Saturday, May 16, 2026
From Ian:
Why does Jerusalem belongs to the Jews? Because history says so
Why does Jerusalem belongs to the Jews? Because history says so
Facts do not cease to exist simply because anti-Israel ideologues seek to erase them.The Covenant and the Wooden Box
Nor should anyone forget what happened when Jerusalem was divided between 1948 and 1967 under Jordanian rule.
During those 19 years, Jews were completely barred from accessing the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, despite explicit guarantees in the 1949 armistice agreements. Fifty-eight synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed or damaged by the Jordanians. Ancient gravestones on the Mount of Olives, some dating back centuries, were desecrated and used for roads, military camps, and even latrines.
The city’s reunification in 1967 ended 19 years of Jordanian control of eastern Jerusalem, with the Hashemite Kingdom’s annexation having been recognized by only two countries.
Yet, somehow it is Israel that now stands accused of restricting religious freedom.
The truth is precisely the opposite.
Since reunifying Jerusalem in June 1967, after Jordan joined the Six Day War, Israel has safeguarded access to holy sites for all faiths. Muslims pray freely at al-Aqsa Mosque. Christians maintain churches and institutions throughout the city. Jerusalem, under Israeli sovereignty, has become one of the few cities in the Middle East where Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have genuine religious freedom protected by law.
The city itself reflects that vitality.
Today, Jerusalem is home to nearly one million residents, making it Israel’s largest city. It boasts well over 1,000 synagogues, hundreds of churches, and dozens of mosques. It is the seat of Israel’s parliament, Supreme Court, and national institutions. It is a living, thriving capital, not a relic of ancient memory.
And that is ultimately what Jerusalem Day represents.
It is not merely the anniversary of a military victory. It is the celebration of an ancient people returning to its historic heart after centuries of dispersion and longing.
When Israeli paratroopers reached the Western Wall in June 1967, commander Motta Gur famously declared, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” At that moment, Jewish history came full circle.
Jerusalem was not conquered in 1967. It was liberated and reclaimed.
At a time when lies about Israel spread with alarming speed across campuses, social media, and international forums, it is more important than ever to stand unapologetically for truth.
Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people because history says so. Archaeology says so. Demography says so. And 3,000 years of uninterrupted Jewish memory say so.
The facts are there for anyone willing to see them.
Jews in Britain are not a peripheral concern of that threat. They are a primary one. Jewish faith schools in north London closed their doors in October 2023, citing security fears. The phrase “Globalize the intifada” is chanted openly at marches through the capital, month after month, without prosecution. After two men were killed at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester in October 2025, the prime minister told the House of Commons that anti-Semitism was not a new hatred, that Jewish buildings, Jewish lives, and Jewish children required extra protection, and that he would do everything in his power to guarantee their safety. Then he did next to nothing. The IRGC remained unproscribed. The marches continued. The files stayed closed.Nicole Lampert: Why doesn’t Starmer make a video warning about far-Left hate marches?
On April 29, 2026, as Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, sat in Madrid discussing Gaza with the Spanish prime minister, a man ran along Golders Green Road armed with a knife, hunting Jews. He stabbed two—a man of 34 and a man of 76. He had been referred to Prevent—the government’s counterterrorism program designed to identify and steer individuals away from radicalization—in 2020. His file was closed the same year. The prime minister visited Golders Green the day following the attack and was met with chants of “Keir Starmer Jew Harmer.”
“Anti-Semitism is an old, old hatred,” Starmer said. “History shows that if you turn away, it grows back.” He was right. Perhaps this time the words will be followed by action, but the word “perhaps” is doing a lot of work here. The record does not encourage hope. And the record matters because of what it confirms: This was not managed ignorance—the filed report, the averted gaze, the truth quietly administered out of existence. It showed something much worse: explicit knowledge, explicit condemnation, explicit promise—and then nothing.
This is the strategic cost—the final destination of the managerial habit that brought about the auction listing for Nelson Street and the conduct of council offices of Rotherham, that wound through the corridors of Broadcasting House, arrived at the gilded antechambers of Buckingham Palace, and came, finally, to the streets of Golders Green. Writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the decline of the nation-state and the loss of political self-knowledge were not merely cultural tragedies but the preconditions for totalitarian penetration. A society that cannot know itself cannot defend even its most vulnerable children. Britain has not produced totalitarianism. But it has produced, with patient institutional thoroughness, exactly the condition Arendt identified as its precursor: a governing class that has lost the will to know what it is, what it values, and what it owes to those in its care. The Chinese Communist Party understands this with the clarity of a predator that has studied its prey. It targets the gap between what British institutions know and what they have decided, for reasons of procedural calm, to pretend they do not know. That gap—patiently widened over decades by a managerial class that chose comfort over conscience—is now a strategic aperture through which a hostile foreign power has walked into the heart of the British establishment.
