Tanya Gold and Jake Wallis Simons
Israelophobia: The Demonisation of a Nation

Tanya Gold & Jake Wallis Simons - Israelophobia: The Demonisation of a Nation

- So I just want to say to all our audience, welcome back everybody. It’s great to have you back for our second session, and tonight we’re particularly lucky to have a Jake Wallis Simons, who’s an award-winning journalist and novelist with us. He’s the editor of the “Jewish Chronicle”, a writer for the “Spectator” and “The Telegraph,” and a broadcaster for “Sky News” and the BBC. Formerly, he was a foreign correspondent who reported from all over the world. He has written four novels, his first work of nonfiction, “Israelophobia: The Newest Version "of the Oldest Hatred and What to do About It”, is out now. Ah, so it’s Israelophobia. Jake, thank you very, very much. I’m looking forward to reading your book. When did your book come out?

• Well, first of all, hello everybody. I can’t really see you, but I trust you are there, and I’m very glad to be speaking to you. My book, I mean, eerily enough, it came out on September the seventh.

• Oh, wow.

• It’s, yeah, four weeks to the day before October the seventh.

• Oh, wow, so it’s very, very, very recent. Well, good. I’m looking forward to reading it, and I just want to say thank you very much. I’m going to hand Jake over to Tanya Gold and she’ll be interviewing about Israelophobia. Thank you very much. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

• Thank you.

• Thank you, Wendy. Good evening, Jake, good evening, everyone, wherever you may be. It’s a pleasure to be back on Lockdown University. Now my colleague at the “Jewish Chronicle,” my boss, really, Jake, has written the definitive book about how hatred of Jews throughout the ages has mutated now to paraphrase the late Jonathan Sacks, into hatred of our state. But before we take this really very fascinating book apart, I’d like to talk to you about your work as a journalist since October the seventh, Jake, because as the editor of the “Jewish Chronicle,” you have been completely out there. You did Question Time, the first Question Time after October 7th, and all this reporting through the Middle East and also through the West is running through your newsroom. I suppose my first question, you know, due to due, is how has this felt for you emotionally? I mean, what were you doing on the morning of October the seventh and how did it begin to filter through for you?

• Well, I mean, I, like many people, I just woke up and saw an alert on my phone, and then the world changed. And I think that for me, there was a process of coming to the realisation of how radically the world had changed. I think for all of us, there was this double trauma, wasn’t there, there was the trauma of the act itself, which we’re still trying to assimilate, and then the second secondary trauma of the response around the world to it, which again, is still, both of those are still unfolding and affecting us. In terms of the experience of it, you know, until October the seventh, I’d been running the paper that the Jewish Chronicle and writing for the Spectator and others maybe once a week or so, and going on TV occasionally. But after October the seventh, it suddenly really took off, and I was thrust into this position of making the, partly because of the book, making the arguments in a much more live fire scenario than I had been for the previous four weeks talking about my book. And in terms of the experience of it, not just fighting that fight, but also, you know, running the paper at the same time, it was all consuming. I mean, like many other people, probably most people here, I didn’t sleep very much for some weeks. In fact, when I went on Question Time on Thursday, it was fulfilment of a bucket list ambition, but didn’t come in the way that I’d ever thought it would. And I went into the loo about an hour before and rested my head on the wall and slept for five minutes in order to get some energy to go on it. So I was kind of under a lot of pressure, and not just exhaustion, but also emotional trauma.

And they came, in the beginning of Question Time, when they opened it, they said to me, they came to me first and said, can you please tell us what it’s been like for Britain’s Jews? And it was quite hard to articulate it without getting emotional. I almost couldn’t do it really because of the pressure and the glare of the cameras and sort of the high stakes. And, you know, covering it, I think, in those first couple of weeks, the experience I drew upon, tried to draw upon was, when I was on the road as a foreign correspondent, one of the early stories I did was reporting on the Bataclan attacks in 2015 in Paris. And I ended up being one of the first journalists, foreign journalists there because of virtue of the fact of how close I lived to an airport. And that was the beginning. I mean, during those years I covered all the terror attacks on the ground from Paris to Nice, Stockholm, Berlin, Brussels, and further afield, Istanbul and Sri Lanka, among lots of other stories. So I’ve seen my fill of that stuff on the ground, and I drew on that emotional playbook from that time, which basically involves locking your emotions away, as I said on Question Time, looking at your emotions away somewhere where only you know the combination until the story is over. But I found that that was, that only got me so far with this story, firstly, because it’s far from over even now, and secondly, because it’s playing out through our families and through our lives and through our sense of self and identity and sense of security and place in the world, which is a very different matter from facing the trauma of others on the ground. And I feel, you know, people often ask, particularly in the early days, have asked me as I’m sure they’ve asked you, have you got any family members or friends who are affected? And my answer was, yes, 9 million of them. And it still feels like that, doesn’t it, you know, even though all those, was it eight weeks have passed and it’s still, the tail of it is still going on. And so, yeah. So that’s been my experience so far.

