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I am in London where the air is not sweet.
The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, accuses Israel of breaking international law by stopping aid from entering Gaza. This is untrue. Israel stopped the aid two weeks ago in order to weaken Hamas and force it finally to release the remaining Israeli hostages whom it kidnapped on October 7 2023. International law requires limited humanitarian aid for civilians, but only if no advantage will result “to the military efforts or economy of the enemy”. Since Hamas has seized most of the aid delivered to Gaza during the war to keep its genocidal war going, it’s clear that withholding aid is not only legal but essential.
Lammy also says the Israelis are starving Gazan children. This is untrue. It is also a blood libel. Everyone could see from the grisly propaganda circus staged around the recent release of skeletal hostages that the Gazans were conspicuously well fed and it was their Israeli hostages who had been starved. In Israel, there’s a view that stopping the aid is pointless because there’s enough food in Gaza to feed the population for around four months.
Sir Keir Starmer walks back Lammy’s remarks. The Prime Minister’s spokesman says:
Our position remains that Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law. And we continue to call on the government of Israel to abide by its international obligations when it comes to humanitarian assistance to the population in Gaza.
Israel’s actions are not at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law. And it has consistently abided by its international obligations. Walking back Lammy means continuing to defame Israel with different words.
I go to a reception where I get into an argument with a Labour party veteran. I tell him the Labour government has promoted hatred of Israel and fomented antisemitism in Britain. He denies this and requires examples. He’s polite and courteous; this is England, after all. I tell him the government has consistently pushed the lie that Israel has stopped aid from entering Gaza and has starved the Palestinian Arabs there. He insists that Israel has indeed done this. I tell him this is untrue, that Israel has let in hundreds of trucks of aid but most of it has been stolen by Hamas. He says he knows for a fact that Israel stopped the aid trucks because he was told this by Someone who saw it happen. I tell him that whatever this Someone saw was only one event in 17 months of war and could have been the result of many things, such as active military activity that day (which happens sometimes making the aid crossings unsafe) or the relief agency UNWRA stopping the aid coming in (which it has repeatedly done). He tells me I have now said contradictory things. As a result, he looks satisfied that he has won the argument.
In a Westminster watering-hole popular with the political crowd, I spot this very same Someone, who is a government minister dealing with the Middle East. He is deep in conversation with a prominent member of Britain’s Jewish community and a Labour party member, who despite purportedly supporting Israel also fervently supports the Palestinian cause. Upon leaving, the government minister thanks him.
I am told that another prominent British Jew, knowing that Starmer intended to impose a partial arms embargo against Israel, told him that the Jewish community would have no problem with this. The Jewish community, many if not most of whom were horrified by the arms embargo, may be surprised to hear that.
I learn that a number of Labour MPs have become intensely concerned that the Starmer government is being sucked into a catastrophically anti-Israel stance because of the rising electoral force of Britain’s Muslims to whom the party is increasingly kow-towing. Around an estimated one hundred out of 403 Labour MPs support Israel, but most don’t dare speak up in its defence because their political careers would then be over.
I ask one Labour MP who does support Israel why so many of his colleagues parrot murderous lies about the Jewish state. He looks unhappy and lowers his voice. “It’s pressure from… the community,” he murmurs. Which community, I ask? Does he mean Britain’s Muslims? He nods, wordlessly. And his Labour colleagues believe absolutely everything the BBC tells them about Gaza, he says in despair; the BBC is the prime source of the lies and the hatred of Israel in Britain.
Starmer holds a reception in 10 Downing Street to mark Ramadan. One of his guests is a Liverpool imam, Adam Kelwick. Four days after the October 7 atrocities in Israel, he posted on social media: “David beats Goliath!” and subsequently urged fellow Muslims to “pray for victory” over Israel in the Gaza war. He has also posted how he looks forward to Israel’s death, writing that it is “lashing out like a wild animal that thinks it’s about to die” which he thinks is a “good sign” in military terms.
