as “utopian”. The book’s subtitle If you will it, it is no dream was meant to be taken seriously.

Penslar deems Herzl a paradigmatic exemplar of what sociologist Max Weber later termed “charismatic authority”. From Vilnius to Sofia crowds assembled – even at dead of night – to watch Herzl’s carriage passing by.

Jewish criticism of Herzl was incessant, and prior to 1945 anti-Zionism was the majority position in world Jewry. Assimilationists balked at Herzl’s despair of achieving Enlightenment pluralism in Europe; rabbinical scholars decried his ambition to restore a Jewish polity through human agency as a blasphemy.

“Heart neurosis! That, and the Jews, will kill me off!” Herzl complained to physician Alexander Mamorek in September 1903. His struggles presaged the coalition instability which plagues modern Israeli politics, sustaining unity among partners in Zionism’s fractious alliance proving nightmarish. The yearnings of Secularists for European culture, the Orthodox for inherited tradition and Hebrew language enthusiasts for a newly-created identity were painfully antithetical. Herzl’s words to Mamorek proved prophetic: he succumbed to a lethal combination of stress and cardiac arrhythmia nine months later.

Herzl was very much a product of Budapest, the city where he lived until he was 18, and one of the great centres of European Judaism. The Herzl home abutted Dohanhyi Street’s Great Synagogue, then the world’s largest and built to resemble the ground plan of a church, and staffed by cassocked rabbis. The family worshiped there regularly, if not zealously.

Today an extension of the synagogue incorporates the site of Herzl ’s home; the garden in which he played is merged within land which became (and remains) a mass grave for around 2,000 Jews of the Budapest ghetto who died variously by bullet, starvation and disease in autumn 1944. That coincidence presents a powerful argument for his project’s necessity.

Penslar’s presentation of Herzl presents strong implicit arguments regarding the state he imagined and most importantly the proposed annexation of the West Bank. For one thing, nowhere in either Der Judenstaat or Die Altennueland did Herzl specify what the geographic boundaries of the Jewish homeland should be.

In Die Autlnueland Herzl even retreated from asserting territorial sovereignty itself. In his mature thought the “Jewish State” was to be a “charted” – not sovereign – entity sheltering within a great power: more like the State of New York than the United States of America. It would have no army of its own.

Herzl was clear that land transfer would be through consensual purchase. Even this should be preceded by international approval under “public law”. Initially Der Judenstaat hinted at Jewish exclusivism, but later Die Altneuland stressed Arab equality. The assertion of a biblical mandate for control of the West Bank (or “Judea and Samaria” as Likud politicians’ term it) clashes even with Der Judenstaat’s earlier rejection of theocracy.

For Herzl the Jewish people’s self-consciousness, not Palestine’s land mass, was what enabled statehood. Hence his claim to have “founded the Jewish State” at Basel before it had any land whatsoever. In the already quoted diary entry of 3rd September 1897 he asserted that “The foundation of a State lies in the will of the people for a State). Territory is only the material basis; the State, even when it possesses territory, is always something abstract. At Basel, then, I created this abstraction.”

On top of his many other talents Herzl possessed an eerie capacity for prediction. On 3 September 1897, reflecting on the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Herzl wrote: “to sum up… I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years and certainly in 50, everyone will know it.” Fifty years and two months later, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

Six months later, on 15 May, 1948, David Ben Gurion read out Israel’s independence declaration in the Tel Aviv Museum standing beneath Herzl’s portrait and thereby invoking his authority. Yet it’s an authority that is often misunderstood or misused by his successors, so that today it could be argued that what Israel desperately needs today is more Zionism.

There are odd similarities with the situation exactly a century ago. Iraq was under British military occupation, but the British government, just like the Americans more recently, wanted to withdraw its troops. An outside force — then it was Arab nationalists based in Syria — was plotting violence that it hoped might quicken Britain’s exit.