• One of the things I think about being Jewish is it’s never, never boring. One thing that surprised me since October the seventh, or really on October the seventh is Jews have often, you know, constantly trying to define ourselves and others are constantly trying to define us. But what I found interesting is the fact that I share, I share that view that you just alluded to, that in my mind, there’s no question, I don’t want to use the word allegiance, but I consider every Jew in the world to be a member of my family. So I share your feelings completely. And I was very lucky to do an event with my fellow columnist, my fellow much better economist, Howard Jacobson, very shortly afterwards, and I remember saying to him that I was shocked, I was absolutely shocked by the response of non-Jewish Europeans, people who live in the west, this milestone of antisemitism that ignited instantly. So I was shocked, but I was also not shocked at all. So there’s a duality, there’s a duality to this experience, which harks back to the double trauma that you talked about. And having written this book, Israelophobia, in which you very skillfully knit together something that we’ve all felt for years, which was the creeping, then galloping demonization of the state of Israel, did you also feel this sense of shock, but lack of shock? And my supplementary question there is why did you decide to write this book and when?

• Well, I think I’ve, it was a very odd experience because I’ve been banging on for ages that this was the threats, that this was how things were, you know, in my book, but also in the paper, and trying to get people to take it more seriously, you know, without overbalancing things. I mean, you know, I, particularly in the paper was always quite keen to have hard hitting investigations exposing some of this stuff, the hate breaches, the Iranian influence, the antisemitism without making the paper all about that, you know, because let’s face it, in normal times, at least rejoicing and celebrating Jewish life in Britain is as much a rebuke to the haters as exposing them. And so I’ve been banging on about this, and yet, nonetheless, on October the seventh and the subsequent weeks, it did feel like a shock how right I was. It was like, I’ve heard it described as like a flare going up over the battlefield at night and you see where everybody is standing, and many more people were standing on the other side than I’d thought, and far fewer people were standing with us. And I think that’s still true today. A lot of people weren’t standing anywhere. They were just sitting on the sofa watching telly and not really conscious while their country is being changed around them and militating against Jews on the street. So I think, yes, I think it was a shock, and I say that with no sense of satisfaction at how right my book was. You know, you sort of write in a, it’s an academic process, isn’t it, writing, and then when you see that actually it’s as true as you thought it was, it is a shock.

But also I feel like, you know, in the days, in the years before October the seventh, people had been criticising the paper on two main counts. One was on focusing too much on antisemitism, and the other was on being too friendly to the right, too right wing. And it’s maybe a slightly right of centre paper, but I feel like on those two counts, I feel we were entirely vindicated on October the seventh and since because the antisemitism, we were more than right to be trying to bring it to people’s attention. And in terms of the political right, of course, we embraced people from the left as well in the paper. But how many people on the political left, aside from the Labour Front bench stood up and spoke up for Jews in Israel in the last few weeks? It’s been almost total silence at best from the political left. And I know many people, Jews and non-Jews, who’ve been so, who’ve been made to feel so homeless as a result of this culmination of the process of radicalization of the left that’s been taking place over recent decades. In fact, one non-Jewish friend of mine from university who is, to give you a sense of her politics, she teaches radical poetry at university. She sent me a message saying, Jake, I hadn’t spoken to him in 15 years. Jake, I’m sorry I defriended you on Facebook. When you went to work for the Daily Mail, I thought you’d gone off the rails. I’m eating my words now. And she feels totally homeless politically, and a lot of people have felt that. So I think, I guess in summary, it’s been a clarifying time. That flare has gone up and we’ve seen things clearly. People have been showing their true colours, haven’t they? It’s been a moment of great clarity for everybody, and what has emerged has not always been, been very pleasant to see.

• I think the most repulsive thing I saw was a former friend of mine who is a economist at a progressive newspaper in Australia. And the day that there was a group of people outside a public building in the city in which she lives screaming, Gas the Jews, she said nothing to her, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, and intervention from her would’ve been useful. They didn’t listen to Jews except to anti-Zionist Jews, the tiny clutch of anti-Zionist Jews. Our words are worthless. And she then had the nerve, not only the next day, to post a photograph of a Jewish child murdered in Auschwitz, kind of code for Don’t hate me, I’m still a human being. She also texted me to ask me if I was all right. So I think for me, that’s been the most painful thing, has been the silence of former friends on the progressive left. But we must start talking about the book. It seems to me that Israelophobia is about how, you know, to pass it really simply, is about how Christian anti-Judaism mutated into hatred of the Jewish state born in 1947. And I mean, the thing about antisemitism, it’s always the same and it’s always different. So could we talk a little bit about the beginning of the state and the export of, I don’t think it’s too much to say, the export of Hitlerism to the Middle East under the mufti of Jerusalem, and how the idea of coexistence between Arab and Jew was strangled at birth?

• Yes. I mean, this was one of the really fascinating bits of research that I did. I mean, it’s something that it was familiar to me in general terms. When I looked into the depth of it, it was just fascinating and very, very revealing of modern day Islamism and the poison that runs through the bloodstream in the Middle East and the Arab Middle East and the Muslim world. And I mean, you know, in brief, during the second World War, the Palestinians had the misfortune, as they have had since to be led by extremists. One in particular was called Haj Amin al Husseini, who’s probably familiar to many people who are watching. And he was an extremist, clannish gangster who vanquished the moderate faction, the NASH-UH-SHIH-BEE, and took control really. And he was like a godfather figure in Palestinian society, controlling all the communal organisations and their funds and developing links with the British and other European powers. But during the second World War, he wished to have the Final Solution brought to Palestine in order to rid it of Jews, and went to Berlin and collaborated with Hitler, he was part of a team of Palestinians and other Arabs who collaborated with Hitler and the senior Nazis to develop this toxic blend of Islamism with Nazism. And they worked together to hone the Nazi, the paranoid conspiratorial classical European antisemitism, which derived from the Christian tradition, from the protocols of the elders of Zion, and from the pseudoscience of the Nazis and the general paranoia of the Nazi worldview, and they passed it through Koranic metaphor and language and tropes to produce propaganda that was hugely clever because it took all the sort of appeal on our base natures that Nazism represented and deepened it by giving it a profound cultural resonance in the Middle East.

