Adam Smith seems to have caved to anti-Israel pressure - and calls it principled

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) explained his vote this week to support Massie Amendment #8, cutting $3.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. His reasoning is where it gets interesting.

He opens as a genuine supporter of Israel — not the coded kind. "I am a supporter of Israel, and I recognize they are under profound existential threat. We should not forget October 7th or the reality that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to eliminate Israel." He names, without euphemism, what's been done to him for holding that view: his home vandalized, a fire set in his driveway, his neighbors' nights disrupted by demonstrations, his town halls shut down, a staff member physically assaulted. He calls this "a dangerous form of corrosive politics that seeks to intimidate those who disagree." 

Then, in the next paragraph, he votes to cut the aid anyway, framing it as "my effort" to "get the attention of the Netanyahu government to force them to change their actions" — as though the vote were his own independent judgment rather a response to the arson and harassment.

Let's pretend that the intimidation campaign did not sway him and take him at his word. Smith's theory is that cutting aid will push Netanyahu to change course — specifically, it seems, to rein in or remove Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the ministers Smith names that "appalled" him. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir aren't obstacles standing between Netanyahu and a policy he'd otherwise prefer. They're the coalition. Netanyahu's government exists because their parties are in it; without them, there's no majority and no government. Weakening Netanyahu doesn't give him more room to break with his coalition partners, it gives him less — a prime minister facing external pressure can survive it by holding his coalition together even tighter, and cannot survive it by shedding the votes that keep him in office. A vote meant to pressure Netanyahu into abandoning Smotrich and Ben Gvir is a vote for the one outcome that vote cannot produce.

If his stated reasons make no sense in real life, it suggests the theory was constructed after the vote, not before it. Smith doesn't explain, because there's no available explanation, how cutting American military assistance forces a change in Israeli cabinet composition rather than simply making the current one more entrenched. What he does offer, clearly and in his own words, is an account of two years of frustration and, immediately preceding the vote, a documented campaign of vandalism, arson, and assault against him and his staff. The more parsimonious reading of the statement isn't that Smith found a clever lever. It's that he capitulated to the pressure and then wrote himself a policy rationale to stand in front of it.

That rationale leans on a distinction that's become the standard exit for Democrats in this position — "I don't oppose Israel, I oppose Netanyahu" — and a piece published the same day supplies the test for when that distinction is actually honest. Daniel Pomerantz's framing is simple and hard to argue with: "Imagine saying, 'I don't oppose America, I just oppose FDR for fighting Hitler.'" Fighting Hitler wasn't an idiosyncratic FDR preference other Americans might reasonably have opposed on the merits — it was the thing nearly the entire country wanted, which means opposing it wasn't opposition to one president's judgment call, it was opposition to America's actual position. The test he proposes is whether the specific policy under attack is something genuinely contested inside Israeli politics, in which case criticizing "Netanyahu" over it is honest, or whether it's something with real Israeli consensus behind it, in which case the Netanyahu framing is doing cover work for a broader objection.

Military assistance used against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran fails that test cleanly. It isn't a Netanyahu idiosyncrasy Israelis are internally split over judicial reform, Haredi enlistment, or his personal culpability for October 7th's failures. It's close to the one thing nearly all Israelis, across the political map, actually agree on: that the threats named in Smith's own opening sentence are real and have to be met. A vote to cut the funding used to meet them isn't a vote against Netanyahu's discretionary choices. By Smith's own stated premise about the threat, it's a vote against the position Israel holds as something close to a whole country, dressed in language aimed at one man because that's the version of the vote that's easier to defend to constituents and easier, perhaps, to live with.

None of this requires assuming Smith is lying about his frustrations with the current Israeli government, which read as genuine and are shared by plenty of Israelis themselves. It requires only noticing that the vote he took doesn't reach the target he named, reaches instead a policy nearly the whole country supports, and followed months of arson and assault rather than preceding them. A statement that opens by naming intimidation as dangerous and corrosive, and closes by doing what the intimidation demanded, isn't an account of independent judgment. It's a record of what the pressure achieved, written in the voice of someone who would rather not describe it that way.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/16 Links Pt2: Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return; How Amnesty International lost its way; Jew hatred is back in the pulpit at the Church of England

From Ian:

Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return,' Jewish leader tells 'Post' after emigrating

Australian antisemitism “has passed the point of no return,” former president of the Australian Jewish Association, Dr. David Adler, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Adler recently relocated to Israel, citing the surge in antisemitism in Australia.

While the family only arrived on July 9, Adler told the Post that aliyah has been in “preparation for a long, long period of time.”

“We’ve seen a general deterioration in Australia for a long time,” he told the Post. “Australia has essentially outsourced its manufacturing. Its defense capacity is down. National identity is being lost. Education standards are down. There is a crazy socialist activism, left-wing activism. Those things have been building gradually. But no doubt October 7 unleashed a level of antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism that I didn’t think could occur in Australia.”

“On October 8, there were some leaders of the Muslim community and some Muslim groups in Australia celebrating on the streets. On October 9, we had the riots in front of the Opera House.”

What Adler found the most shocking was that the authorities “failed to act” after these incidents.

Australia passed point of no return, 'all downhill'
“There was not a single arrest from the riots at the Opera House, despite a number of laws being broken. And that area, I know from security experts, is covered by high-definition CCTV. However, the authorities chose not to act and instead warned the Jewish community not to go there,” he explained.

Since then, Adler said it’s “been all downhill.” He said he has lost track of the number of threats made against him, including death threats.

This led him to arrive at the viewpoint that the trends in Australia “have passed the point of no return.”

“The tipping point has been reached and passed. And even though there’s a Royal Commission running at the moment, and it’s doing a good job in exposing some of the accounts and evidence of antisemitism, I do not have confidence in efficient action being taken to deal with it.”

Adler told the Post that anti-Jewish violence is predominantly coming from Islamic extremism, but that “Australia has taken nowhere near enough action” to combat this. “It should do things like expel the hate preachers, deport the hate preachers, close down mosques that are teaching extremist and radical views, and in fact has done some things in the opposite.”

“The whole antisemitic, anti-Israel extremism is on a level that no one forecast.”