Amid rising doubts about the wisdom of his approach, Arnold Wilson, Britain’s ebullient proconsul in the country, claimed there was nothing to see here. “The Shaikhs and tribes of the outlying districts are everywhere settling down,” he insisted to a former colleague in a new year letter. “The political atmosphere in Basrah is good, in Baghdad fair and improving, and I think even in Mosul things are getting better.” This analysis was at best deluded, at worst deliberately deceitful: a revolt would plunge Iraq into chaos later that year, and the 1920s would be a decade of instability in the Middle East, as a crisis in one country rapidly spread across freshly-drawn frontiers that were no more than lines in the sand.

The revolt that convulsed Iraq in 1920 was a taster of the consequences of three irreconcilable promises the British had made during the First World War, which became apparent over the next ten years. Under pressure in 1915 they had sent Mecca’s ruler Sharif Hussein a weasel-worded letter that recognised his claim to an empire encompassing Iraq and Syria if he rose up against the Turks. In 1916, in the Sykes-Picot agreement, they then secretly pledged a northerly wedge of this same territory to the French, to patch up the entente cordiale.

Then in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 publicly committed themselves to a Jewish national home in Palestine — land that Hussein believed they had already acknowledged as his. During the next decade the British contorted themselves to try to square these promises with each other. The widespread anti-western sentiment, the Arab-Jewish conflict, and Islamism we see in today’s Middle East are all the result.

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The most immediate problem arose from the clash between the promises to Hussein and the French. If you have seen Lawrence of Arabia you will recall that the end of the war left Lawrence’s ally, Sharif Hussein’s son Feisal, in control of Damascus, the city that, defended by Saladin, had defied the crusaders eight centuries earlier. Now the French, citing their 1916 deal with the British, felt it was theirs.

While the French were in no position to oust Feisal, the British tried not to take sides, and Anglo-French relations deteriorated. By January 1920, however, the British had begun to wonder if continuing to sit on the fence was wise.

The British had initially hoped that they could directly govern Iraq, in order to exploit the country’s oil, while buying off the Arabs with independence in Syria. It now dawned on them that whatever happened on one side of the Sykes-Picot frontier would soon happen on the other. Were Feisal’s confident and vocal Arab nationalist supporters able to gain independence for Syria they would set an uncomfortable precedent for Iraq. Moreover the French would be likely to veto British rule in Palestine in revenge.

These factors, together with the growing realisation that sooner or later they would need French support to fight another war with Germany, led the British to decide that they would have to side with their old rivals. In March 1920 news from Damascus, where the nationalists had proclaimed Feisal king of Syria and his elder brother Abdullah emir of Iraq, spurred a Franco-British rapprochement.

At the Italian resort of San Remo a month later, the British and French governments firmed up the 1916 Sykes-Picot deal. Britain got Palestine and Iraq; France: Syria and a quarter share of Iraq’s oil, to compensate her for the loss of the city of Mosul — hers by the 1916 agreement but which the British had seized just after the end of the war.

The precise frontiers of these shard-like new states would be hammered out by Anglo-French teams of surveyors during the ensuing decade. Meanwhile, Syria’s brief experiment with self-government ended when a small French army expelled Feisal from Damascus that July. Its general marched into the tomb of the city’s most famous ruler soon afterwards, and there he is reputed to have declared, “Saladin, nous voici” (“Saladin, we’re back”).

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In Iraq, Wilson was already dealing with the fury following the Anglo-French decision to call time on Syria’s independence. Following encouragement from the nationalists in Syria, that June a revolt broke out, which it took the British 90,000 troops to quell. In doing so they killed over 8,000 Arab insurgents.

As the new secretary of state for the colonies, Winston Churchill became responsible for the country at the start of 1921. When at the same time it emerged that the Arabic translation of the 1915 promise to Hussein lacked any of the disingenuous subtlety of the English original, Churchill’s answer was to put the newly jobless Feisal on the throne in Baghdad. In doing so, however, he had ignored French warnings, and when days later, Arab extremists tried to murder France’s top official in Syria, the French felt they had been vindicated. Anglo-French relations entered a deep-freeze.