And I quote some of the passages in my book. It’s extraordinary when you, so this stuff was broadcast mainly via wireless radio, we call it now, into the Middle East, thousands of hours of broadcasts. In fact, as I’m speaking, I’ll flick through the book and see if I can find one example, ‘cause it’s so interesting to see. And this stuff really did, it only only happened for a few short years, but had a very, very powerful effect. So yeah, so this, for example, so this was a speech. This is what the cover of the book looks like, by the way. And this bit from July, 1942, the presenter delivered a speech entitled, “Kill the Jews Before They Kill You,” which was delivered about the time as the first Jews were arriving at Sobibor and Auschwitz. And just a couple of lines. He said, “According to the Muslim religion, "the defence of your life is a duty "which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews. "This is your best opportunity to get rid "of this dirty race, "which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune "and destruction on your countries. "Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their shops, "annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism. "Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews "before they annihilate you.” Extraordinary. You can hear the dirty Jews, that’s such a Nazi thing, and the base British, supporters of British imperialism is such a Nazi thing, but the Islamic duty that’s threaded through, it’s so toxic.

And this was, after the war, Husseini who had other crimes in addition to this, working with the SS and so on, was captured by the Allies and released back to Palestine. He became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And the Muslim Brotherhood, as you may know, became the source from which Sunni Jihadism sprung, from the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, as the most influential figure was Said KOOB-TOOB after the war, sprang Hamas, sprang Al-Qaeda, and sprang the Islamic State. They have differences, but their roots are in the same place. And if you look at the Hamas charter, which is obviously current at the moment, article 32, I believe, says that, accuses the Jews in Israel of seeking to take over not just the land of Palestine, but the entire Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates, and as evidence of this, it cites the protocols of the elders of Zion. So this is Nazism really, and it’s still alive today, as we can see in Israel, the resonances between the massacres of October the seventh and the massacres of the Nazi era are not entirely coincidental.

And the other addition, I would say, on this chapter of history is that when the British and the United Nations proposed the first, for the first time, the two-state solution in 1947, the proposal was to have a Jewish state with an Arab minority which exists, and alongside it, an Arab state with a Jewish minority, which does not exist for a variety of reasons. They proposed that. And as we know, the Arab side rejected it, whereas the Jewish side accepted it. At that time, the person who rejected it on behalf of the Palestinians was none other than Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a enthusiastic supporter of the Holocaust, who had exported Hitlerism into the Middle East and saw in the rejection of the two states solution in 1947, the opportunity to commit genocide of the Jews and tried to do so by calling upon irregular forces from the Muslim Brotherhood alongside other armies of the Middle East in the first attempt at a fully genocidal war. So all of that history is fascinating and really relevant to today, I think, to the modern jihadism, still contains the virus of Hitlerism

• Antisemitism in Christian Europe, I’ve always read it’s not only an emotional imperative, but also had very practical, practical uses for the anti-Semite and even for the cynic who used to, who wished to manipulate the anti-Semite. And I’ve seen there’s a similar dynamic in the Middle East because I understand from reading your book that there were many moderate Arab voices who wish to accept a Jewish state in 1947. Could you very quickly analyse that situation for me, and also why it failed, why it has failed so completely.

• I think that there’s always been this duality in the Middle East and in the Arab world between the self-interest of individual Arab peoples, whether it’s tribes or nation states or leaders, and the demands of pan-Arabism, the sense of the Arab people on the whole being one nation. And that pan-Arabism has fractured dramatically really since the fall of Iraq, the downfall of the Baathist party and the Arab Spring has begun to fracture. But it was very powerful in decades past and still has a degree of power today. And when Husseini called upon his Arab friends and allies to wage war on the Jews rather than accept the two state solution in 1947, behind closed doors, many of them expressed reservations and wondered whether it wasn’t better to accommodate the Jews in some way.

But then when it came to it, when it came to the crunch and war was going to happen, those same people who’d expressed reservations behind closed doors issued the most blood curdling injunctions and war cries, and joined the fray without hesitation. And you can see that echoing today actually as well, that after October the seventh, the Saudis for instance, you know, publicly spoke out quite strongly, particularly in the beginning against Israel. And the analysis at that time was, this is the end of the Saudi deal. The Saudis have turned on and are now, you know, reverting to type as it were. But after a short time, the analysis changed and with enough kind of background, anonymous briefings, people came to realise that actually the Saudis hadn’t taken that position. They’re not particularly keen on Hamas, as isn’t the rest, most of the rest of the Arab world. Indeed the most vivid pro-Hamas demonstrations we’ve seen in recent weeks have been in the West, not in the Middle East. So I think that, yes, there’s always been that tension between the demands of loyalty that pan Arabism imposes and the self-interest, the breaking, the instinct to break with the consensus. And we’ve seen that with the Abraham Accords in recent years.