Nicole Lampert: How Amnesty International lost its way

There was a lot of internal discussion about how to retain and attract progressive donors, many of whom were critics of Israel, Malekar adds. “I clearly recall that sections in Western Europe and the USA saying we were losing ground and membership because we were behind others in progressive circles who were criticising Israel.”

“Until then, Amnesty had held to its core values of judging things on international and humanitarian laws, but slowly I saw how the line was being blurred as the work became more politicised and standards went down.

“The organisation became more and more led by political ideologies such as theories around colonialism and seeing everything through the lens of the victim vs the oppressor. Younger people were joining from universities who were imbued with these political theories in which Israel is only ever viewed as an oppressor.”

In 2021, Amnesty became a champion of the politically charged Black Lives Matter campaign, a source of further controversy. Tim Gudgion, a former Amnesty member, says he resigned his membership at this point, regarding its involvement as “very, inappropriately, political”.

Then, the following year, an Amnesty report claimed there was apartheid across Israel and the occupied territories. It caused huge anger in Israel.

“Even if you agree the occupied territories are using a form of apartheid, none of us would accept that it is the same in the state of Israel,” says Malekar, who is one of a number of whistleblowers featured in a report by the campaign group, EiGHT, on alleged double standards by human rights organisations in their approach to Jews and Israel. “And we tried to argue that in making these two territories one land, they were actually joining hands with the most Right-wing Israeli politicians who want to annex the occupied territories.”

The head office in London didn’t appreciate the Israeli branch’s pushback, she says. “These are people who are very committed, and it surprises them if someone would dare to question them.”

And what happens when the perceived oppressor becomes the victim, as it did on October 7, 2023?

Malekar recalls an exchange of emails between head office and other department heads as she hid in bomb shelters not knowing how bad the war was going to get. “One of the things I remember from that horrible night was communicating with London as they considered how to phrase their condemnation. They could never just say, ‘this is wrong’. Not even for one minute. There were discussions over how to frame the narrative.”

Must Durham’s miners be forced to celebrate Palestine?

The Durham Miners’ Gala – ‘the big meeting’, as locals still call it – took place last week. Once, every coalfield had its gala. Now Durham’s is the last great survivor. But survival is not the same as relevance.

In recent years, the question hanging over the ‘big meeting’ has become harder to avoid: what is it for, and who does it now belong to? That question became sharper still after County Durham, long impregnable Labour country, turned into something much closer to a Reform UK stronghold in last year’s local elections.

The gala itself remains organised around a politics that belongs to another century. It is caught between three worlds: the culture of the old industrial working class, the socialist politics of the 20th century and the activist liberalism of the contemporary left. Add to that the visible support for Reform among the families and descendants of Durham colliers, and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The big meeting can no longer pretend that these tensions are merely background noise.

Over the past few years, the Gala has become less a living expression of working-class politics and more a stage for the narrow concerns of the Corbynista activist class. A clip from this year’s event made the point brutally. The ‘Palestine Bloc’ – around 30 (mostly white) activists carrying Palestine flags and wearing the keffiyeh uniform of the modern protester – moved through Durham behind a few dancers in traditional Palestinian dress. They shouted ‘free, free Palestine’. Some in the crowd clapped. Others booed. John Cleese posted a video of it on X, with the observation that it would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch. He’s right.

This wasn’t the first time the gala has embarrassed itself. The flashpoint last year was the invitation to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. It seems that every year the gala is dragged into another controversy because the activist left insists on making it speak the language of identity politics and middle-class luxury beliefs. As a result, the working class has been turned into a costume, a backdrop, a set of banners and brass bands to lend moral weight to causes that often have little to do with the people whose history is being borrowed.

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07/16 Links Pt1: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?; The PA's Army Threatens Millions of Israelis; Karim Khan’s sex abuse accuser goes public; Vance’s Bridge to Nowhere

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: The warning signs for Israel in Washington can no longer be ignored

Vance, who is seen as a prime contender to be the Republican nominee for president in 2028, also waded into the conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender. Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” he said, reiterating a claim that has been refuted and discredited.

The embrace by such a senior Trump administration official of conspiracy theories about Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence, which have proliferated in the years since his death and often have veered into antisemitism, is part and parcel with Vance’s increasing alignment with the far Right base populated by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens.

Taken separately, the vote in the House of Representatives and the Vance interview are worrisome signs that the “special” relationship between Israel and the US is on life support at best. Taken together, they should be an alarming wake-up call that the days of the “kishkes” identification test with Israel – as exemplified diversely by the late Lindsey Graham and former president Joe Biden – are long gone.

Although it’s easy to place the blame elsewhere – and there are a plethora of strong arguments to be made in retort to both Democratic and Republican detractors of Israel – we must also look inward and see what can be done to reverse the tide of sentiment against us.

We can surely criticize the headline-provoking gambit by US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) last week, who chose to only hear and see the Palestinian side of life in the West Bank. But we can also acknowledge that vigilante Jewish groups are patrolling the area in a heavy-handed and lawless fashion that creates potentially lethal friction points and does irreparable damage to Israel’s image.

We can criticize Rahm Emmanuel for haughtily coming to Israel and warning us about what needs to be done to repair the US-Israel relationship, while acknowledging that some of his points were spot-on and unfolding before our very eyes in the House vote and Vance interview.

Jerusalem can no longer ignore or downplay the growing trends in the US of having to endorse the “Israel is genocide” trope to become a candidate, or of blaming Israel for getting the US entangled in Iran. The unsettling news this week demonstrates that with stark clarity.

Lee Smith: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?

Trump is angry the Iranians violated Vance’s MOU to open the strait. But virtually no one believed it had any chance of success, except Vance and the influencers he courted to write articles and social media posts that he could take to his boss to show that the base could be fooled into thinking it wasn’t like Obama’s deal.

And those who said the deal was as bad as Obama’s were excoriated by the brash youths who populate Vance’s comms apparatus. “Cool, Ted,” White House validator Alex Bruesewitz tweeted at MOU skeptic Sen. Ted Cruz. “No one asked you, bro. Stop trying to undermine the President and his administration.” Bruesewitz gave more of the same to another Trump ally, journalist Mark Levin: “Sit back and stop trying to undermine the President and his team.”