The Arab backlash to colonial rule was gathering strength. The Iraq uprising had lasted just six months, but in 1925 a revolt in Syria broke out which went on for three years. The French accused the British of assisting the rebels. While there is no evidence of direct support, it is certainly true that the British did next to nothing to prevent the rebels using territory under their control as a safe haven. They sat on their hands for a simple reason: they knew they would become even more unpopular if they handed over men whom ordinary Arabs saw as freedom fighters, to face execution by the French.

British inertia was the product of a desire to avoid making their position in Palestine any worse. The British had expected to reap Jewish gratitude for their sponsorship of Zionist ambitions, and (just like Jared Kushner today) assumed that the investment the Jews would bring to Palestine would win over the Arabs to their permanent and growing presence. Both hopes proved naïve. Amid Arab enthusiasm for the unification of Syria and Palestine, the declaration of Feisal as king of Syria in April 1920 had led to four days of rioting in Jerusalem, and over 250 deaths.

Accused by each side of favouring the other, the British zig-zagged. To dispel well-founded allegations of anti-Semitism they appointed the prominent British Zionist, Sir Herbert Samuel, as high commissioner. After further riots in Jaffa in 1921, he temporarily halted Jewish immigration.

That was a gesture, since Jewish immigration to Palestine was at that point negligible. So tough was life in the mandate that in some years there were net outflows. But this began to change when tougher immigration policies, brought in by the United States and other western countries in the 1920s, narrowed the options available to Jews trying to leave Europe.

Naturally the arrival of growing numbers of eastern European Jews by the late 1920s created tensions with the Arabs. Jewish access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem was a particular flashpoint. Today the wall forms the eastern edge of a large piazza, but in the 1920s that space was full of Muslim housing, which only a narrow alley separated from the wall. In 1928 the Muslims complained when orthodox Jews erected a screen across this passage to segregate male and female worshippers. And then the following year a protest by radical Jewish youths at the wall led to a riot which spread to the towns of Hebron and Safad. Two hundred and seventy one Jews and Arabs died; nearly 600 more people were injured. And so began a cycle of violence which has yet to end.

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From today’s perspective, however, the most relevant development of the 1920s may be the intellectual response to the humiliation that many Arabs felt after the end of the First World War.

One man who had been closely involved in Feisal’s short-lived kingdom of Syria was a thinker named Rashid Rida, a Sunni Muslim now regarded as one of the founders of the Salafi movement, which now provides the intellectual ballast for violent jihad.

Rida in fact flirted with more liberal ideas while he was in Syria. But following the removal of Feisal, he returned to Egypt where he reverted to the Wahhabism that had shaped his earlier thinking. There, his views would strongly influence an Egyptian named Hassan al-Banna, who came to believe that the unbroken British occupation of Egypt since 1882 and his country’s vulnerability to foreign influence were symptoms of a deep moral decline that only a spiritual revival along Salafi lines might solve. That was the purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood, which al-Banna founded in 1928.

In a world in which sectarianism has driven Sunni and Shia Muslims apart, the influence that such thinking has had in turn on revolutionary Iran’s ayatollahs was huge, and it is they who have now replaced the British as the power behind the throne in Iraq.

Gharbzadeghi — the idea that the west’s influence is toxic – echoed Rida’s thinking. And Khomeini’s manifesto, Islamic Government, borrowed deeply from the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brother hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966. A century has passed, but the legacy of the 1920s lives on.

That lack of amusement has extended to the man’s many admirers over the past weeks, as the Roman Catholic Church rejected the author for the canonisation process partly due to his alleged anti-Semitism. Bishop Peter Doyle, of Northampton, added that there was a lack of a “local cult” and “pattern of personal spirituality”, around the man, but it’s certainly been his writings on the Jews that have caused the greatest resistance.

