Britain, Israel, the younger generation and the future

Three moments have chilled me in recent weeks.  

The first moment was one Saturday night a few weeks ago, on the tube in central London.  I was on my way to Luton, flying to Israel to talk to some brilliant tech companies. A group of perhaps a dozen teenagers spilled out of a carriage and ran along the platform. They were dressed up, clearly well on their way to being drunk, and happy. As they ran, they were laughing and shouting, like any group of teenagers. And then they started chanting ‘Free, free Palestine’.

The second moment was the silence that followed the Iranian clampdown on the recent protests.  Thousands of Iranians had been gunned down in the streets, thousands had been arrested. Horrific accounts of state violence were escaping the country despite the regime’s best efforts. This was a government slaughtering its own people, whose crime had been to demand rights and democracy. And yet all the people who had been marching in the streets and shouting over Gaza were silent. No marches, no shouting, no outrage. The silence was deafening.

The third moment was the recent polling by UJS which found that a fifth of students are not open to house sharing with a Jewish student. If ‘Jewish’ had been replaced with any other minority, this would have been a national scandal, cue for a bout of national soul-searching about how we got to this place. The tragic insight of ‘Jews Don’t Count’ applying once again.

Each of these three moments were a cause for sadness.  But put together, they are a basis for more than that.

The first is just a single anecdote, but it reinforced the sense that the coming generation now starts from the unquestioned axiom that Israel is in the wrong. I doubt this group of teenagers were unusually informed about the Middle East Peace Process. I don’t suppose that they gave a lot of thought to the issue. Chanting ‘Free, free Palestine’ is just what groups like them feel they ought to do.

The second confirms the suspicion that for its haters, Israel is different. Other countries can commit horrific abuses of human rights, mass slaughter of their own citizens, brutal repression, and it causes barely a flicker of outrage. Not that Israel deserves a free pass – far from it – but the fixation on Israel to the exclusion of others is telling.

The third is in some respects the most troubling of all. It tells us that for this coming generation there is little distinction between Israel and Jews. I still believe – perhaps naively – that the vast bulk of the students who do not want Jewish flatmates are not saying this because they have an intrinsic hatred of Jews. Rather, they hate Israel, and do not want to share their homes with people who they assume will not share that hatred. And so for them the line between what they think of Israel and what they think of Jews becomes blurred.

I spent five years in Israel as British Ambassador, and left a decade ago. It was an easier time, before the horror of 7 October and the ensuing conflict in Gaza, but even then there was a pervasive view in Israel that Britain was fundamentally an antisemitic country.

I didn’t agree then, and I don’t agree now. But I am now worrying about where we are going with attitudes to Israel. If it is now a given among the young that Israel is in the wrong, and if there is a unique fixation on Israel, and if the distinction is blurred between Israel and Jews, then this creates a toxic and dangerous situation for our community.