• I wanted to move to talking about Israelophobia in the west, in America, in Canada, in Europe. Because, it often seems to me that, as people scream, Free Palestine, they don’t actually want to free Palestine at all. Well, certainly don’t want to free it from Hamas. And they seem happy for these people that they claim to love to live under the most unbearable tyrannies in which women and gay people and any kind of dissident is immaterial, unsafe. And I suppose these questions fuse much more back into ancient Christian antisemitism because I’ve spent a lot of time, well, really since, since Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015, wondering what on earth is in it for these people. And I wanted to explore that question with you. I have my own theories that I’m happy to share with you, but could you start off on that, Jake?

• Yes, I mean I think we’re probably going to find some points of similarity in this, Tanya. I think that most of the people taking to the street every weekend, for them, for many of them and certainly for the more radical and ideological ones, it’s not really about the Palestinians. It’s about society here and really about themselves, their own political identities, and it’s an expression of that. It’s an expression of radicalism, of anti-capitalism, of anti-tourism, of anti-status quo. It’s mixed in with, you know, we’ve seen Just Stop Oil, the radical environmental demonstrators taking on the Palestinian cause. It’s definitely a phenomenon of the political hard left in its deepest expression. And you know, I do feel that there’s more than a whiff of narcissism about it as well. You know, when the Palestinians were being barrel bombed by Assad during the Syrian civil war in the south of Syria, there were no demonstrations in their favour. And when Muslims have been massacred or abused, when they’ve been herded into concentration camps in China and they’ve been expelled and raped in Burma, and when they’ve been attacked by other Muslims all over the Middle East, we haven’t seen any anger at all on the streets of Britain. So it is not about the Palestinians or the Muslims, it’s about the perpetrators, it’s about the Jews, and more than that it’s about what it means about me, that I stand up against Jewish power and against capitalism and against the dark forces in Britain. So I think it’s really a narcissistic self-serving attempt to peg yourself into the ideological political firmament and to express a sort of anti-establishment instinct. And I think that if these, that a lot of these people, I do feel, just don’t have experience of real life Palestinians, or if they have, they’ve experienced it through such a thick ideological lens that they haven’t really seen it. They’re not interested in the reality, they’re not interested in what’s really going on, and not just the Palestinians, but also across the Middle East. They haven’t got a deep knowledge. And I do feel as a final note that you, if I can say this, is this off record or is this being recorded? I’m just about to libel somebody.

• I think it’s being recorded, so be careful.

• Alright, I won’t say what I was about to say, but there’s a certain, yes, I won’t talk about the certain commentator that’s in my mind.

• I think I know who you’re talking about.

• Knew where I was going with that.

• I mean, I completely agree with you. I covered one of the big Palestine marches in Central London, and two things were very clear to me. The first is, if I was to raise an Israeli flag or even hold a sign that said, Hamas is terrorism, I would not have been physically safe. That was perfectly clear to me. And as regards the way that when they say, We are all Palestinian, what they really mean is the Palestinian is me was beautifully illustrated for me. When I saw a sign just up against a pillar in Trafalgar Square, and it said, End genocide, and on instinct, it was done in a very pretty hand. Obviously I’m certain it was done by a woman. I was certain it was done by a woman. And it was very prettily done and coloured, and on instinct, I turned it round and it said Israel is just like my ex-boyfriend. And I thought, that’s it. You know, that’s it. Exactly. I mean, Howard Jacobson, who I can never stop quoting 'cause I think he writes better on antisemitism than anyone alive says the Jews have become an idea, we’ve always been an idea, with a fearful mirror in which the non-Jew looks and sees everything it fears and everything it is. So I think that that woman personally was the opposite of politicised. This appalling crisis, she has made all about her. And in my hometown of Penzance, she very kindly let me, let me cover a protest march there.

And I mean, frankly, these people didn’t know what they were talking about. I mean, they stood up with blood libel after blood libel, after blood libel, and they actually let me speak, and I said things that I suspect they found more reasonable than they were comfortable with. I’m for the partition plan, you know, I’m for peace. I think we should get out of the West Bank if we can. I’m not a fan of the settlers and I would like the settlements to be disbanded. And I think they were really disappointed that I wasn’t the sort of monster that they’ve conjured in their minds. And my final point on this, because I have been so obsessed why the bourgeois liberal left who are frankly the people who make these terrible utterances of hatred respectable, when I think about what’s in it for them, and I think at the end of the day, it really is just rank selfishness because these people live in incredible luxury. You know, they live in one of the most comfortable and wealthy liberal democracies on earth. And yet for vanity, they have to walk around saying that they’re anticapitalist, and they aren’t, of course, of course they aren’t. They’ll never leave their lovely houses. And so they launder their souls using hatred of the Jews. And I think there’s one other element, which is if you believe that Jews being so evil that the holocaust, you know, the very nadir of human civilization, if the Jews were somehow responsible for it being so very evil, you will sleep better at night. I think it’s comforting for them.

