A Parliamentary debate over ‘pro-Israel influence’ sends a dreadful message

At a time when the number of antisemitic incidents in the UK are running at near-historic levels, it beggars belief that, this week, our parliament will stage a debate on “pro-Israel influence on politics and democracy in Britain”.

Jews have been stabbed in the streets, murdered at their synagogues, and harassed and intimidated in schools, hospitals and campuses and, somehow, the real problem Britain faces is the alleged outsize influence of the “pro-Israel lobby”.

This is not parliament’s doing or the government’s. It’s the result of a petition pushed by a plethora of extremist groups – like 5Pillars, an Islamist news site, which hosts fascists and neo-Nazis like Mark Collett and Nick Griffin to rail against Zionists – clearing the 100,000 signatures requiring a parliamentary debate.

This debate is nothing short of an opportunity for centuries-old antisemitic tropes about Jews, money and power to be peddled and propagated in the mother of parliaments. It is a dark, disturbing day for Britain – a country which the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, once described as “being good to the Jews” as well as “the Jews being good for Britain”.

As we all know, antisemitism has metastasized in recent decades. As the late Lord Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, suggested in 2017: “In the Middle Ages Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and early 20th century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel.”

Consequently, the myth of an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy pulling the world’s strings – most notoriously propagated by that infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – has evolved over time.

But the essence remains the same: that Jews are engaged in a surreptitious and malevolent effort to subvert the national interest to promote their own agenda – and, when they’re caught out, they attempt to deflect criticism by raising the false charge of antisemitism.

This is unsurprising: anti-Zionism – the all-consuming hatred of the world’s only Jewish state which is today so prevalent in many of our public institutions and culture – was contrived in Stalin’s Soviet Union by a group of far-right nationalist authors who, as  expert Izabella Tabarovsky put it, “rewrote the antisemitic conspiracy theory of the Protocols as a Marxist-Leninist critique of Zionism fit for consumption by Soviet Communist elites and the global left”.

Equally unsurprising is the evidence, produced by the Anti-Defamation League in 2023, that there is a “significant overlap” between anti-Israel sentiments rooted in antisemitic conspiracy theories and traditional antisemitism. Research in Britain by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research similarly found that “the greater the intensity of anti-Israel attitude, the more likely it is to be accompanied by antisemitic attitudes as well”, while the recent report by the Union of Jewish Students underlines the close connection between antisemitism and anti-Israel activism on campuses.

The International Holocaust Definition of Antisemitism is explicit that it isn’t antisemitic to criticise Israel in the way any other state or government could be criticised. It is likewise explicit that “making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions” is antisemitic.

Words have consequences. Beyond Westminster, the denunciations of the “Israel lobby” and the “Zionist conspiracy” – myths now spread to millions with ease on social media – are already having a pernicious effect. In 2024, polling found that one quarter of 18-24 year-olds believe that Israel and its supporters are “a bad influence on our democracy” and that “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”

After wave upon wave of far-left and Islamist anti-Israel propaganda – comparing the state and its “Jewish supremacist” supporters to Nazis and “settler colonialists”– is it any wonder that one in five university students now say they wouldn’t want to share a house with a Jewish student?

I know first-hand just how disturbing and distressing anti-Zionist antisemitism can be. I was subjected to unrelenting hate, including being labelled the “Member for Tel Aviv” because I spoke out against antisemitism and I was forced to leave the Labour party – my political home of 55 years. I can only imagine the trauma and fear suffered by Jewish children and teenagers facing social ostracism, abusive language and, yes, physical violence by peers who have been led to believe that the Hamas terrorists who carried out atrocities on 7 October and beyond are heroes, while “Zionists” are guilty of genocide. Those in denial about these atrocities should visit the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in London, where they will see Hamas’s unspeakable crimes against young people who simply wanted to dance.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories have had bloody and tragic consequences for Jews for centuries – and they still do. That reality – not toxic lies about the “Israel lobby” and Zionists – should be at the forefront of parliamentarians’ minds next week.