Cambridgeshire Police call off their investigation into the slashing on March 8 last year of the portrait of Lord Balfour which hung in Trinity College, Cambridge. The noble Lord was the eponymous writer of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which Britain committed itself to a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. In a video posted on social media, an unnamed female activist was seen spraying red paint onto the painting before slashing it with a box-cutter and pulling apart the canvas. At the time, the activist group Palestine Action stated it had carried out the attack. The police say: “A thorough investigation was carried out but the investigation has now been filed pending any new information coming to light.” Is it likely that the police cannot discover anyone who can identify this videoed criminal? Trinity College says it “continues to condemn this act of vandalism in the strongest terms”.
The courageous pro-Israel writer and activist Jonathan Sacerdoti finds that his invitation to address students at the UWC Atlantic School in Wales has been cancelled. Sacerdoti had been invited to talk to them about antisemitism and journalism. After complaints by pro-Palestinian students, the school lost its nerve. Sacerdoti writes in the Spectator:
They cited concerns over students’ “emotional safety” and the difficulty of managing their reactions. The solution they proposed? That I record a pre-vetted video answering pre-approved questions, ensuring that my presence would be absent in every possible way…
In one discussion, I was told that some students might lose control of their emotions and say something “perceived as being antisemitic”. Their concern was that this might be “incriminating”, putting the student in a “vulnerable position”. The real risk was not antisemitic abuse, but how they would be judged for it.
Founded in 1962 by Kurt Hahn, a German-Jewish educator who fled the Nazis, the school was intended to bring together students from diverse backgrounds, including conflict zones, to engage in rigorous education and meaningful dialogue.
In the same week, the London School of Economics hosts the launch of a book on “understanding Hamas” that describes it as a resistance movement which has been demonised in the West. It says the demonisation of Hamas “intensified after the events in Southern Israel on October 7,” with the group being branded “as ‘terrorist’ or worse.” One contributor to the book, Jeroen Gunning, professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Conflict Studies at King’s College London, led a seminar last year for Britain’s Foreign Office, where he and three other academics told officials that calling Hamas terrorists was an “obstacle to peace” and suggested that Israel was a “white, settler colonialist nation”.
London’s Metropolitan Police decide to take no action against an imam who, shortly after the October 7 atrocities, cursed Jews and called for the destruction of their homes. This imam, who preaches at an east London mosque in an area with a sizeable number of Jewish residents, told his followers: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists. Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.” The police say the legal threshold for anti-Jewish hate crime has not been met.
On BBC Radio’s veteran soap-opera The Archers, the iconic “everyday story of country folk” in the fictional and quintessential English village of Ambridge, committed Christian and local bed-and-breakfast owner Lynda Snell is fasting for Ramadan. She explains to her neighbour: “Well I feel any opportunity to expand the human experience develops character and deepens our understanding of our fellow travellers upon this earth.” During the evening meal marking the end of the day’s fast with her Muslim neighbours, after she remarks on the beauty of the Arabic prayer before the meal a member of the family translates the prayer into English.
Faiz Shah, 22, from Bradford, Mohammad Comrie, 23, from Leeds, and Elinaj Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, from Croydon, who kidnapped and brutally assaulted an Israeli Jew last August because of his Jewish heritage and to extort money from him, are each jailed for more than eight years.
Their victim, Itay Kashti, a London-based music producer and composer, was lured to a remote holiday cottage in west Wales on the pretence of working with musicians, only to be “immediately assaulted” upon entering. The three had previously discussed their “intention of jihad” against Kashti who they believed had been on “pro-Israeli marches”.
The court hears how Kashti was kicked, punched and handcuffed to a radiator by the three men who had stocked the cottage with supplies for a week. Shah told the others: “I can actually bet that his fortune came from West Bank settlements, came from Palestinian land.” Ogunnubi-Sime said: “No remorse for a man like this, he ain’t just some Jew doing it for the bag [money], he actually loves this shit,” and told his fellow kidnappers before the attempt: “Each one of us has 100 per cent faith in Allah, so we cannot fail.”