• Yeah, I mean I think that the phrase that fitted what you were just saying about the bourgeois liberal antisemite is luxury beliefs, which an American commentator called Rob Henderson came up with. And it describes a suite of views which will be familiar to all of us with radical positions on colonialism, on slavery, on sexuality, on gender, and on Israel and Palestine. And they, the term luxury indicates that they’re not deeply held expressions of values and conviction, but instead they are markers of status. You know, if I can express to the world my concern with misgendering or with the Palestinians or with microaggressions or with structural racism, then I’m communicating that I’m part of the new elites to some extent. And that’s where the luxury comes into it. It’s a luxury option that enhances my social status.

• It’s so incredibly trivial. I wanted to ask you about, not your comment, of course, their beliefs. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the right, I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, but sometimes I sense a little bit of friction between us on this because it’s very much my belief that the right will come for us too when it stops being expedient. And my fear is a lot of the people who are standing up for us at the moment, the example being, of course, Tommy Robinson turning up at the march against antisemitism , and in my view, thankfully, being arrested before he caused trouble, is at the moment they are using the Jewish cause to bash the Muslims, and when they get bored of that, they won’t love us any better. Do you have any views on Israelophobia on the right? What are your beliefs?

• Well, I think that you and I are in slightly different positions, 'cause I think that naturally, politically, we fall slightly on other sides of the line, if I’m not, if that’s not too much of a presumption on my part, Tanya. But I am naturally center-right, I suppose, rather than center-left in most things. Not in everything, but in most issues. And so I feel a bit more comfortable. But I think that the far right is obviously a grave threat. Not so much in Britain actually, but throughout Europe and in the United States, there was a very violent and virulent far right scene, if you want to call it that, sometimes breaking into politics, you know. But the alternative for Deutschland who are represented in the German parliament, to the Sweden Democrats who are part of the ruling administration in Sweden, and many other countries, the Front National or whatever they’re called now in France, the Le Pen outfit and others across Europe. And of course in the United States, we’ve had actual shootings, antisemitic killings like the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, which has illustrated how, just how much of a deep threat it is on the far right. In Britain, we don’t suffer from that to the same extent. I don’t mean to diminish the unpleasantness of the Tommy Robinsons of this world, but we don’t have, the closest political, the closest we get to a far right political representation is probably UKIP or Reform UK or whatever the Brexit party, as it was, which is not very clear, I mean, they’re a bit of a joke.

They might change the outcome of the election by taking votes off the Tories, but they won’t win any political seat. They’re never going to come anywhere near Parliament, touch wood. I don’t think they will. Certainly not in the next 10, 15, 20 years. And the most they can do is cause trouble at Jewish demonstrations and do interviews with the Five Pillars lot. And I think that we have seen recently an attempt by the far right to latch on to a larger movement in Britain in an attempt to get some relevance by proxy. So you mentioned Tommy Robinson trying to latch on to the Jewish community and the Jewish cause because he’s trying to use the fact that in his basic view of society, we stand against Muslims, so does he, therefore, he’s going to be with us, a sort of base calculation. And we’ve seen Nick Gryphon, the former leader of the BMP siding with extremist Muslims, because in his mind you stand against the Jews, I stand against the Jews, let’s be together because they’re desperately trying to get more support than they have naturally in Britain. You know, we’re quite a moderate country, we don’t really have much truck with the far right. So that’s my reading of it without seeking to downplay the threat, particularly overseas. My overall reading of it is that.

• I’m wondering whether, now it’s been seven weeks, because I don’t know how you felt, but my extremely emotional response, and I suspect the emotional response of some listeners is to instinctively feel that we were alone. There was a heartbreaking video of a Jewish man outside Labour Party conference. I dunno if you saw it. And he was heckling a crowd of pro-Palestine protestors, sorry, people speaking for Palestine. And this was very, very shortly after October the seventh, I think it was the eighth or the ninth, and he was shouting at them, you like that, don’t you? You like it that we’re always on our own. But now seven weeks on and there has been some polling by the excellent More in Common think tank saying that as you say, this country is more moderate, is still more moderate than our worst fears would bear out. And I’m wondering whether a lot of our fear is based on the fact that anti-Jewish, anti-Israel voices are so magnified, first of all on social media. We’ve heard about the sort of horrors of TikTok and brand new racism and let’s learn how to be antisemitic on TikTok and on Twitter. And also because people who do hate Israel and who do hate Jews are so overrepresented, well, in the media.

• Yeah–

• I mean, I respect another accusation often made at us back to others. I’m wondering whether I’ve been panicking too much and I wonder what you think about that.

• I think that’s a really interesting question because you are right, certainly, that social media lends the wrong people megaphones. I’ve felt, you know, generally my position on social media up until October the seventh has been take it with a very large grain of salt because I’ve always been aware that you look over the heads of the people shouting loudest on social media to the majority who are not on social media being extreme, but who are moderate and reasonable. And so, you know, in the month between when my book came out and when October the seventh happened, I was receiving a lot of hate because of the book. And I just recognised that this was a small number of idiots speaking into an echo chamber and it didn’t represent the real Britain since October the seventh, I’ve taken it a bit more seriously because social media does have the power to brainwash people to win hearts and minds, and that, you know, people spend a lot of time on social media. You know, I’ve done events since October the seventh to people who are Israel activists and all of their activism, you know, all of the comments and the questions that I’ve taken have been really about what happens on social media. That’s the world. So I think it can be more pernicious than I previously allowed, particularly as we’ve seen with TikTok infecting young minds so effectively, and we can talk about that separately. But I think that aside from that, I think generally, in the country you are right, the people who are extreme pro-Palestinians, anti-Israel, anti-Britain, anti-capitalist and all the rest of it are small in number. And there is a silent majority that is basically decent without skin in the game, without particularly strong prejudice One way or the other.