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The Church's disturbing rush to judgment

By Catherine Pepinster

Cult or otherwise, there are Chesterton societies and magazines all over the world, and since the 1970s in particular he has been regarded as one of the great Catholic apologists – a man who managed to communicate often tangled theological beliefs with clean and clear popular appeal. American conservative Catholic thinkers are especially dedicated to this English-language writer, seen as one of their own, and their influence in the Vatican under Pope John Paul II helped to further the cause.

It must all seem somewhat esoteric, even obscure, to most observers. Chesterton was who he was and will remain so, hagiographical acknowledgement or otherwise. Yet saint-making still matters, whatever the cynics may say, and to have accepted Chesterton as a saint would have been profoundly controversial. This would have been the Roman Catholic Church placing its highest seal of approval on a man who many believe disliked Jews, at a time when even the most optimistic commentator would agree that the ghoul of anti-Semitism has found new life.

Controversy wouldn’t be new, of course; the entire business of saint-making has always been touchy and messy. The process isn’t supposed to begin until a hiatus of five years after someone’s death and then there has to be evidence of “heroic virtues”, proven miracles, and so on.

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By Giles Fraser

The Roman Catholic Church’s official teaching is that it doesn’t make saints, it merely recognises them, but that’s a little disingenuous. Holy lobbying has become a big business, and one drenched in church politics, which is why different groups back conservative and progressive figures for the process. Whatever the Church may claim, there is a pronounced political and ideological division both in clerical and lay circles.

For example, those who worked to promote the cause of Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the traditionalist Catholic group Opus Dei, came from the opposite side of church politics to those behind the campaign for Óscar Romero, the bishop in El Salvador murdered by a fascist gang for his support of the poor and opposition to the government. But both groups have to be accommodated in a game of ecclesiastical balance.

It’s also why Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II were rushed to the front of the queue – with insufficient consideration of the former’s links to repugnant despots, and the latter’s – whatever his undoubted strengths – alarmingly flaccid response to sexual abuse within the clergy.

Then there are the legions of saints with dubious records, such as local hero Thomas More. He was a martyr for the cause, he was brilliant, but he also personally ordered and supervised the gruesome torture of those who questioned Catholic beliefs. That somewhat inconsistent element to his moral character was conveniently ignored, partly because when he was canonized in 1935, the Papacy was eager to emphasize its status and honour those who agreed with it, and because England was in dire need of some new compatriots confirmed to be in heaven.

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By Douglas Murray

Chesterton is equally problematic, if less tangibly so, and the reason why his treatment has upset many of his devotees is not, for the most part, because they defend anti-Semitism, but because they deny the author of the Father Brown stories, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and volumes of compelling journalism was an anti-Semite in the first place.

Indeed his popularity among Catholic thinkers, and secular conservatives, has grown rather than diminished since his death in 1936, due to his undoubted wit as a writer, and his genuine cleverness and ability to charge through clutter and hypocrisy, like some grand knight of paradox and traditional values. His observations still seem highly relevant: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried” he wrote in ‘The Unfinished Temple’,  in (What’s Wrong with the World, Collected Works, 1910) “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it” (The Everlasting Man, 1925) and “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” (New York Magazine, 1923)

Chesterton’s gift, his charisma if you like, was the ability to be a middleman of intellectual ideas and popular curiosity. He could explain philosophy to the masses, and mass to the educated atheist, could write weekly and sometimes daily newspaper columns that roared with cleverness, and then produce a biography of St. Francis or Charles Dickens that impressed life-long devotees. When he published his life of Thomas Aquinas, the world-renowned Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson was distraught. “For many years I have studied St. Thomas and written on him and now a journalist writes a better book about him than I have!”

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By Christopher Rhodes

Yet within Chesterton, within the style and the brilliance and the originality, there was something darker. Richard Ingrams, an admirer, put it well when he wrote that he, “shut his eyes to a great deal of the unpleasantness and cruelty in the world, including his own circle.” He was likely referring to his brother Cecil, and to the author and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, who undoubtedly had a major influence on the much gentler and kinder Gilbert Keith.