Vance saved for himself the privilege of screaming at Israeli officials who doubted the prospects of his deal’s success. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said last month, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance’s name is now attached to a loss because Trump’s return to war is proof that everyone Vance and his communications team hectored was right and Vance was wrong. Accordingly, Vance’s associates are messaging that the vice president never really had that much invested in the MOU’s success. As one ally of the vice president recently told reporters, “All that really mattered was him being seen as attempting to bring the war to an end.”

In the new version, Vance’s talks with the Iranians, the rapport he boasted of building with Iranian Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, were more like diplomacy theater: If the MOU didn’t work out and made the White House look foolish when the Iranians inevitably violated it, that was still pretty good material for JD’s 2028 campaign. At least he proved to isolationists—i.e., pro-Iran think tankers and journalists whispering in Vance’s ear and pro-Russia podcasters whining into their microphones—his opposition to the neocons’ latest war for Israel.

The issue is that whatever version of Vance’s efforts is correct—he believed he could secure a deal or he didn’t have much confidence he could secure a deal—the result is the same. The Trump team spent down prestige by negotiating with a side determined to humiliate it, while it stiff-armed domestic allies on whom it depends for political support. And that support could come in especially handy now as the administration returns to a war that is likely to become increasingly unpopular as long as the president fails to devise a strategy to win it.

Perhaps even more consequentially, the vice president, ever keen to highlight how U.S. interests diverge from Israel’s, beat up on a partner it is likely to need if it decides to win the war. Otherwise, the administration is likely on course for another long conflict in the Middle East, what Trump refers to as a “forever war.”

A journalist asked Vance in the press briefing last week if that wasn’t essentially the condition the administration had created with its phony cease-fires, fruitless negotiations, and tit-for-tat exchanges of fire. “So far the Iranians are not showing any signs of wanting to give what you want them to give,” said the journalist. “The plan right now is basically when they misbehave to keep bombing.” Vance disagreed. “It’s not a forever war if the Iranians violate the terms of the agreement and shoot commercial shipping, and we respond to it,” said the vice president, seemingly without understanding he was just rephrasing the question.

But that’s precisely the stuff America’s forever wars have been made of: the continuation of hostilities without defining victory and making decisive moves to obtain it. The reason America doesn’t win wars is not that it wants to turn tribal confederations into liberal democracies or teach surrealism to veiled schoolgirls or sow corruption abroad and reap the profits. Those are all effects of the fundamental problem, which is deciding, for whatever reasons, not to win.

For Trump, the choices are stark: either preside over another American war without resolve and go down in history as the American president who forfeited America’s postwar birthright and lost the strait, or decide to win.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Iran-Backed 'Decisive Campaign' To Destroy Israel and the West

The documents, recovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Gaza Strip and published by the Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, reveal that Hamas had meticulously planned the October 7 massacre more than a year before it was carried out. They also expose Sinwar's unwavering commitment to Hamas's founding objective: the destruction of Israel through mass murder and conquest.

The operational planning was astonishingly detailed. Sinwar envisioned breaching the border simultaneously at 25 locations using approximately 2,500 terrorists in the opening assault.

Sinwar estimated that approximately 10,000 "well-trained fighters" would eventually be required to carry out the operation successfully. Each Israeli community was assigned specific assault teams. Military bases were designated for destruction. Strategic road junctions were mapped and allocated to specialized units. Every aspect of the operation had been carefully calculated.

These were not defensive plans. They were invasion plans.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation concerns Sinwar's own understanding of the consequences of his actions. He fully anticipated that Israel would respond with overwhelming force. "The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal," he wrote. "It may even use a nuclear bomb."

Despite this extraordinary assessment, Sinwar concluded that the invasion should proceed because "this campaign is a battle of life or death."

He deliberately chose to launch the attack because advancing Hamas's ideological objective – the destruction of Israel – was more important to him than the lives of the Palestinians under his rule.

This is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that Hamas has never been a national liberation movement primarily concerned with improving the lives of Palestinians. Rather, it is an Islamist terrorist organization prepared to sacrifice its own people in the pursuit of its ideological war against Israel.

The lesson from these documents is that Hamas remains committed to the same objectives that guided its founders nearly four decades ago: eliminating Israel through violence and replacing it with an Islamist state.

Hamas is but one component of a broader Iranian strategy aimed at undermining American influence and destabilizing pro-Western Arab governments throughout the region, apparently to drive US forces out of the region, thereby leaving the run of the Middle East, unimpeded, to the ruthless Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now ruling Iran.

The October 7 massacre was not an aberration. It was the realization of a strategy, reportedly conceived seven years in advance. Preventing another October 7 requires more than temporary ceasefires or diplomatic initiatives. It requires ensuring that Hamas can never again function as either a military force or a political authority.

Anything less invites more catastrophes, as we have seen for 47 years, from Iran's attacks on Israel, Arab neighbors, brutalized citizens, the United States, and the West.

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Haredim Petition Moses For Exemption From War Against Amalek (PreOccupied Territory)

 Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

Rephidim, June 16 - Citing a busy schedule of study, representatives of the ultra-orthodox community formally petitioned the Israelite leader today to leave them out of the fight against the nation's eternal nemesis who attacked the nation's stragglers from behind.

The petition argues that full-time yeshiva students engaged in spiritual protection of the Jewish people should not be required to take up arms, even against an enemy that God commands the people to blot out. “Moses, we respect the divine directive,” read the document, signed by leading rabbis and community askanim who made the journey all the way from future exile. “But with all due respect, our boys are already fighting a higher battle — the battle against the yetzer hara. Drafting them would constitute bittul Torah on a national — or, in this case, desert-wide — scale.”

"It's like the future Holocaust in Europe," explained a Haredi petitioner. "The post-Holocaust yeshiva world will look back at the pre-Holocaust yeshiva world and consider it an ideal toward which to strive - and look how much protection all that Torah study provided. QED."

“King Saul will get in trouble for sparing Agag, but that's before there's such a thing as daas Torah,” explained one rabbinic adviser, pausing to adjust his black fedora against the desert sun. “Today we have committees. Moses will understand. Oh, and by the way, we want extra quail stipends for yeshiva students with six or more children.”

