British Jews are not here to submit to your loyalty tests

There are weeks when the hypocrisy is so brazen that another carefully worded expression of concern feels like participation in the insult. Last week was one of those weeks.

In Israel, Arab citizens voted in a democratic election and secured record parliamentary representation.

In England, we were digesting a government review describing antisemitism in our schools and colleges. At the BBC, a distinguished Jewish producer’s allegations raised grave questions about the treatment of Jewish employees by our national broadcaster. While in London, a celebrity benefit concert promoted the freedom of a convicted murderer, while raising money for organisations whose records demand the scrutiny their famous supporters would rather direct elsewhere.

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Yet somehow, Jews are still the people expected to explain themselves. Explain our homeland, explain its government, explain its democracy. Explain why we believe the Jewish people should have a country at all.

“Before we are willing to discuss the abuse of your children, the treatment of your colleagues or the glorification of people responsible for murdering your families, perhaps you could first tell us where you stand on Israel?”

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I have had enough of that arrangement and last week supplied nineteen very good reasons to reject it.

The Arab-led Joint List and Ra’am won nineteen seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. Eleven for the Joint List, eight for Ra’am. A record result, almost doubling the ten seats held by the outgoing Arab-led parties. Almost sixteen per cent of parliament, approximately one seat in six, with Arab voter turnout reported at around a record-breaking eighty per cent.

Citizens voting, parties organising, representatives elected. Real political power, exercised by people whose views frequently challenge those of the Jewish majority. That is true democracy in action.

Some of the movements represented within Arab politics explicitly challenge Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. Yet Israel’s Supreme Court has repeatedly overturned attempts to disqualify Arab parties and candidates, protecting political participation through a demanding evidential threshold for exclusion.

The reality behind that sentence is that the Jewish state’s courts have protected the political rights of people who want to change its defining constitutional identity. The country endlessly caricatured as incapable of tolerating Arab political agency has just elected nineteen representatives from Arab-led parties. It has done so even though they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the political movement upon which the State protecting their very rights has been built.

Anyone describing Arab citizens inside Israel as simply excluded from democratic power has an increasingly awkward encounter with reality ahead of them. Anyone presenting those citizens as interchangeable with Palestinians living under Hamas or the Palestinian Authority is concealing a fundamental difference.

Israeli Arabs can vote to change their national government. Palestinians have not had a presidential election since 2005 or a legislative election since 2006. The national leadership in the West Bank and Gaza has gone approximately two decades without renewing its mandate.

Where are the packed arenas demanding an end to that? Where are the celebrity shirts demanding that Palestinian young people be allowed to choose and remove their national leaders? Where are the campaigns demanding freedom from Hamas’s coercion and genuine accountability from the Palestinian Authority?

Apparently, Palestinian political freedom becomes rather less fashionable when pursuing it requires confronting Palestinian rulers. Thank goodness it’s so much easier and so terribly fashionable to shout at the Jews.

Now come home, to England, home of the brave, liberal, educated anti-racists.

Sir David Bell’s review into antisemitism in English schools and colleges described a significant and growing problem. The government highlighted evidence that three in five Jewish pupils aged sixteen to nineteen had experienced or witnessed antisemitism, and accepted all twenty-seven recommendations.

Before reaching for your next qualification, just sit with that number, three in five. These are children, British children, children entitled to walk into a classroom without being abused, intimidated or attacked. Their safety should command an immediate, unambiguous response.

Instead, the National Education Union’s response became an extended attack on recommending the IHRA definition of antisemitism, warning about its effect on classroom debate and objecting to the questioning of teachers’ professionalism. Jewish children describe a hostile environment, and the adults responsible for representing educators become preoccupied with defending their ideological territory.

A child’s right to feel safe at school is a concrete obligation. It should carry more weight than an adult activist’s determination to preserve their preferred vocabulary.

The union’s general secretary, Daniel Kebede, is a disgrace and a man who has his own history with vocabulary. In 2021, he called from a rally stage to “globalise the intifada”. The NEU subsequently said he meant solidarity and civic protest, without support for violence. Jewish families know what the intifadas were and what the word truly means.

Bombed buses, murdered diners, ordinary journeys turned into funerals.

If you lead a union of educators, understanding why that slogan frightens Jewish children ought to be among your most basic responsibilities. Those children should never have to negotiate with your politics to obtain your protection.

Next we come to our national broadcaster, the BBC.

Lucie Kon’s allegations describe a Jewish professional coming to feel that her identity had eclipsed her experience, judgment and standing. She says colleagues expressed hostility towards Zionists after 7 October, that her connection to Israel was treated as a problem when considering her professional impartiality, and that raising concerns left her isolated. She received a settlement exceeding £400,000 after her departure.

The BBC says its investigations did not uphold the antisemitism allegations, while acknowledging shortcomings in its treatment of her.

The public needs an independent examination of the evidence. The BBC’s ability to investigate everyone else does not entitle its own management to the last word about what happened inside its offices.

Lucie worked on We Will Dance Again, my documentary about the Nova music festival massacre. She says an executive questioned her involvement because she had “skin in the game,” that colleagues told her Zionists were “evil,” that calling Hamas terrorists meant she had to call Israel terrorists too, and told her to “think about what drove Hamas to do what they did.”

A Jewish woman’s connection to murdered Jews becomes grounds for suspicion. Her knowledge becomes a liability, her identity a complication, her determination to tell the victims’ story becomes something requiring additional scrutiny.

That allegation should appal everyone who cares about the BBC. An institution that celebrates the value of lived experience must explain how Jewish experience is treated when the subject is murdered Jews. An institution that asks employees to report racism must demonstrate that doing so will not destroy their confidence, standing or career. So now, an institution funded by the public must submit to independent scrutiny when its own processes are in question.

