For 19 relentless months, the Jewish community in the UK and across the world has lived with the raw, unceasing anguish of the Gaza conflict. That anguish has been constant but in recent days, as Israel intensifies its campaign, it has deepened. Something has shifted. The days feel darker than they have ever been.
Polling shows that many British Jews are incensed by Israel’s hard-right government – one that fails to prioritise the release of hostages and appears capable of denying the most basic of human necessities inside Gaza. But that private anguish is weighed, every day, against a bitter calculation: speak out, and risk handing ammunition to those who don’t criticise a government, but a people.
And yet that dilemma has – surely – now been decisively overtaken by events.
With honourable exceptions (this newspaper included), the silence from parts of the Jewish community is at risk of becoming deafening.
The joint statement from Starmer, president Macron and prime minister Carney is unsparing and unprecedented: Israel’s renewed offensive is “wholly disproportionate” the denial of aid “unacceptable”, the scale of human suffering “intolerable.” Sanctions are threatened unless Israel shows a more human face.
It is time, is it not, for Jewish community leaders to put their public weight behind such sentiments.
None of this is to ignore the awful, exponential growth of bigotry that this conflict has generated.
John Ware.
We remember how it began at 12.50pm on Saturday 7 October marking a new low for the Keffiyeh clad wannabe “fighters” whose ugly demonstrations have disfigured British streets ever since.
While Jews were being shot, and Jewish women (and men) were being sexually mutilated, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied to the Metropolitan Police for an “emergency demo” – the first of dozens of applications.
Here’s how the PSC justified what they described as Hamas’s October 7 “offensive”: it could “only be understood in the context of” Israel’s “decades long occupation…colonisation of Palestinian land” and “apartheid.”
In truth, it could only properly be “understood in the context” of Hamas’s “decades long” genocidal ideology to eliminate Israel, irrespective of oppressive Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
Ever since antisemitism dressed up as enduring primaeval hate for Israel has skyrocketed here and everywhere.
Yet worse – much worse – is to come if the cease fire talks now underway in Doha fail and Benjamin Netanyahu triggers the full gamut of his plans for the future of Palestinians.
You don’t have to be a soothsayer to see the bleak future for diaspora Jews should that happen.
Herding Palestinians into three tightly controlled sectors in the strip and heavily restricting their movement will assuredly trigger more accusations of war crimes as the IDF police this.
Fighting will continue and many more civilians, including children, will die, fattening the files of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court prosecutors.
Displaced Palestinians flee from Khan Younis, Gaza, amid the ongoing Israeli military offensive in the area, on Monday, May 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Further accusations of genocide will gather momentum. To say nothing of the death of more Israeli hostages – widening divisions between Netanyahu’s government and the majority of its people.
Permanent violence from the indefinite reoccupation of Gaza and the de facto annexation of the West Bank will be inevitable, and with it, the risk of destabilising both Jordan and Egypt from an influx of Palestinian refugees.
Accusations of ethnic cleansing – this time more credible – will follow.
Israel has already been globally shamed by its decision to withhold essential food, water and medical aid since early March – an unconscionable decision on any view, though not it seems to the spokesman for the prime minister’s office. “There’s certainly no shortage “of food, said David Mencer last week. “There’s no famine in Gaza. There’s a famine of truth. Where there is hunger in Gaza it’s hunger orchestrated by Hamas.”
Yes, Hamas steals aid. But is Mencer’s suggestion really that everything would be hunky-dory but for Hamas appropriating aid? There hasn’t been any aid for ten weeks.
The inference that every NGO and every doctor who has described symptoms of malnutrition is making it up is simply awful.
“Israel is never allowed to win a war”, I hear some Jewish friends say.
But has this war reached a winnable stage? It has not say the generals.
Nor will it ever.
For months, from the Chief of the General Staff down there has been a broad consensus that it is unwinnable, at least in the terms in which Netanyahu has framed “victory” – the complete destruction of Hamas.
I’ll take the view of seasoned war fighters any day over Jewish Chronicle editorials from their armchairs here in London castigating “western leaders who think Israel must be dragged back from the brink of victory.”
Yes, Hamas steals aid. But is Mencer’s suggestion really that everything would be hunky-dory but for Hamas appropriating aid? There hasn’t been any aid for ten weeks
Israel has already reset the balance of regional power, emasculating Hezbollah and showing Iran up for the blowhards that they now appear to be.
In Gaza, as the UK born ex IDF spokesman Lt-Col Peter Lerner eloquently explained last week in this newspaper, that Hamas can no longer govern, and how its tunnels – the “spine” of its military network – are being systemically destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is still recruiting and can fight and probably would to the last man, taking yet more young IDF soldiers with them.