A spokesman for the Agudas Yisrael Party acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue. "Our first draft demanded exemption for yeshiva students from military service across all existential wars," disclosed Rabbi Gershon Freerider. "That would have been an explicit departure from the rule that, while a man who has taken a wife is exempt from military service for a year, so he may rejoice with her, that doesn't include defensive wars, when even the bride herself must contribute. So we toned it down - but that doesn't mean we won't also try later on to exempt yeshiva students from those emergency military drafts, as well - especially since in our world, the women are already used to shouldering the economic burdens of the household."

A separate committee of Haredi delegates has convened to discuss alternatives to the agrarian society the Torah has ordained for Israel once conquest and division of the land has been accomplished, because how can yeshiva students be expected to farm when there's Torah to study? Also, women must remain completely covered even in the hottest weather as they do the farming in their kollel husbands' place.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The "doykeit" that resulted in mass murders in 1946 has become fashionable today

In 1946, an eight-year-old boy named Henryk Błaszczyk missed his old playmates enough that he hitched a ride 25km outside his Kielce home to see them, spent a few days picking cherries and visiting relatives, and came home. Afraid of his parents' anger, he invented a story about being kidnapped by Jews and locked in a basement. His father marched him to the militia station; the boy pointed to 7 Planty Street, where roughly 150 Holocaust survivors lived — many of them, presumably, meaning to stay in Poland for good. Within hours a mob of soldiers, policemen, and civilians had dragged those survivors into the street and beaten, stoned, and shot at least forty of them to death. 

The building had no basement. 

Keith Lowe tells the story in Engelsberg Ideas. He explains that Kielce was not an isolated spasm. Rzeszów had its own blood-libel riot weeks earlier. Kraków had a pogrom in August 1945 over a rumor that a Christian child had been murdered in a synagogue. Hungary saw anti-Jewish violence in a dozen towns in 1946, driven by a rumor that returning Jews were killing children to make sausages. 

The Jews who returned to Kielce and Kraków and the Hungarian towns were not naive. Many were death-camp survivors who had every reason to distrust their neighbors and returned anyway, because home was still home and the people who lived there were still, in theory, their countrymen. 

This is doykeit, "hereness," in its purest and most literal form: people getting off trains and walking back into the towns where their families had lived for generations, believing that shared citizenship and a shared catastrophe had finally settled the question of whether they belonged. The facts proved them wrong. Within a year, somewhere between 90,000 and 95,000 of them fled eastern Europe in three months alone, and roughly 300,000 total fled in the five years after the war. The verdict on doykeit was delivered by the people staking their lives on it, and they delivered it with their feet.

When I've criticized doykeit and the book that made it fashionable again,  Molly Crabapple's  Here Where We Live Is Our Country, I've concentrated on the simple fact that the Bund that pushed that idea disappeared because the Holocaust destroyed it, while the Zionism that the Bund and Crabapple despises provides a home for half of the world's Jews where they can live, freely, "here." 

But the best argument against doykeit comes not from the Holocaust but from what happened in the immediate aftermath, in places like Kielce and Kraków and Rzeszów where Jews had lived for generations. They chose to stay "here." Their neighbors made it clear that they were not wanted. 

A movement that wants Jews to abandon the one form of self-defense that has demonstrably worked has an obvious interest in reviving the one doctrine that failed, dressing it in the aesthetics of Yiddish socialism and interwar radicalism so that the failure reads as romance rather than warning. The Bund's doykeit  was not a hypothetical. It was tried, by people with every reason to want it to succeed, at the exact moment history handed it the best possible conditions for success — and it collapsed within a year. The assumption that Jews can fight alone for their rights to live wherever they want (except Israel, of course) was demonstratively proven wrong by the very Jews who literally tried it. 

The most complete real-world test of doykeit ended in a mass grave and hundreds of thousands of refugees who had wanted to stay being forced out. Its most enthusiastic revival is happening now, marketed to people who will never have to test it themselves. Jewish lives have become less important than the socialist concepts that have consistently failed to protect them. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/15 Links Pt2: The dark truth about the pro-Palestine marches; Boris Johnson: pro-Palestine marches support ‘nihilistic Islamist ideology’

From Ian:

Just the headlines today, I have a water damaged ceiling issue.

The dark truth about the pro-Palestine marches

Shai Davidai: Antisemitism Is an Ideology. We Must Fight It Like One.

British Jews moving to Israel should do so out of love, not fear

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07/15 Links Pt1: Trump warns Iran: negotiate or face energy strikes; Vance alleges Israel ‘manipulating’ American opinion on Iran war; Massie amendment to cut Israel funding fails 104-314;

From Ian:

Just the headlines today, I have a water damaged ceiling issue.

John Spencer: What Options Does the United States Have Left in Iran? Actually, Many.

Mother whose son’s body was taken to Gaza by Unrwa worker says extra £23m UK funds for agency is ‘disappointing’

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British surgeon with a history of supporting antisemitism sues NHS for using IHRA definition that proves it

Middle East Eye reports:

A British surgeon is taking the National Health Service (NHS) and the UK government to court, arguing that the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism has been used to restrict political speech and silence pro-Palestine expression.

Ranjeet Brar was suspended from his role at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust following a speech he gave on 6 April 2026 outside the US embassy in London commemorating the victims of a reported US-Israeli attack on a school in the Iranian city of Minab.

In his speech, Brar said that Israel, which he described as a “genocidal settler colonial entity”, “has no right to existence” and “needs to be wiped off the map and replaced with the word ‘Palestine’”.

Footage of the speech was later circulated online by right-wing and pro-Israel social media accounts, including GB News and Julie Hartley-Brewer.

So Brar says he is not an antisemite. OK, let's see

He ended a fundraising video for his advocacy group by holding a sign that read, "Say no to 'genocide' doctors — Ban the Jewish Medical Association."

This was not a call to boycott Israeli products, not a demand that a colleague apologize for a specific statement, but a demand to abolish a professional body of Jewish doctors, on the grounds that Jewish doctors organizing as Jewish doctors is itself the problem. Healthcare Workers Against Censorship, the group Brar co-directs, frames this as resistance to "well-financed pro-Israel lobby groups — ardent Zionists." A Jewish Medical Association source put it more simply: they've said the JMA should be banned because it's "an extremist group."