The current BBC Charter expires at the end of 2027. Renewal for 2028 should require demonstrable accountability on these matters, including an independent examination of antisemitism complaints and how Jewish staff are treated.

The BBC cannot expect public trust on the strength of another statement asserting how seriously it takes everything. Showing us is a long time coming, not doing so is no longer an option.

Then came Macklemore’s tour: Dublin, Paris, London’s Wembley Arena and thousands of screaming, adoring, cosplaying useful idiots, “freeing Palestine” one keffiyeh, one red, green and black bucket hat, one shouted “Zionism is racism” slogan at a time. A convicted murderer on the T-shirt, moral superiority on the faces. Which river? Which sea? Not a clue! But absolutely no doubt who to hate.

The published beneficiaries included UNRWA USA and the Palestinian Youth Movement. Their inclusion was advertised in advance, it was a deliberate decision.

PYM’s British spokesperson, Jeanine Hourani, described the 7 October hostage-taking as “legitimate” and “effective”. Those words concern people abducted from their homes, families and a music festival, human beings dragged into captivity, sexual abused, tortured and in many cases, murdered.

I find it obscene that an organisation represented by someone reported to have defended those kidnappings should be presented as a worthy recipient of a humanitarian fundraiser.

While UNRWA’s record demands far more than a vague acknowledgement of “controversy”. In 2024, the UN’s own investigation concluded that nine UNRWA employees participated in the 7 October massacre. Subsequent American investigations have supplied further evidence of far more and deep involvement across the organisation with Hamas.

In February this year, USAID’s independent Office of Inspector General announced the ten-year debarment of UNRWA school principal Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa. It turns out that the school principal was also an Hamas operative who coordinated communications with other Hamas members during the attacks.

By June, the watchdog had referred 101 current or former UNRWA staff for debarment over 7 October participation and/or affiliation with Hamas’s military wing. Its published examples included teachers and deputy principals identified as commanders and snipers.

After those revelations, the organisers chose UNRWA USA as a beneficiary. They chose to lend it celebrity prestige and the moral authority of a benefit concert and to own that decision with pride.

Then there was Macklemore’s shirt demanding freedom for Marwan Barghouti and he is far from alone in choosing to make a murderer the face of his merch.

Zack Polanski has worn the “Free Marwan” shirt and publicly defended the campaign. Matthew Freud, a doyen of the British establishment and one of its most accomplished public relations operators, has discussed his work raising Barghouti’s profile. More than two hundred cultural figures have backed calls for his release.

A cause célèbre, a convicted murderer with celebrity advocates, establishment connections and merchandise. But before applauding, read the history.

In April 2002, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades issued a statement describing themselves as operating “under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti”. Human Rights Watch recorded it, citing contemporary reporting by Agence France-Presse.

This was the organisation whose record included over 40 suicide bombings and over 300 shootings and stabbings targeting civilians. Human Rights Watch documented its claims of responsibility for a shooting at a Bat Mitzvah and at least twelve suicide bombings against Israeli civilians between January and August 2002 alone.

Hold that image beside the celebrity T-shirt, they murdered women and children at a Bat Mitzvah, on public transport and at restaurants.

In 2004, Barghouti was convicted of responsibility for five murders, attempted murder and membership of a terrorist organisation. The same Israeli court acquitted him on thirty-three other counts relating to attacks in which another twenty-one people died, because his responsibility had not been proved.

This last fact really matters, it matters in the same way that the Israeli Supreme Court fighting to allow Arab parties to stand for election matters. Israeli judges tested allegations against a prominent enemy of their country and rejected those the prosecution failed to establish. They required evidence, they distinguished organisational and political prominence from proven individual responsibility.

The acquittals demonstrate judicial process, but they give the campaigners no licence to erase the convictions that remained. Five murders, five people whose absence their families have lived with ever since. Yet the campaign offers us the prisoner as an icon, his imprisonment as the injustice and his freedom as the moral imperative.

I am disgusted by the sight of a convicted murderer accumulating cultural prestige while his victims are reduced to an inconvenient footnote. But my disgust is compounded by those who use their name to polish his reputation, and his notoriety to embellish their own dwindling fame, then mistake each other’s applause for evidence of moral courage.

I will not accept Jewish safety being made conditional on Jewish political compliance. Our children are being abused because they are Jews. Their right to protection should require no further explanation. Our colleagues are entitled to dignity regardless of whether someone approves of Zionism, the existence of the only Jewish state or their Jewishness worn openly and proudly. The victims of terrorism are entitled to remembrance regardless of how fashionable their killers become in the eyes of fame hungry morons. Arab citizens exercising democratic power in Israel deserve to be seen as people making political choices, even when those choices wreck somebody’s favourite apartheid slogan.

Last week, Israel’s Arab citizens voted.

Here, we confronted evidence of antisemitism in education, grave allegations inside our national broadcaster and a celebrity campaign celebrating the freedom of a convicted murderer and giving money to supporters of terrorists.

Anyone determined to lecture Jews about our homeland should find the courage to confront that record at home.

If you can spend last week denouncing the Jewish state while finding excuses for hostility towards Jews here; if you can demand accountability from Israel while shielding your own institutions, activists and celebrity heroes from scrutiny; if you can applaud a convicted murderer’s name and then presume to instruct his victims’ people about morality, then your words are as meaningless as they are disingenuous.

You do not get to demand that Jews justify our homeland while refusing to confront the hatred we face at home.

Last week left yet another stain on this country’s institutions, one the people of this country should be ashamed of, sadly, just another for us to add to a very long list.