Maybe they’ve absorbed some Israelophobic narratives because it’s hard not to without, if you don’t actively combat it. But they’re basically decent people. And Sunday, two weeks ago when we had that march against antisemitism, a lot of them came out onto the streets with us. There were a lot of Christians there, there were a lot of Hindus there, there were people from many different communities, a lot of Iranians there, and just ordinary people who came out to support the Jews, and the overall number was more than a hundred thousand people. But they were dwarfed nonetheless by those attending the pro-Palestinian marches, and they were eclipsed almost entirely by the vast silent majority who remained silent, who didn’t come out and who aren’t doing anything and who can’t rouse themselves to anger or to passion about what they see happening or what they don’t even see happening, perhaps, because they’re not looking hard enough, and to the Jews of Britain. And I feel like what Jews are going through in Britain is part of a greater social corrosion by which these luxury beliefs that we’ve, that I’ve mentioned earlier, with these radical positions on gender and race and colonialism and slavery in Israel and Palestine is beginning to undermine ourselves, to hollow out society from the inside, and it has serious real world consequences and the silent majority are remaining silent. You know, I wrote in, I know it is bad form to quote oneself, but I just, because I wrote about this in the Sunday Telegraph last week, and I talked about Victor Klemperer’s idea of the Jews as being a seismic people because we feel the earth tremoring before the earthquake hits. And right now we are feeling that, the earthquake has hit in Israel and we’re feeling the tremors here. And I’ve just phrased it that what we, what the last few weeks have taught us is that when the Jews feel the tectonics plates shift under our feet, the rest of the country puts the kettle on. And that’s kind of how it feels. I just don’t know when they’re going to, when the silent majority, who I’m sure are decent and moderate and kind, when they’re going to just stop being so silent.

• I mean, I think you are completely right. And I’ve had a long series of conversations with a very understanding non-Jewish friend of mine, and we talked on and on and on about this. And she said to me, what do you want? What response do you want from me? And I thought about it, and as you know, I’ve just finished a long piece that took me two years to research about Holocaust memorialization. So I spent several weeks staying in Poland to research this: Three and a half million Jews in Poland in 1940, as you know, and 5,000 now. And I thought very hard about what I wanted. And I said to her, I want you to find this unbearable. I want people, on seeing this existential threat to Jewish people to run from their homes and scream their lack of acceptance of this from their doorsteps, but of course, they didn’t. And I said to her, you know, that this affects you too, because when a society turns on its Jews, as you say, that is a sign that that society is crumbling, that its values are crumbling, and people should remember what happened last time. There was only one other thing I wanted to ask you about before we start taking questions. And this is, as you know, a particular obsession of mine. What do you believe is the role of the anti-Zionist Jews in this, as a Jew, who I estimated five to 10% of the population. Let’s not name check them. They love it.

• Okay, I mean, just a thought that just occurred to me just about what you just said though that I’d like to share, where your friend asked you, What do you want me to do, I think what we want is for them to be how they were during the Brexit debate in 2016. Be like that. During Brexit, people really cared about it. They talked about it all the time, whether they were remainers or they were leavers, you couldn’t get away from it. A lot of people demonstrated in the streets on both sides. They wrote to their MPs, they demanded political representation. They had a stake in the issue and they tried to change it in so many different ways. I mean, of course some people were disengaged, but it was, everyone was thinking about it and talking about it because they cared. And that’s, I think that if you people were like this, if people were like that over this, you know, this matters arguably more than that. And I think that’s what we should be asking for, or expecting, and it’s what we’re not getting. But to talk about the Jewish Israelophobes, I mean, there aren’t very many of them, are there? And I mean, I know the function that they play is that they act as alibis for the haters, for Israelophobes. You know, so often people will say, I’m not anti-Semitic because I’ve got a Jewish friend, you know, as if having a Jewish friend is a price worth paying to be excused from the accusation of being antisemitic. And it will inevitably be a Jewish friend who is equally as far left and extreme as they are. And I think that what is going through, I don’t mean to presume to know what’s going through the minds of these people because I don’t know any of them very well personally at all. I’ve barely spoken to them, apart from being shouted at from time to time.

But I feel like what they are looking for, more than anything else, is acceptance. And that is what all Jews are seeking in our hearts to some extent, I think. Certainly the diaspora tradition is wanting to be accepted, and even in Israel, they don’t wear it as heavily as we do, but they want to be accepted into the Middle East, into the family of nations. They want normalisation. Who doesn’t. Acceptance because, and we feel it so keenly because we’ve had so little of it for so many thousands of years. And the shifting of antisemitism from a race-based hatred in the 20th century to a political movement now that hates Jews for their nation state, not for their race, opens a door to acceptance that you can go through if you only disavow your own homeland. So, you know, disavowing your own homeland and roots is the price that you will pay for entry into the hard left and acceptance by the hard left. And not only will you be accepted, but you’ll be accepted as the mascot, you know, as the totem, maybe the court jester. You’ll be that because you’re so valuable to the Israelophobes because you are Jewish and you’re giving them cover that you assume a special significance in that milieu. And that’s quite tempting, I think, for somebody who’s, A, inclined to the hard left anyway, and B, quite weak-willed and impressionable and desperate for acceptance, and C, without a very strong and heartfelt connection to their own Jewishness perhaps. And that can be a quite deadly combination that can lead people to become agents of those who seek us harm even though they’re Jewish themselves.