Brar's preferred framework for all of this is Marxist class analysis, and he deploys it carefully. Global power belongs to a capitalist ruling class, he says, and Israel functions as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for Anglo-American imperial interests, not the reverse. Financial institutions, media narratives, and foreign policy all flow from "monopoly capitalism," never from any ethnic or religious group. It's a coherent worldview, and for most of the interview it stays coherent.

Then the interviewer raises the idea that Jews control the world's financial and political systems, and Brar's says yes, Jews are "a considerable number of people" among the financial ruling class, though the project itself is British, American, and European. Just with a lot of Jews. 

His father Harpal Brar's pamphlet, which Ranjeet Brar has personally distributed and sold at rallies, is titled Zionism: A Racist, Antisemitic and Reactionary Tool of Imperialism, and its cover merges a Star of David with a swastika. Its fifth chapter argues that Nazi-Zionist collaboration "arose logically from shared aims."  Elsewhere it revives the Khazar theory to deny Ashkenazi Jews their history. This is Protocols-style conspiracism laundered through "reactionary tool of imperialism," and Brar has never repudiated it, before or after his own arrest over it.

In fact, the pamphlet is distributed at rallies where Ranjeet Brar is a prominent speaker. If he was against antisemitism, why does he support the distribution of his father's antisemitic pamphlet?

The pattern holds outside the pamphlet too. In an April 2026 speech outside the US Embassy, Brar called for Israel's destruction and also described financiers in the City of London as "parasites." He has separately pushed the claim that Israel harvests Palestinian organs, an update on the medieval blood libel with a state substituted for the Jewish community. Each piece, alone, has a "materialist" gloss available. Together, they trace the same arc every time: economic grievance, routed through "Zionist" or "capitalist," landing on Jews as a class of people to be organizationally excluded.

None of this makes Brar unusual on the far left, which is precisely the point. What "the socialism of fools" describes is a structural resemblance between two explanations of who runs the world, one naming a class and one naming a people, that share enough vocabulary to slide into each other when the speaker stops being careful. Brar is careful in interviews. He is considerably less careful when he's holding a banner, selling a pamphlet, or answering an unscripted question about who's actually in the room when the money gets counted. The interview performance of principled anti-racism was never the evidence that mattered; the sign was.

This is exactly why the IHRA definition is so important. It can see when people like Ranjeet Brar are Jew haters even when they insist otherwise, because sometimes the context and history explains it all better than the antisemites' attempts at spin.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/14 Links Pt2: The Road to Forty-Four Percent; Melanie Phillips: Why liberalism cannot defend Britain; The unfathomable darkness of the Church of England

From Ian:

The Road to Forty-Four Percent By Abe Greenwald

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To move beyond terrorism, he had to reframe the terrorist threat as a minor nuisance or a thing of the past. He did both. Obama insisted that ISIS was just the jihadist “jayvee team” and could be dispatched with a few drones. Never mind all the talk about radical Shiites—it was time to offer Iran our “open hand.” As for the multiple terrorist threats that Israel faced, they were best dealt with by creating a little “daylight” between the U.S. and the Jewish state.

And that was that. It was as if the War on Terror was a bad dream. And so we would spend more than a decade wiping from our minds all concern about Islamist ideology and jihad.

Toward the end of this period, Donald Trump entered politics and commandeered the national consciousness. To the extent that anyone thought about terrorism anymore, it was to point out that the real terrorist threat came from white racists in Trumpland.

By the time Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the attacks of 9/11 were multiple epochs beyond us. Those long-ago media students of Islam and terrorism were now students of Trump and Covid. And those are the ones who hadn’t been replaced by a generation that wasn’t even alive during the War on Terror.

In the West, that younger generation had been shaped by a grab-bag of leftist ideology to despise America and Israel and support the enemies of both. After October 7, all consideration of Islamic radicalism would be refracted through the prism of Israel. The millenarian bloodlust of jihadists was excised entirely and replaced with a story about genocidal Zionists.

Protests made up of mostly non-Muslim Westerners would go on to march and chant in support of Islamic terrorists. And in doing so, they would normalize Jew-hatred and justify jihad and make the West safe for Muslims to declare their affection for Hamas.

For those punks and fools of the West, the path to virtue wasn’t found in distinguishing between Islam and Islamism. Their virtuous mantras sought to collapse that distinction. And far from feeling good about their country, they urged the Muslim minority—and everyone else—to share in their hatred of it.

Democrats split ahead of vote whether to cut $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel

The Congressional Progressive Caucus broke with House Democratic leadership on Tuesday in the latest example of support for Israel dividing the Democratic Party.

Hours after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to colleagues saying that he would oppose an amendment to end $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Progressive Caucus, sent a competing letter urging House Democrats to reject the aid to Israel.

“The Democratic Party needs a new approach to Israel and Palestine,” Casar wrote. “The American people are crying out for an end to U.S. tax dollars subsidizing Israel’s military.”

“After the Israeli government has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza and helped lead the United States into a destabilizing, deadly war with Iran, we are called to act,” he stated.

The House is expected to vote later this week on an amendment from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to strip funding for Israel from the 2027 national security and State Department appropriations bill.

Massie lost his primary in May, in an election that focused in large part on his opposition to U.S. aid to Israel. He has used much of his remaining time in the House to pursue anti-Israel measures, including calling to re-investigate the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and amendments to strip out Israel-related provisions from annual appropriations bills.

The Jewish state receives about $3.8 billion annually in U.S. aid, including $3.3 billion in foreign military funding to purchase arms and $500 million for cooperative missile defense programs.

Massie’s proposal to end most of that aid, which also includes some spending on humanitarian programs, has further divided a Democratic caucus in which support for Israel has become a major fault line and cost several incumbents their seats in primary challenges from the anti-Israel left.

In his letter on Tuesday morning opposing the Massie amendment, Jeffries acknowledged the difficult political calculus that many Democrats face and called for a “major reset” of U.S.-Israel relations.

“There are good faith reasons that will result in members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment,” Jeffries wrote. “Moving forward, it is my strongly held view that for the good of Israel and the Palestinian people, American policy in the Middle East must change.”