Israel has already forgone the prize of normalisation with Saudi, the world’s most influential Muslim state because the government has no credible exit strategy from Gaza that offers a realistic prospect of stability.
That strategy in outline does exist. A temporary authority led by moderate Arab states operated by technocrats, monitored internationally, with no role for Hamas. And, yes, the Arabs would likely require members of the Palestinian Authority, as a prelude to reopening a path to Palestinian statehood. The argument that two states are illusory is powerful and well-rehearsed.
Yet there’s been zero attempt to revive it for over a decade. It may well prove to be impossible, but every other alternative is even more impossible.
Netanyahu spent the pre-7 October decade ensuring it could never be revived with his double game of bolstering Hamas by rejecting the Mossad’s plans to reverse the relentless growth of its war machine by choking off its illicit funding.
Israel and the global diaspora have paid a very heavy price for the prime minister prioritising his own political and personal self-interest.
The Gaza war has long since become a senseless, protracted act of political survival for Netanyahu and his administration, propped up by Israel’s “ultra–Messianic Jewish proud boy supremacists,” as the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman accurately describes them.
Of course, Hamas is still recruiting and can fight and probably would to the last man, taking yet more young IDF soldiers with them
And for what? To avoid prison on multiple charges of corruption.
Against the ever worsening, heartrending plight of Palestinians, should Israel choose to fight on, the issues that have been of most concern to British Jews – like complaints about media bias in reporting the conflict – will get even less recognition than they do now, however justified they may be.
So too will the heated arguments over whether the Hamas controlled health ministry has exaggerated Gaza’s death toll.
I don’t know how accurate the latest figure of 53,272 dead is and 120,673 wounded, save that they fail to distinguish combatants from civilians. I also know that none of us will actually know the true breakdown until a proper audit of this war is completed by a reputable independent body.
Yet you don’t have to be a statistical scholar to anticipate that the non-combatant death toll is likely to be very high indeed.
The correlation between 60% plus destruction of buildings and death seems to me to be beyond obvious. In north Gaza, less than 30% of building appear to have remained standing.
Against a continuing Gaza bombardment, rationing of aid, and TV pictures of refugees clutching their pathetic bundles of what’s left of their belongings, eking out a living in tents, or worse, the trauma of 7 October to Israel will be weighed even less in the balance than it already is.
Not just that day’s brutal slaughter but also the fact that 200,000 Israelis were displaced north and south by unremitting rocket salvos from Hamas and Hezbollah. 2,200 rockets and missiles targeted at Northern town of Metula damaged 60% of buildings; in Kiryat Shimona, dozens of homes received direct hits and about 1,000 more were damaged.
In comparison to the rubble strewn wasteland of Gaza, Israeli losses will recede into the distance from the footnotes they’ve already become.
So too will any wider understanding of Israel’s collective sense of the existential risk it faced from Hamas and Hezbollah.
With the focus exclusively trained on Palestinian suffering instead of Hamas’s genocidal attack that triggered it, life for the Jewish community in Britain is likely to get even more unsettled. The public and institutions will become even more indifferent to the exponential rise in antisemitism.
So how should British Jews respond if Netanyahu goes ahead with his plans in Gaza?
I meant no offence when I observed that in the face of the plight of Gazans, Jewish community leaders who typically emphasise their strong bond with Israel, have thus far been relatively silent.
It should not be read as an accusation of empathy deficit. And it goes without saying this is not a sideways call to hold Jews accountable for the actions of a government they had no part in electing.
The truth is that most British Jews do feel shame in many of Israel’s actions under Netanyahu, according to polling by the Institute for Jewish Policy research a year after 7 October.
By and large, Jews have chosen not to express their deep misgivings publicly, inhibited by the close connection they feel with the Israeli nation state, and a reluctance to offer a bone to Israel’s haters. They prefer to “share their thoughts only amongst trusted friends”, explains the CST’s Dave Rich.
As I say, Jews are torn.
That now needs to change if this war continues in the direction Netanyahu appears to want to take it.
Even though much of the world shared Israel’s pain for less than a day, it’s an opportunity to remind the world that the heart of Jewish values do indeed centre around compassion and the value of human life.
This past decade has seen an accelerating trend in anti-Jewish bigotry, inflamed by the Israel-Palestine conflict, and largely indifferent to Jewish feelings, not by governments, but by too many institutions.
It began when the Labour party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in the autumn of 2015 with only the briefest of respites after Kier Starmer took over.
One way of combating this is for Jewish leaders to keep emphasising the distinction between the Israeli nation state and its importance to Jews – and the actions of Israeli governments when they run counter to Jewish values.
That distinction has never been greater than at the present moment.