• I mean, they were essential it seemed, in retrospect to the Corbyn movement, the dreadful Jewish voice, the Labour, for example. But my belief is, although they have accelerated the trend, it probably would’ve happened without them. Would you agree?

• What would’ve happened without 'em, the Corbyn era, you know?

• The renewal of public hatred against Jews would’ve happened without them being the handmaidens to it, the alibis, the beards, the–

• Oh yes, definitely. I mean, I think it’s bigger than them. It’s much bigger than them. I think they, you know, I think they have a lot of significance in a very small echo chamber. I think most people don’t, aren’t really aware of them and don’t really care and probably don’t know that much about it. But I think within the kind of battlegrounds of the hard left and those who are trying to, you know, limit their abilities to spread their hatred, then it becomes quite relevant then.

Q&A and Comments:

• I’m going to just scroll through the questions, if that’s all right. I think we’ve covered a question from Tommy KAM-IHL-EE.

Q: Could you say, oh, could you say what you think of Jewish people who participate in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations?

A: Well, maybe we haven’t covered that entirely because I didn’t, I mean, what do you think? Have you been at one of the pro-Palestine demonstrations as a journalist?

• No, no, I haven’t. No, no.

• Well, you know, I will try and answer it. I mean, as I said, I feel that if you had explicitly stated any kind of Zionism at these marches, even a liberal Zionism, you would’ve placed yourself in danger. Maybe not physical danger, but certainly of heckling and of dislike.

Q: From Adrian Wolfe, To those Jews who protest against Israel defending itself, did you support the UK in 1982 when Argentina invaded British territory?

A - Well, it’s a similar question. I mean, I think that, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, history is rich with examples that we can draw upon that contrast with the attitudes that people have towards Israel defending itself now. And one of them is of course, World War II, which was the last time that we experienced existential threat, and look how we behaved. I mean, we didn’t concern ourselves overly with the deaths of German civilians. In fact, you know, many multiples more Germans were killed than Britons. But that didn’t make us think that we were fighting an unjust war or that we should have a ceasefire in 1941 or anything like that. And indeed we ended up firebombing Dresden and burning alive 25,000 civilians, which is not, I’m not saying that Israel should do the same, but I’m saying that that’s what we do when pushed, or at least not what we did then when we were pushed.

And the other example that I’ve been thinking about a lot is our campaign against Islamic State. The Battle of Mosul in 2016, 2017 was quite similar in some ways to the campaign against Gaza in that it was, the city had Islamic State fighters in it, embedded amongst civilians, although they had only a year to prepare rather than 17 years as Hamas has had, there weren’t any tunnels, but they were in there. And we and the Americans and the Iraqis and the Kurds besieged them on the ground. We bombed it from the air, an aerial assault. And then they went in and won the battle. And by the end of it, estimates vary widely, but between 11,000 and up to 40,000 civilians were killed in that assault. Not a single person came onto the streets in Britain demonstrating against the civilian death toll. They didn’t die any less gruesome a death than the Gazan and civilians are dying now. And we took, if anything, less care over the placement of our bombs than the Israelis are taking over theirs. And so, you know, there are various differences, but the basic morality of it has to be the same, that there are, there is a cause for a just war sometimes, and we need to be able to defend it.

• Were you disappointed with the antisemitism protest, asks Gita Khan. It wasn’t, if you prick us, do we not bleed rather than a proud upstanding recognition of our place and contribution to British society. Now you were there and I wasn’t, and the reason I wasn’t there was firstly because I live in West Cornwall and secondly my friend rang me up, my non-Jewish friend, a different friend, and said, Are you on the antisemitism march? And I said, rather grandly, it’s not for Jews, it’s for you. You are the one who should be going. I stand up for Jews always. What was your view of the march? The anti, the Jewish–

• I thought it was really good. I liked it a lot. I thought there were, I mean, for me, it showed up the Jewish leadership quite a lot because there was a lot of disunity amongst the various Jewish factions leading the community. And I felt that there should have been better political representation, higher profile political figures should have attended. But other than that it felt very good spirited, it felt very tolerant, and it felt very sort of innervating, I suppose. But I think that underlying your question is perhaps something which I have felt, which is that, you know, I have some, you know, a less of a tolerance I think these days for Jews who don’t stick up for Jews. And I have less of a reservation. You know, I just think we’re in a position at the moment where there is such a clear right and wrong, there is such a clear moral landscape at the moment, and it’s the, and the need to stand up is so urgent that people need to do it. Not just Jews, but we’re talking about Jews. And if you can’t, you know, and I feel less apologetic about the bonds of loyalty that Jews rightfully experience. And I feel not apologetic at all at, at sort of expressing that myself by trying to fight in the way that I can and demanding it of others. I think everyone should do it, you know? As the Norwegian saying has it, Every bird must sing with a beak it has.