Cecil Chesterton was a journalist and editor of limited talent, but was revered by his younger sibling. Cecil was obsessed with what he saw as the negative Jewish influence in media and finance; led a vitriolic campaign against the handful of Jewish figures who were involved in the 1912 Marconi Scandal – an early form of insider trading, mostly involving non-Jews – and, with the far more talented Belloc, developed a virtual ideology based on the belief that Jews were alien to British society and a direct threat to its future.

Cecil died at the end of the First World War, through illness rather than combat, and shortly afterwards Chesterton wrote an open letter to the Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs, the first Jewish Lord Chief Justice of England), as the politician was about to travel to Versailles as part of the British delegation to the peace conference. It’s drenched in anti-Semitism, with references to “the Jewish international”, “alien psychology”, and “Daniel, son of Isaac, Go in peace, but go.”

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By Tom Chivers

But there is much more than letters written in grief, perhaps under the influence of friends. Chesterton may have been led further along a dark path by those around him, but his mingling of misplaced medievalism, English insularity, and instinctive distrust of what he always offensively assumed to be Jewish characteristics, led to his own brand of error and cruelty. Many, though far from all, of his contemporaries may have had prejudices about Jews, and sometimes expressed them, but it was Chesterton’s frequent comments, his attacks and then defence of his position or attempted justification, that singles him out.

In his book A Short History of England, for example, Chesterton praised the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I as the actions of a “tender father of his people”; in his journalism he condemned the British press for opposing the French military and establishment’s anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair; and even called for Jews to be forced to wear a form of public identification.

Then there were the clawing vulgarities. In On Lying in Bed and Other Essays: “I am fond of Jews/Jews are fond of money/Never mind of whose. I am fond of Jews/Oh, but when they lose/Damn in all, it’s funny.” And this from The Flying Inn: “Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck/And his nose it had a hook/And his attitudes were anything but Aryan/ So I gave him all the pork that I had, upon a fork/Because I am myself a Vegetarian.”

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Is Chris Williamson an antisemite?

By Tanya Gold

His defenders argue that he was a Zionist, but that’s far too facile an analysis. While many at the time who supported the creation of a Jewish state did so because they thought it would lead to Jewish security and dignity, Chesterton was more concerned with what he was convinced was the foreign, un-English nature of the Jewish people. In other words: find them somewhere else to live. This was a natural – an inevitable – consequence of his obsession with what he referred to as “the Jewish question”, and incessant references to “plutocrats” and “financiers” – a vocabulary that would soon become part of the litany of genocide.

The other common defence is that he – and Hilaire Belloc for that matter – were vehemently anti-Nazi. That’s certainly true, though they also cheered for fascism elsewhere, especially when it was wrapped in Catholic nationalism. Chesterton wrote of thousands of Jews being “rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes” by the Nazis, who “beat and bully poor Jews in concentration camps”, and how, “I do indeed despise the Hitlerites.”

He died before the Holocaust was fully implemented, and with his authentic opposition to eugenics and his hatred of what he saw as “Prussian barbarity”, he would likely have been disgusted. But opposition to mass murder and ethnic cleansing doesn’t forgive someone of anti-Semitism, and those who help to create a climate where racist atrocity is permissible share a certain responsibility for its reality.

While the claim might groan in its banality, he certainly did have Jewish friends who he sincerely liked, he was appalled by the idea of Jews being harmed because of who they were, but he also played a game of grimy hide-and-seek around the issue, popping up to provoke and condemn, and then claiming innocence or, as his partisans would claim today, purity of intent. That just won’t do.

I once thought, perhaps with far more sanguinity than was deserved, that when weighed in the balance, GK Chesterton may not have been completely on the wrong side of history – that at least he wasn’t part of the problem, and that when the testing-time came he saw the threat before others were aware. No longer. He may not have been the worst, he may well have changed his mind if he had lived longer, but the damage was done.

As Jew-hatred gains a shockingly new prominence, its proponents look to anybody who offers an intellectual underpinning to their venom. Chesterton, tragically, is one of theirs. No saint he.