Judge Catherine Richards states she has “no doubt” Kashti was targeted due to their “understanding of his wealth and Jewish heritage.” She says: “Anyone listening to this case would be horrified by what they heard and by the motivation behind it,” adding that the defendants “seemed to justify action against the victim in this case based on his background as if he was less worthy of your respect and compassion, and [that is] utterly abhorrent to any right-thinking person”.
The case is barely reported. Other than Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator, no horror, outrage or shock are expressed that such a thing could have happened in Britain.
I go along to the launch in the House of Lords of the report on the October 7 atrocities by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for UK-Israel, chaired by the historian Andrew Roberts (who is also Lord Roberts of Belgravia). This unsparing, scholarly and meticulously sourced report documents in excruciating detail precisely what happened on that terrible day, and for a full 24 hours after that until the last of the Hamas-led genocidists had been beaten back or killed. The book has been produced to provide unassailable evidence that refutes the wicked lies that people in the west have told themselves, denying that that the rapes and beheadings and burnings alive and torture and mass slaughter took place. It is intended to serve for generations to come as the definitive account of what happened.
The launch is attended by a heart-warming crowd of perhaps a couple of hundred people. It includes an emotionally wrenching presentation by an Israeli victim of the October 7 massacre, Ayelet Schachar-Epstein. She recounts how in the attack on her kibbutz, Kfar Aza, her son Netta jumped on a grenade to save his fiancée and was murdered along with Ayelet’s mother-in-law, a nephew and two brothers-in law. Netta was murdered shortly before his 22nd birthday. When Ayelet and others were eventually rescued from their safe room, she says, they emerged into air full of smoke and the stench of charred flesh.
Some of the peers listening to this survivor of the unspeakable barbarism by the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza are still fluttering with dismay at yet another debate about Gaza that’s just taken place in the Lords’ chamber down the corridor. The Bishop of Gloucester, Rachel Treweek, says in that debate that she finds “the recent airstrikes on Gaza deeply shocking and abhorrent”, as is “the continued cruel holding of hostages”. She wants to know what the government is doing to ensure that the Israelis “abide by their international obligations as the occupying power to ensure unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza,” and “what consideration has been given to introducing targeted sanctions should the Government of Israel persist with this culture of impunity”.
Thus Israel’s desperate struggle to defend itself against genocide, conducted with greater care for civilian life and humanitarian provision than any other military in the world ever takes in war, is denounced as a “culture of impunity”. And this from a Christian cleric. Surely the angels themselves are weeping.
Other peers pile in with gratuitous attacks and vicious distortions. Lord Purvis of Tweed wants “ targeted actions against the extremist members of the Israeli Government who have rejoined the cabinet”. Lord Grocott parrots as established fact the “400 deaths reported so far” that apparently must be added “to the 48,000 that have already taken place” — the alleged total of fatalities from the resumption of the war at the weekend which Hamas somehow counted with lightning speed to add to the now-debunked nonsensical totals they’ve been pushing throughout the war but which Grocott and his ilk are still repeating. Lord Singh of Wimbledon, inveighing against “the excesses of Israel”, asks why Britain is still supplying it with arms; while Lord Sahota opines that Gaza has been transformed from an “open prison” to an “open graveyard”.
But there is is pushback from other peers against this morally bankrupt rubbish. Baroness Foster of Oxton states that “those who are really guilty of breaching this ceasefire” are the Hamas terrorists “with many psychopaths in Gaza”, and that the only solution is to to release the remaining hostages who had been “tortured and starved” and are “still in underground tunnels”. Lord Turnberg asks: “Should we not be pressing Qatar and Egypt to impress on Hamas that it really must come to the table? We must have some peace and some resolution and it is Hamas that is preventing it.” And Lord Pannick says:
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the tragedy of Gaza is going to continue until Hamas is removed from power? Can he explain what he wants to say on this subject to Ayelet Epstein, who is watching these proceedings and whose son Netta was murdered by Hamas on 7 October when he successfully shielded his fiancée from a grenade?
What indeed.
So there are still some “right-thinking” persons in Britain. But my goodness, what they are all up against.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk
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