A new Israeli government will not fix the West’s antisemitism

Yesterday, President Isaac Herzog asked Gadi Eisenkot to form Israel’s next government. Watching Herzog, I found myself wishing that a man with his judgement had more opportunity to exercise it beyond the largely ceremonial confines of the presidency. For now, the task falls to Eisenkot, he has the mandate. Whether he can assemble a coalition is another matter.

I’m a British Jew and while Israel is my homeland, I have no vote there. Israelis will decide who leads their country regardless of what I write from London and rightly so. Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu are remarkably close on some of the big questions of Israeli security, and the judgement about who would govern better belongs to Israelis only. However and for what it’s worth, I do believe Netanyahu has led Israel for an extraordinary length of time. After that many years, a change of leadership is generally healthy for any country, Israel included.

A new prime minister could make a great deal of difference to Israelis. The question for those of us living in Britain and America is why anyone expects a change of government in Jerusalem to cure a hatred that our own societies have allowed to flourish.

What Washington heard at the ballot box should tell us everything we need to know about the US. On Tuesday morning, as Americans went to the polls, Donald Trump called Fox News and said the United States would end nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. Of all the mornings on which he could announce a change to one of America’s longest-standing defence relationships, he chose election day and he all but told us why. Democrats were using the aid against Republicans on the campaign trail; he singled out Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan as the exemplar.

Trump says Netanyahu had already discussed ending the aid with him, while Netanyahu had publicly talked about phasing it out over the next decade. The existing agreement runs through 2028, Congress controls the funding, and even America’s ambassador to Israel couldn’t say when the money would stop. The policy was still unsettled, certainly not agreed upon between allies, but the election-day message was ready to go.

El-Sayed won, no great surprise given all that we know about the progressive left in the US. It means that a Democrat who campaigned to end US taxpayer support for Israel’s military is now a senator-elect from a state Trump won twice. In the House, returning Democrats including Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar will be joined by newcomers who also opposed US military support for Israel and in many cases Israel itself as a Jewish homeland. A growing part of the Democratic Party sees electoral advantage in campaigning against support for Israel. On election morning, the Republican president was already trying to take the issue off the table.

By Wednesday, with Republicans having lost both chambers of Congress, JD Vance offered his verdict. “The reason we lost is the war,” he said of Iran. He also pointed to voters’ frustration with America’s relationship with Israel. America chose to go to war alongside Israel, yet barely a day after the polls closed, the vice president had moved from the consequences of an American president’s decision to the electoral cost of the relationship with Israel itself. Anyone wondering how Republicans might talk about Israel in 2028 should pay attention to how quickly Vance got there. His nomination would signal an almost certain and dramatic shift in policy from the US Right.

Britain, on the other hand has already had a preview. Last month, the Green Party voted to equate Zionism with racism and to replace Israel with a single Palestinian state. In my view, that makes the Greens an explicitly antisemitic party. They champion national self-determination for Palestinians and declare it racist when Jews exercise it.

Labour, meanwhile, increasingly uses its public posture towards Israel to court a progressive base it fears it has lost. Every time it calculates that a harder line on Israel will win back voters drifting towards the Greens, it helps make hostility to the Jewish state a measure of progressive credibility.

The Conservatives and Reform have both stood up publicly for Israel. I hope they have the conviction to keep doing so when the polling makes it harder. There are people on the British right who hear America First and fancy singing it to the tune of Britain First. Rupert Lowe, a former Reform MP, now leads the abhorrent Restore Britain, and Nigel Farage has left the door open to talks with him about a pact. The test for Farage and Kemi Badenoch will come when a pollster tells them that standing by the Jewish state might cost them votes. Trump’s election-morning phone call gave us a fair idea of what folding looks like.

So now the question turns to what Jews are living with already, both here in the UK and in the US. I know this is an old drum I’m banging, I’d love to have less reason to bang it, but sadly the beat goes on.

Last month, an independent review into antisemitism in England’s schools and colleges reported that three in five Jewish students surveyed said they had experienced it. The Community Security Trust recorded 178 antisemitic incidents affecting the school sector in the first six months of this year, including 53 involving Jewish children away from school, often on the way to or from it. Think about what it takes for a child to tell you they feel unsafe in their school uniform. Then think about what it takes for that child to put it back on the next morning.

Then there’s the creative industries. We’ve had a prominent, award-winning producer accuse the BBC of antisemitism, and we’ve watched Kanye West, the man who released a song called “Heil Hitler”, get a much-heralded return to fashion. Alongside those headlines, it would be easy to treat a music video producer’s Instagram posts as a footnote. But when your peers name you Best Producer two years running, you have a standing in the industry that gives your words weight far beyond your own feed.

Last Wednesday, Chris Murdoch won that award for a second consecutive year at the UK Music Video Awards. Campaign Against Antisemitism drew attention to three Instagram posts it attributed to him. It says that on the first anniversary of 7 October , he shared a graphic presenting the attacks as legitimate resistance, with the caption “Long live the resistance”. They also identified two undated stories, one portraying former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as having outwitted Israel and died in battle, and another saying “Zionism is Nazism”. Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. The IHRA working definition gives comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis as an example of antisemitism.

People coming up in our industry pay attention to those their peers hold up as the best, as do the Jews working alongside them. When you see the massacre of Jews recast as resistance, you’re left wondering how many of the people you work with think that’s an acceptable thing to say.

Boycotting Jewish businesses has become de rigueur in some activist circles. In Philadelphia this weekend, campaigners turned it into a bike ride, targeting six Jewish-owned businesses on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. They chose to take that message through the streets of an American city on the eve of the anniversary of a Nazi celebration of Jewish hate and murder. The day before, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an Orthodox Jewish man was attacked on his way to synagogue.

A Jewish child in a school corridor, a Jewish family opening its restaurant, a Jew walking to shul. Does anyone seriously believe that the identity of the Israeli prime minister is what makes these people targets? The people doing the targeting can dress it up in whatever political language they like, the truth is that being Jewish is enough.

If Netanyahu were the real obstacle for the Western progressive movement, you would expect to see some solidarity with the Israeli left. There are Israelis who have spent their political lives arguing for Palestinian statehood alongside a secure Jewish state. Where are their allies among the people who claim to want peace? An increasingly influential part of the Western left has moved from arguing over where the borders of two states should lie to demanding a single state in which the Jewish homeland ceases to exist. The British Greens have made that party policy. What could any Israeli prime minister offer a movement whose demand is the disappearance of the country he leads?

Qatar’s spending in Western education deserves scrutiny, including whose ideas that money has helped amplify. But the people who have taken up those ideas here are responsible for what they do with them. It took British politicians at a British party conference to declare Jewish self-determination racist, they made that choice themselves.

Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy and a bulwark against Islamist movements that seek its destruction and are expanding their ideology and influence across the West. Whether our governments stand by it should be a question of principle and strategic judgement. Increasingly, they are asking what standing by the Jewish state will cost them at the ballot box. When a politician sees votes to be gained by pandering to people who will hate Jews whoever governs Israel, that politician is making a choice about antisemitism.

If Eisenkot succeeds, I’ll wish him well. I hope he gives Israelis a government they trust and a chance to move forward after years of grief and division. That is enough to ask of him, it is all that anyone can and should.

A Jewish child in Britain is entitled to walk into school in safety, a Jewish restaurateur in Philadelphia is entitled to open for business in peace, Jews in my industry are entitled to go to work without hearing the massacre of Jews spoken of as something to celebrate.

Those are obligations Britain and America owe their own citizens. Israel owes us no change of leader, no change of policy and no concession in order for us to fulfil them.