Britain, I Barely Recognise You

This is a difficult article for me to write.

Not because I’m frightened of what people will say. I think we established quite some time ago that I lost whatever filter I once possessed somewhere around October 2023.

It is difficult because I am writing about a country I am profoundly grateful to.

Britain gave me opportunities. It gave my family opportunities.

I spent a huge part of my childhood here and I have spent roughly half my life here. My children are growing up here. I have built businesses here, made lifelong friendships here, laughed here, cried here, succeeded here and spectacularly fucked things up here.

Britain has been part of the architecture of my life.

Which is precisely why I find myself writing something I never imagined I would say:

I am ashamed of what Britain is becoming.

Not ashamed of British people.

Not ashamed of the millions of decent, hardworking people who get up every morning, take their kids to school, go to work, pay their taxes, care for their neighbours, volunteer in their communities and quietly hold this country together with Sellotape, tea and sheer bloody determination.

I’m ashamed of what has happened to the country around them.

Because the Britain I grew up admiring increasingly feels like a shadow of itself.

A country once famous for stubbornness now appears terrified of offending anyone who shouts loudly enough.

A country that once understood the difference between democracy and tyranny increasingly ties itself in moral knots trying to pretend there is no difference at all.

And a country whose grandparents fought fascism has somehow reached the bizarre point where people openly glorify terrorist organisations on British streets while Jews are advised to think carefully about where we wear a Star of David.

Something has gone horribly wrong.

Then There Is Israel

Britain is the country in which I live.

Israel is something different. Israel is my spiritual and ancestral home.

It is where my people come from. Where our language was born. Where our prayers have pointed for thousands of years. Where Jewish history is written into stones beneath your feet.

You do not have to agree with every Israeli government. I certainly don’t.

You do not have to agree with every military decision. I certainly don’t.

Israel is a democracy populated by Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins and people from virtually every imaginable background. We argue about absolutely everything. Usually simultaneously. Preferably while eating.

Criticising Israel is not antisemitic.

But obsessively applying standards to Israel that are rarely applied elsewhere, stripping away the context of October 7, treating Hamas propaganda as gospel and portraying the Jewish state as uniquely evil is something else entirely.

And Britain’s political leadership has increasingly wandered into that territory.

The British government has suspended some arms export licences, paused free-trade negotiations, sanctioned Israelis and now imposed restrictions on goods from Israeli settlements.

Its Foreign Secretary has gone further, publicly accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Those are extraordinary words.

Especially when directed towards a country still living through the consequences of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

A war Israel did not ask for.

A war that began when Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel on October 7, 2023 and murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped ordinary human beings.

Babies.

Children.

Parents.

Grandparents.

People dancing at a music festival.

People sitting in their kitchens.

People hiding in cupboards while terrorists searched their homes.

You can believe Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly, because they have.

You can demand that Israel protects civilian life.

You can criticise Israeli policy.

You can mourn every innocent Palestinian child killed in this nightmare.

I do.

None of those things require pretending October 7 never happened.

Nor do they require pretending Hamas is some slightly overenthusiastic Palestinian residents’ association.

Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organisation whose ideology has for decades rejected Israel’s right to exist. Its founding charter contained grotesque antisemitism. Its fighters demonstrated on October 7 what that hatred looks like when translated from words into human beings with guns, knives and grenades.

And Israel is expected to fight that enemy according to a standard seemingly demanded of no other country facing people who deliberately embed themselves among civilians.

That does not place Israel beyond criticism.

It places criticism within reality.

There is a difference.

Britain Has Forgotten Who Its Enemies Are

Perhaps the most astonishing part of Britain’s increasingly hostile posture towards Israel is that Israel has spent decades helping keep Britain safe.

That isn’t some sentimental claim about friendship between nations.

It is intelligence.

Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen has spoken publicly about Israeli intelligence that he says saved British lives.

The British Parliament itself has heard the same fundamental point stated plainly: Israeli intelligence has helped prevent terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.

Think about that for a moment.

While British politicians compete to condemn Israel, Israeli intelligence officers have been working behind the scenes helping stop people being murdered on British streets.

And notice something important.

I didn’t say Jewish lives.

British lives.

Because Islamist extremists do not ultimately divide the world into Jews and everyone else.

Jews may frequently be near the beginning of the list.

We are rarely the end of it.

The ideology threatening liberal democratic societies despises many of the things modern Britain supposedly celebrates: religious freedom, women’s equality, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, secular government and the ability to reject religion altogether.

This distinction matters enormously.

I am talking about Islamism, an extremist political ideology.

I am not talking about Muslims.

Millions of Muslims want exactly what I want: to raise their families, live safely, build good lives and be left alone by lunatics claiming divine permission to murder people.

They are threatened by extremists too.

But refusing to name Islamist extremism because doing so feels uncomfortable doesn’t make anyone safer.

It simply makes us quieter.

And extremists adore silence.

The Wet Paper Tiger

Britain increasingly resembles a wet paper tiger.

Still roaring.

Still issuing statements.

Still lecturing other countries about morality.

But underneath?

Weak.

Terrified.

Politically paralysed.

Unable to distinguish between compassion and capitulation.

There is something almost surreal about watching British politicians lecture Israel about security while Britain itself struggles with home-grown extremism, Iranian-linked threats, antisemitism and people openly celebrating organisations Britain itself designates as terrorists.