EXCLUSIVE: Two New Law Firms Threaten New York Times With Shareholder Suit Over Gaza ‘Rape’ Story and Softball ‘Investigation’ of Platner, Accuse Times of ‘Pushing False Narratives’

A growing coalition of law firms representing a New York Times Company shareholder is demanding the publisher turn over its "books and records" for an investigation "into whether the company's board has abdicated its basic oversight duties" following a string of controversial Times reports that sought to discredit Israel or support anti-Israel Democratic politicians such as Graham Platner, according to a demand letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

If the Times does not produce the materials by July 21, a lawsuit will be filed in the New York County Supreme Court, according to a letter sent Tuesday by a coalition of lawyers representing the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a nonpartisan think-tank and beneficial Times shareholder. It is the second time that lawyers from the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC)—and now several other firms who recently joined the effort—have demanded access to the news organization's internal data and communications, accusing it of rampant anti-Israel bias and advocacy on behalf of prominent anti-Israel Democratic politicians like Platner—who withdrew in disgrace last week from Maine's Senate race—as well as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The stockholders, the letter says, aim "to investigate whether the [Times] Board is engaging in any form of oversight to ensure that the New York Times remains a news reporting agency worth anything to its stockholders, rather than becoming viewed by the public as a simple propaganda arm that selects its articles and reporting in a way that ignores truth in favor of pushing false narratives."

The prospective lawsuit could provide a new avenue for accountability at the Times, which has been largely dismissive of a rash of criticism over recent reporting on Israel and how it handled its investigation of Platner's alleged sexual misconduct. The paper has offered competing and often contradictory defenses for these articles, leading the shareholders to question if the Times board is flatly "ignoring company quality and compliance policies" that are meant to produce neutral, fact-based journalism. The inclusion of two new prominent law firms—Grant & Eisenhofer and Schall, Brown & Schwartz—on NJAC's campaign suggests that the Times may face difficulty dismissing their fresh concerns, which extend past mere anti-Israel bias to now encompass velvet-gloved reporting on two high-profile, anti-Israel Democrats.

"A Board doing its job does not watch its company get caught, publicly and repeatedly, publishing material that violates the company's own written standards, and say nothing," the letter states. "The violations themselves are for the newsroom to answer; the Board's attention to those violations, or its ignorance of them, is what NCPPR seeks to inspect." To do so, lawyers are demanding the Times hand over scores of internal records related to its reporting on Israel and Platner, including any private discussions the Times board may have engaged in about the coverage.

NJAC's initial May 29 letter came on the heels of a lurid and outlandish report, now widely discredited, from Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that accused Israel of raping two Palestinian "journalists" in separate incidents with a carrot and a dog. The NJAC raised concerns about the quality of the board's oversight prior to the publication of the column, which relied heavily on a Hamas-linked organization for the dog rape allegation, according to multiple reports, including in the Free Beacon.

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07/14 Links Pt1: Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East; The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"; Royal Commission, Royal Omission

From Ian:

Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East

The Jewish people, returning to their ancestral homeland after centuries of exile and persecution, represent the reclamation of indigenous rights in the face of repeated conquests. Jews maintained an unbroken presence in the land, however small, and their national revival drew on deep historical, religious, and archaeological ties – connections that predate Arab arrival by millennia.

Nowhere is this distortion more evident than in the construction of a distinct “Palestinian” identity. I’m not the first to posit that the notion of a separate Palestinian nationality serves primarily tactical purposes. It functions as a strategic tool to sustain opposition to the Jewish state and advance broader Arab cohesion, rather than reflecting an ancient, organic peoplehood distinct from the surrounding Arab world.

This ideology emerged in modern times as a mechanism to delegitimize the sole sovereign Jewish entity in the region, framing Jewish self-determination as an alien intrusion.

Consider the visual reality of any regional map. Vast Arab-majority countries surround tiny Israel, home to the Jewish people. The contrast is stark: a constellation of Muslim-majority states, products of historical expansion, arrayed against the Jewish homeland.

This is not a case of a powerful empire oppressing a minority indigenous group, but rather the opposite: the world’s smallest, most unique native civilization defending itself against the lingering impulses of one of history’s greatest imperial forces.

The greatest feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand has been convincing much of the globe that this expansive legacy represents a vulnerable underdog fighting for liberation, rather than a continuation of efforts to extinguish Jewish sovereignty.

This imperial Arab history provides essential context for today’s debates over indigeneity and justice. The Jewish return to Israel, far from colonialism, is decolonization, the restoration of a people to their biblical and historical cradle after successive foreign dominations, including Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman, and British periods.

Israel’s success as a vibrant democracy, technological innovator, and refuge stands in sharp contrast to the challenges faced by many neighboring societies still grappling with the aftereffects of authoritarian legacies and rejectionism.

The Palestinian cause, in this light, appears less as a pure liberation movement and more as an extension of historical patterns of denial toward Jewish rights. By insisting on a narrative that erases Jewish indigeneity while promoting a fabricated national story for tactical gain, it perpetuates conflict rather than seeking genuine coexistence.

True peace would require acknowledging the Jewish people’s ancient ties, the realities of regional history, and the right of Israel to exist as the fulfillment of self-determination for an indigenous nation.

The real colonial dynamic in the Middle East stems from those expansive conquests that reshaped identities and suppressed diversity across North Africa and beyond. Israel, by contrast, embodies resilience and revival, the Jewish people’s determination to reclaim and rebuild in their eternal homeland, contributing to the region while defending against ongoing threats.

They are the colonizers. Recognizing this truth does not diminish legitimate aspirations for peace or prosperity among all peoples, but it demands intellectual honesty. Only by confronting historical realities can we hope for a future where the Jewish state is accepted not as an anomaly, but as the rightful, indigenous presence it has always been.

Eitan Fischberger: The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"

“American Doctor,” opening in theaters August 14, presents Feroze Sidhwa as a neutral American physician with no personal stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framing doesn’t survive contact with his own record:
Sidhwa has told MSNBC he has no connection to the conflict whatsoever, yet his own writing going back to 2007 describes decades of activism rooted in what he himself has called a Zoroastrian religious duty to oppose Israel, alongside years spent editing books and essays for Hamas-sympathizing academic Norman Finkelstein.

