OPINION: I get what the Israeli government’s up to with its Tommy Robinson invite
David Aaronovitch highlights the influence that the far-right activist has had on anti-Muslim attacks
Eight years before Jihad Al-Shamie rammed his car into Jews attending Heaton Park synagogue and caused the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, a very similar attack took place in north London. Darren Osborne hired a van in Cardiff and drove the 150 miles to Finsbury Park, where he drove at worshippers outside the local mosque, killing Makram Ali, who was 51.
Osborne was a middle-aged man in a state of personal crisis, who seemed to be looking for scapegoats for his own internal problems, and found them in British Muslims. The horrific Manchester suicide bombing carried out by Salman Abedi had taken place weeks earlier and Osborne went looking for anti-Islamic material.
The court that tried Osborne heard he found it in the online and social media postings of two people in particular, the leader of the BNP offshoot Britain First and those of Tommy Robinson, the stage name of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Osborne subscribed to Robinson’s email list, and a couple of weeks before received a message from Robinson talking of Islam forming “a nation within a nation” in the UK. Two days before Osborne’s murderous attack, Robinson posted a tweet that referred to the phrase “look back in anger”. At the end of his crime scene note, Osborne wrote “Don’t look back in anger, God Save the Queen.”
After Osborne’s conviction, the head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, Dean Haydon, talked about how Osborne had “self-radicalised” using online material. “We have legislation in place that deals with [terrorist] propaganda”, Haydon said, “but some of the material that’s online is unpleasant but does not cross the boundary into crime.”
Jewish organisations had long recognised the danger of attacks on premises associated with Jews. The Community Security Trust was consulted by Muslim organisations on how to do the same for mosques and Muslim events. It is an area where Muslims and Jews have a common concern.
At the weekend, Netanyahu’s minister for the diaspora, Amichai Chikli, decided to get stuck into the affairs of British Jews by linking the Manchester attack to a decision to invite Tommy Robinson to Israel on an official visit. “Tommy,” he posted, “is a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam. Together with friends like Tommy Robinson, we will build stronger bridges of solidarity, fight terror, and defend western civilization and our shared values.”
This found some support among a noisy sliver of British Jews, including the right-wing podcaster Andrew Gold who posted that all the Jews in his “circle” were fans of Robinson, who was sent to prison five times between 2005 and 2025 for offences including assault, fraud and contempt of court.
The Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies took a very different view. Their statement condemned Chikli’s invitation and said that he had “ignored the views of the vast majority of British Jews, who utterly and consistently reject Robinson and everything he stands for.”
To me, it’s pretty clear what’s going on here. The Israeli government, which includes at least one minister who used to have a picture of the Jewish mass murderer Baruch Goldstein on his living room wall, is attempting to coerce the diaspora into unconditional support for whatever it chooses to do. It wants to equate support for the state of Israel with backing for its incompetent and bloody handling of the war in Gaza. By characterising the world as being in two camps: the righteous led by Netanyahu and “radical Islamists” it seeks to escape responsibility for what the events leading up to 7 October.
Then its focus was on its attempts to introduce two-tier citizenship in Israel by neutering the Supreme Court, and its policy of slow annexation of the West Bank in which its principal enemies were the Palestinian Authority and the international community.
7 October happened on Chikli’s watch. The misery of the last two years, 2,000 Israeli dead, at least 50,000 Palestinians and the inevitable legacy of future generational hatred, had two parents, not just one: the pitiless ideologues of Hamas, and the carelessness of the Israeli government. And now he wants British Jews to embrace Tommy Robinson and describe those who won’t buy his schtick as “kapos” and collaborators.
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