Americans reading this would be wise to resist the comfortable assumption that what is described here is a foreign pathology—a peculiarly British failure of nerve from which the New World is naturally immune. It is not. The pipeline that rewards ideological conformity with credentials and institutional authority operates on both sides of the Atlantic. The universities that incubated the assumptions that made Rotherham possible sent their graduates into British newsrooms, council offices, and police commands; their American counterparts sent theirs into the FBI, the Department of Justice, the prestige press, and the administrative apparatus of every major American city. The same spirit of iconoclasm that came for Churchill’s statue came for Washington’s and Jefferson’s, too—pulled down by crowds in Portland in 2020 while city administrators placed them in storage and commissioned reports on whether they deserved to stand at all. A committee reporting to the mayor of Washington, D.C., formally recommended removing or relocating the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.
The same willingness to brand truth-tellers as extremists—which destroyed Sarah Champion’s career for stating the obvious about Rotherham—was visible in the treatment of every American official, journalist, or academic who raised questions that the managerial consensus had decided were impermissible. Britain did not fail because it was uniquely weak. It failed because its governing class lost the will to know itself—and the consequences of that loss, once set in motion, proved impossible to contain. America’s governing class is further along that same road than it yet knows. The wooden box, in America, has not yet been built. But the administrators who would build it, if asked, are already at their post. The question is not whether it is being constructed. It is whether enough people—in Britain and in America—will recognize the lumber being assembled before all the nails go in.
In the summer of 1940, when every counsel of prudence pointed toward negotiation, one man looked into the abyss and refused to blink. He had spent decades preparing for that moment, honoring a covenant older than the war itself: declaring his support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, fighting the White Paper that would have closed Palestine’s gates to Jews fleeing extermination, prosecuting at the cost of everything the war against the regime whose explicit purpose was to end Jewish life in Europe. He understood that the Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews—that England’s fate and the fate of the Jewish people were bound together in a moral order that transcended any government or generation. That conviction did not make him perfect. It made him, at the moment of maximum cost, faithful. He turned down a dukedom.
Those who have inherited stewardship of the covenant—the politicians, police, and civil servants—are failing it right now, if not betraying it outright, in the streets of Golders Green, in the halls of Parliament, in the lecture halls and council offices and police commands where the custodians made the same choice—managed truth over honest reckoning. What remains of that moral order, in the hands of those now charged with keeping it, is not easy to say. It endures—but not in the institutions, which have failed it, or in the bronze, which has been spray-painted, or for much longer in the synagogue, which has all but been sold. It endures in Leon Silver, who could not bear to let go of a building half a mile from where he was born.
It endures in Henry Glanz, who blew the shofar every year for the children who never reached England. It endures in Sarah Champion, who said the plain thing and paid the price for it. “The outside is very plain,” Leon Silver said of the building constructed from its first brick to be a synagogue but that’s now being stolen away to become a symbol of Islam’s triumph over Britain’s Jewry. “But people say the inside is beautiful, which I think so too.” The moral truth Silver might not even have known he was echoing with his words—“the inside is beautiful”—endures in everyone who has named what the governing class could not bring itself to name and everyone who refused to look away from what the governing class chose not to see. The moral truth endures—because covenants of that depth do not dissolve when institutions fail them. They wait.
On Friday night, Sir Keir Starmer took time out of being knifed by his Labour colleagues to warn of an impending threat in a statement posted on social media. He couldn’t have looked more serious; the sinews of his neck were taut. He used his hands in his best headmaster mode to drum home his points.
Soft music, with just a hint of menace, played in the background.
There was going to be a march in London, he warned, organised by people who were “peddling hatred and division, plain and simple”. The march, he added, was “a reminder of what we are up against in a battle of our values”.
Writing on X Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, also emphasised the danger of this march, warning, “if protest turns violent, we will act swiftly, with extra court capacity in place.”
Hallelujah! Could it really be that our political leaders had, after the stabbings in Golders Green, the arson on synagogues and Jewish ambulances, the deadly attack in Manchester, finally woken up to the horror of the “pro-Palestine” hate marches and the anti-Semitic, violent, pro-terrorist, genocidal rhetoric they endorsed?
Of course not.
They were talking about the march with the Union flags, not the ones with flags of Palestine and the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you want to know just how upside down our world has become, we need to look at today: which march was deemed hateful and which one they tried to ignore.
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