He has repeatedly and specifically denied ever seeing Hamas inside Gaza’s hospitals, telling the BBC that in his account no one who has ever set foot in Gaza has witnessed it. The record at every hospital where he has volunteered says otherwise.

At European Hospital, where Sidhwa insists he saw no trace of Hamas, the IDF says it found a Hamas tunnel running directly beneath the building, the same tunnel where senior Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar was killed in a May 2025 strike, along with the bodies of other terrorists and a cache of weapons and intelligence material.

At Nasser Hospital, Sidhwa himself confirmed on Democracy Now that one of two people killed in a March 2025 strike on a recovery room was Ismail Barhoum, the man the IDF identifies as Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, and argued the strike was illegal anyway. Freed Israeli hostages say they were held inside that same hospital, and Hamas’s own Interior Ministry ran policing operations out of it.

The personal website that now anchors Sidhwa’s media career, complete with a press kit, went live on the exact day his New York Times op-ed was published in October 2024, suggesting the “reluctant-witness” persona was a planned rollout rather than an accident of timing.

Israeli think tank urges tougher measures against Turkish consulate, limiting diplomatic presence

A new policy paper published by the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy called on the Israeli government to take a series of steps to reduce the Turkish consulate’s activity in Jerusalem and limit the status of its representatives.

Among the recommendations are revoking diplomatic benefits, canceling work visas, restricting freedom of movement in Israel, removing immunity from diplomatic vehicles, and reexamining the activity of Turkish institutions operating in the city.

The paper, written by retired ambassador Ran Yishai, who heads the center’s research division, includes 10 policy recommendations. According to the author, their purpose is to reduce what he defines as hostile Turkish influence in Jerusalem and strengthen the implementation of Israeli sovereignty in the city.

At the center of the document is the claim that the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem does not function as an authorized representative office to the State of Israel, but rather as a body operating mainly with the Palestinian Authority. For that reason, the paper argues, there is no justification for Israel to continue granting its representatives the full range of benefits normally extended in diplomatic relations between states.

Yishai says that for years Israel allowed the Turkish consulate to operate in Jerusalem in a manner that went beyond its official status. In his view, the consulate serves as a central hub in Ankara’s policy in the city and acts in a way that denies Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

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Lindsay Graham was irreplaceable

I have walked the halls of Congress with NORPAC four times, in 2008, in 2009, in 2015, and again this year. Eleven years separated the 2015 trip from this one, and Congress does not have the same vibe it did in the past.

Lindsay Graham died Saturday night at his Capitol Hill home, felled by what the D.C. medical examiner's office has preliminarily called an aortic dissection. He had just returned from Ukraine and was expected on Sunday's "Meet the Press" when paramedics were called to his house for cardiac arrest instead. He was smart, he was unapologetically pro-Israel, and this year my delegation actually got to meet him in person, which is why his loss lands harder for me than it might have otherwise.

But Graham's death is not the full story. The story is what his absence reveals about a coalition that was already thinning before he died.

On my earlier trips, meeting with Democrats required no special strategy. Support for Israel was the default position, so consistently that the handful of members who opposed it would not even take the meeting. NORPAC could walk into any Democratic office in 2008, in 2009, or in 2015 and talk about Israel on its own terms. This year the briefings were different: NORPAC had us orient many of our conversations with Democrats around a bill against antisemitism rather than around Israel itself, because that was the framing likeliest to get a sympathetic hearing. The shift in strategy is itself the data point. When an advocacy organization has to downplay Israel to reach half the aisle, the automatic bipartisan consensus that defined this mission for two decades has already broken.

Republicans have not made that shift, at least not yet. Every Republican I met this year was still overwhelmingly pro-Israel, Graham foremost among them. But the enthusiasm behind that support felt generational in a way it hadn't before, concentrated among members old enough to remember 1967, 1973, Entebbe, and the Osirak strike as lived history rather than as book history. Graham belonged to that cohort, a lawmaker whose support for Israel was built on decades of direct experience with the region rather than on inherited talking points. Losing him means losing not just a vote but a repository of institutional memory, and the members coming up behind him did not grow up with the same reference points.

None of this is uniform, of course. Richie Torres and John Fetterman remain as forceful on Israel as any Democrat in Washington, and lawmakers like them are critical because they show the default can still be resisted. But a default is still a default, and shifting a party's baseline takes years, not a single election cycle or a single strong voice pushing against the current.

What made Graham valuable was not simply that he voted the right way. It was that he could argue the case with the fluency of someone who had spent decades studying it, and that he did so with a passion that is increasingly rare on either side of the aisle. Replacing a vote is a matter of arithmetic. Replacing that combination of knowledge, credibility, and appetite for the fight is a lot more difficult.

We need to rethink how to support and defend Israel. Pro-Israel advocacy built its strategy for forty years on the assumption that new Grahams would keep arriving to replace the old ones. This year's trip was the clearest sign yet that the pipeline has slowed, and mourning the man without reckoning with what's drying up behind him would waste the one clarifying thing his death has handed us.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/13 Links Pt2: Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’; The people who know nothing know everything; "He's a Lying Liar." Haviv SLAMS Ro Khanna's Political Stunt in Israel

From Ian:

Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’

Human rights groups are tolerating terrorism against Israel, the UK’s independent reviewer of terror legislation has said.

Jonathan Hall KC said Left-wing activists regarded violence towards supporters of Israel as a “kind of exemption” because their brains had been “scrambled by Gaza”.

He said that many civil liberty NGOs had abandoned their “traditional” focus on “domestic issues” and instead become “sucked in” to an obsession with the Palestinian struggle.

Speaking at an event at Parliament, he said that some human rights groups had “lost this really precious neutrality and ability to be consistent” on the subject of Israel.

Mr Hall said: “I’ll be able to tell you from my own experience, I barely have any engagement with these sorts of groups. You’d think that Amnesty UK would be right in the forefront of saying: ‘There is an amendment to this legislation, what should we do?’ No, they’re involved in really defending one particular sort of protest.

“And I think that it’s an example of something that we’ve seen with the Palestine Action group response, where people on the whole get their brains scrambled by Gaza.

“So they tolerate behaviour, very violent behaviour, which they would say, if it was being done by the extreme Right or an Islamist group, ‘yes, of course that would amount to terrorism’. But they seem to regard it as a kind of exemption.”