Meanwhile Israel develops the cyber-security systems you use.

The medical technology you depend upon.

The defence systems protecting Western soldiers.

The intelligence helping European governments stop terrorist attacks.

Israeli technology runs quietly beneath huge chunks of the modern world while Israel itself is portrayed as some rogue civilisation that the enlightened West has finally discovered it must discipline.

Fine.

But choices have consequences.

You cannot endlessly kick an ally in the teeth and simultaneously assume that nothing about that relationship will ever change.

Israel has already responded to Britain’s latest measures by dramatically reducing diplomatic cooperation.

And I suspect this is only the beginning.

Because eventually Israelis will ask an entirely reasonable question:

Why should we continually help countries whose governments treat us as their moral embarrassment?

I desperately hope intelligence sharing continues because ordinary British people should not pay for the stupidity of their politicians.

But Britain should never make the mistake of assuming Israeli cooperation is a law of physics.

Friendship requires reciprocity.

So does trust.

And Britain Is Losing More Than Israel

This is the part British politicians seem incapable of understanding.

Israel will survive Britain turning against it.

We have survived considerably worse.

Jewish civilisation has watched Assyria, Babylon, Rome, Byzantium, empires, caliphates, kingdoms and dictatorships rise, declare themselves permanent and eventually disappear into history books.

And somehow the annoying little Jews are still here.

Still arguing.

Still praying.

Still inventing things.

Still eating hummus.

Still complaining that somebody else’s hummus isn’t proper hummus.

We are extraordinarily difficult to get rid of.

And this time something is different.

For most of the last two thousand years, when countries decided Jews were no longer welcome, we had nowhere to go.

Now we do.

There is a tiny strip of land beside the Mediterranean where Hebrew is spoken again.

Where Jewish children run through playgrounds.

Where ancient festivals are national holidays.

Where archaeological excavations keep uncovering names, coins, inscriptions and artefacts belonging to the people supposedly accused of having wandered in yesterday and stolen somebody else’s country.

Our home is there.

It always was.

The tragedy is that if Britain continues hollowing itself out culturally and politically, ordinary British people have no equivalent escape hatch.

There is no second Britain waiting across the sea.

I Want Britain Back

And perhaps that is why this makes me so angry.

Because I don’t want Britain to fail.

Quite the opposite.

I want Britain to remember itself.

I want the country that gave my family opportunities to flourish.

I want the country whose humour, creativity, eccentricity and extraordinary capacity for understatement I adore.

I want pubs and village greens and curry houses and football and terrible weather and people apologising when youaccidentally bump into them.

I want the Britain where Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists and everyone else can live alongside one another without anyone demanding ideological obedience from everyone around them.

I want British Muslims who reject Islamism to feel supported rather than abandoned to extremists claiming to speak on their behalf.

I want British Jews to walk through London without instinctively checking whether our Magen David is visible.

I want politicians with enough backbone to say that liberal democracy is worth defending.

Not apologising for.

Defending.

Because tolerance cannot mean tolerating the destruction of tolerance itself.

Multiculturalism cannot mean importing every conflict and hatred on Earth and then politely pretending nobody is responsible for anything.

And compassion for Palestinians cannot require demonising Israelis or rewriting Jewish history.

There must surely be room in the adult world for more than one thought at a time.

Palestinian children deserve peace.

Israeli children deserve peace.

Palestinians deserve leadership that values their children’s lives more than the destruction of Israel.

Israelis deserve neighbours who do not teach generations that murdering Jews is resistance.

And Britain should have the moral confidence to say all of those things simultaneously.

So Yes, I Am Ashamed

I am ashamed of Britain’s political cowardice.

I am ashamed of watching ancient antisemitic lies crawl back into respectable conversation wearing humanitarian vocabulary as a disguise.

I am ashamed that Jews in Britain once again find ourselves asking questions our grandparents would recognise immediately.

Should I wear this?

Should I say where I’m from?

Should I tell them I’m Israeli?

Is that crowd safe?

Should my children know what to do if somebody starts talking about Jews?

How the hell did we get back here?

But underneath the shame is something else.

Gratitude.

Because Britain has given me too much for me simply to shrug and walk away emotionally.

I want this country to recover its courage.

I want British people to look around and realise that defending their culture doesn’t mean hating anybody else’s.

It means recognising that democracy, freedom, equality and tolerance survive only when people are prepared to defend them.

My prayer is not for Britain’s humiliation.

It is for Britain’s awakening.

Because we Jews learnt something over thousands of years that perhaps Britain has forgotten:

Civilisations are not indestructible.

Values do not defend themselves.

Freedom does not perpetuate itself automatically.

And sometimes by the time a society finally realises what it has lost, getting it back costs far more than protecting it ever would have.

So I pray Britain wakes up.

I pray its people reclaim the confidence to defend this strange, beautiful island and everything generations before them worked themselves to the bone to build.

Because if Britain turns its back on Israel, Israel will still be there.

And if history ever decides once again that Jews are unwanted here, we will pack our bags, argue about the baggage allowance, complain about the queue at Heathrow and go home.

To Israel.

To the place our ancestors never stopped calling home.

But Britain?

Britain has nowhere else to go.

And that is why I desperately hope it remembers who it is before one day it looks in the mirror…

and no longer recognises the country staring back.