Q - There’s a very pertinent question from Andrea Bernstein: Given that Mr. Simons describes himself as leaning to the right, what is his view of the politics of Likud in general, and Netanyahu in particular, and I was hoping you’d take this with another question, which is anonymous, saying if there was a legitimate two-state approach, perhaps the world’s hatred of Israel would be minimised. What do we think of that? They seem to be connected questions.

A - Yeah, well, there are two huge questions and I’ll try to just skip through them quite quickly. I mean, Netanyahu could, I mean, like everybody, I despair at Netanyahu himself and at the political catastrophe, which had a major part, I think it’s indisputable to play, in the current calamity which has befallen our homeland. There’s been a, not just a lack of leadership, but there’s been some, you know, the opposite of good leadership, has been bad and damaging and quite contemptible leadership, not just from Netanyahu himself, but also from his extremist allies who are inexcusably occupied in places around the cabinet table.

Q - Can I just push you on that just for, well, not push you, but just ask you, I mean, it’s my view that these people have no place in any government. I mean, do you share that view? Do you think that Netanyahu should just, you know, if this is the only way he can stay in power, it’s his duty to Israel to just bow out?

A - I think it was his duty to Israel not to bow in the last time he did, frankly. I think he’s gone along. Yeah, he was in his prime, a magisterial leader. And I’m not, you know, the Abraham Accords were his brainchild from the beginning, really, you know, and he’s done so much good for the country, but it just seems to me that it is just unavoidable. The unavoidable truth is that he has become not just a shadow of his former self, but he is become his own nemesis, really. And the destruction he’s brought on the country now is just so clear. So yes, I agree that he and his cronies should not be in their positions,

Q - You know, a great deal more about the Arab world than I do. Do you think there is any possibility or pathway to peace? What do you thinks going to happen?

A - Well, I mean the two state solution, which is the other part of the question, wasn’t it? I mean, I, you know, it would be nice, wouldn’t it? I cannot see how that could happen anytime soon. And the main reason, aside from all the Israeli flaws, of which there have been many over the years. I think the deeper obstacle is the lack of any kind of decent Palestinian leadership. The Palestinians have been failed by their leadership ever since the establishment of Israel and before. And if you look at the Palestinian side, look at Fatah, look at Abbas, who’s supposed to be the moderate, I mean, he was saying the other day that the Nova Music Festival, that the Israeli victims of that had been killed, not by Hamas, but by Israeli helicopters. You know, he supported the Hamas attacks on October the seventh. You know, he did not condemn them and, indeed, he supported them. He is in the 18th year of his four year term in office. He presides over a brutal and corrupt autocracy on the West Bank, you know, and crushes his opposition. There was a case that about two years ago of a prominent pro-democracy campaign, a Palestinian pro-democracy campaigner called Nizar Banat, who was gaining a following and who was tipped as a possible political alternative to Abbas in the future. And he was arrested by Palestinian security forces and beaten to death.

I cannot see how there could be any semblance of a functioning state on the West Bank or in Gaza when that’s the best they’ve got. So that’s just the reality. It’s not how I want it to be. It’s how it is. And we have to accept the reality for how it is. How we get out of this position, I don’t know. I think the two sort of glimmers that I would point out is, firstly from the Israeli point of view, I think that the doctrine that was pursued by the Bennett administration before this one, which was the brainchild of a public intellectual called Mika Goodman was called shrinking the conflict, which the idea is that 70% of Israelis agree on 70% of the issues. And so let’s work out what we can agree on and take a step forward. And when applied to the Palestinians, it’s that okay, maybe we can’t see a grand idea of a two state solution right now or political settlement right now, but we can help to build confidence by maybe easing a checkpoint here or a checkpoint there, or more visas there, or make it easier to go into Jordan across the bridge or the bridge or whatever it is to try to step towards a position of confidence building. The other glimmer of hope is the Abraham Accords and the bringing in of external Arab powers to help to stabilise the Palestinian areas. And we might see that in Gaza, perhaps, after the war is over, if and after. But as I’m saying this, I’m aware of how thin these two glimmers of hope sound. They’re not very substantial at all. That’s just the reality as it appears to me.

• Thank you, Jake. It’s, well, it’s going on eight, so I’m going to have to bring this to a close. Thank you very much for listening tonight, wherever you are in the world. Thank you, Wendy, and especially thanks to you, Jake. I know as the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, you have an absolutely terrible time online, and I did once say to you as a joke before October 7th that it’s your job to get shouted out by everybody as the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. But I certainly didn’t mean in that way and I would advise everyone who loves words and wishes to defend Israel to buy your book, “Israelophobia”.

• Thank you very much. It’ll be available, I’m not sure everybody is in the world, but it should be out in the States next year, sort of February time. But you can get it on amazon.co.uk if you want to as well. They’ll ship it out there, and it’ll be with you in a couple of weeks.

Q - Thank you. Excellent presentation, and thank you guys. Jake, are you going to be at the book launch? Are you going to, you know, are you going to be at your book launches? Will you be there in New York?

A - Yes, I’m hoping to go over to the States in the new year, yes.

• Okay, great.

• I haven’t got exact dates yet, but I’m hoping to be there.

• Okay, good. Well, hopefully I’ll be there. Would love to host you when you’re there.

• That’d be wonderful.

• Thank you very much. That really was a very interesting presentation. Thank you to you both, it was excellent. Thanks for joining us, bye-bye.