Earlier this year, six Palestine Action activists were cleared of committing aggravated burglary after a break-in at the UK headquarters of an Israeli-owned arms company.

The six activists were found not guilty over allegations that they had used or threatened unlawful violence.

They had used an old prison van to ram-raid an Elbit Systems factory in Bristol in the early hours of Aug 6, 2024, and attacked police officers with sledgehammers, according to Avon and Somerset Police.

They “genuinely believed” their demonstration at the factory would help the Palestinian cause in Gaza, the court heard.

Mr Hall urged humanitarian groups to “pull themselves back from the brink and remember what they really are there to do”.

He said he had spoken to senior executives at British NGOs who are “worried about the direction of travel” but are being “pushed” in that direction by younger members of staff.

Lee Smith: The Culture of Loserdom

The United States saved Egypt from a humiliating defeat in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered French, British, and Israeli forces to evacuate the Suez Canal, which they’d easily taken from Egyptian forces. But not even Nasser’s Soviet patrons could save him in 1967, when Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, seized Sinai, and remade the Middle East in six days. His successor Anwar Sadat lost the 1973 war when Ariel Sharon nearly encircled Cairo and only Henry Kissinger’s intervention stopped him.

And then Sadat turned it around, briefly. He won a Nobel prize for making peace with Israel, got back the Sinai—and then terrorists killed him for it. The country’s only other Nobel prize winner, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the throat on a Cairo street for writing a book that Egyptian terrorists didn’t like. In other words, Egypt cannot abide winning. And thus, naturally, Egypt renewed the contracts of Hossam Hassan and his twin Ibrahim, thereby rewarding the coach responsible for one of the most spectacular chokes in sports history and consequently one of the most repulsive displays of sporting conduct.

People, nations, aren’t supposed to lose like Egypt does, by embracing loserdom as a collective gestalt deployed to blame others for the failures that are only their own. Perhaps the most crucial job of any parent, and coach, is to teach their children how to lose gracefully and what to learn from it so that they may reap victory in the future. Sports is part of that tuition—even the best teams lose sometimes. You can do everything right, execute every play perfectly, but the other side, the other athlete, is simply better. Or you were better, but the calls went against you, or the weather was bad, and that’s just the way it goes.

But if you wanted to breed psychopaths, if you wanted to build a mummy army fed on a strict diet of resentment, you’d tell them nothing is their fault because every outcome is controlled by a mysterious force: colonialism, or Zionism, or voodoo, etc. And then, when things went against them—and things always go against those whose minds and souls are cut to fit the jagged-edged pattern of paranoia—they’d erupt in fits of predictably maniacal rage.

It’s the instrumentalization of those pathological furies that drives the politics of the Middle East. For instance, because of Egypt’s will to lose, Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything, from Mossad dolphins to soccer defeats, to their death in another war with Israel. It’s the same throughout the Muslim Middle East, which is why from Iran to Gaza, the Palestinian cause—the global standard of loserdom—is celebrated like victory.

And now the third-world migrants who have overrun Europe’s shores have brought the same culture to the continent. After Morocco’s loss to France, for instance, North African immigrants surrounded an Amsterdam hotel believed to be hosting Israelis and shouted threats, holding them responsible for the loss. And here, in the United States? It’s not a good sign that the man elected to run America’s greatest city can’t tell winning from losing and gives evidence he thinks like the third-world mobs drenched in resentment, that Egypt was robbed.

The people who know nothing know everything

I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.”

Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

The dinner was being held in an immaculate apartment overlooking the city. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lighting was flattering, and the books had been arranged not alphabetically but morally. Edward Said sat beside Frantz Fanon. Judith Butler leaned against a large volume on decolonising architecture. There were several books about Israel, none by Israelis, historians, military analysts, Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, or anyone who had recently burdened themselves with the region’s chronology.

The apartment belonged to Oliver and Beatrice, who had invited 12 people for what they called “an evening of food, friendship and necessary conversation.”

I had been included, I later realised, as the necessary conversation; the one in need of “education.”

Beatrice greeted me at the door with the expression of a person welcoming a recently rehabilitated extremist.

“We’re so glad you came,” she said, touching my arm. “We were worried you might feel uncomfortable.”

“I’ve been to family weddings,” I replied. “I’ll survive.”

The other guests had already assembled around a huge island bench. They held champagne flutes and spoke in low, solemn tones about suffering in places they would never visit.

There was Julian, an international lawyer who specialised in commercial leases but had recently developed strong views on the laws of armed conflict. Nadia worked in branding and referred to herself as a storyteller. Marcus was a documentary producer whose documentaries had never been produced. Eleanor taught postcolonial literature and had perfected the academic art of converting adjectives into accusations. Simon was in finance and considered himself politically courageous because he had once criticised capitalism at Davos.

There was also Theo, a surgeon, who knew nothing about Israel but knew it with clinical confidence.

I was introduced around the room.

“This is our pro-Israel friend,” Beatrice announced.

When celebrity ignorance gets a stage

You can criticize Israeli settlement policy in Judea and Samaria. Plenty of Israelis do, loudly, in a free press, which is more than can be said for any of its neighbors. That is a real debate, and I welcome it.

But a nation that has voluntarily relinquished more territory than it currently holds is a strange poster child for expansionism. Name another country in history that won defensive wars and then handed the land back just for a signature on a peace treaty.

I’ll wait.

That’s the thing about Casablanca’s Oxford speech: It is the statement of a man who has never had to know anything, explaining to a room full of university students who the Jews really are. He got the biography of his subject wrong because he never learned it. He got the map wrong because he never looked at it. Although he does note that some of his closest friends are Jewish.

The danger isn’t that a rock singer holds uninformed opinions and mumbles through them to an audience who knows even less. Everyone is entitled to those. The danger is the machinery around him: the host who says “100% agree” without a beat, the comment sections calling it brave, the prestigious institutions handing Casablancas a lectern, the total absence of anyone in the room asking a single factual question.

When ignorance gets a stage, applause and an Oxford invitation, while the people it targets get stabbed on a London street, we are not having a policy debate. We are watching a line move.

So, I’ll say it again: Say something. You don’t need a position on settlements to notice that the facts here are wrong and that the target, once again, is the Jews.

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