The modern right’s love affair with Israel is one of the great paradoxes of our age. Only a few decades ago, the same political lineage trafficked in mutterings about bankers, cabals, and “cosmopolitan elites.” Now it waves the Star of David as if it were the Union Flag’s long-lost cousin. But let’s be honest – this isn’t solidarity; it’s strategy.
For the populist right, Israel isn’t a nation so much as a prop – a totem in the morality play of “civilisation versus barbarism.” By clutching at Israel, they think they’ve bought immunity from antisemitism – a kind of moral vaccination. “How can we be antisemitic?” they cry. “We love Israel!” Yet many of them still push conspiracies about George Soros, mutter about “globalists,” and recycle the same tropes that once painted Jews as the secret engineers of decline.
It’s the oldest play in the book: my enemy’s enemy is my friend – until I’ve eliminated the first enemy. That’s the logic of power without principle, the politics of convenience. It wins battles but never peace. And when the new friends have served their purpose, the old hatreds tend to reappear, leaner and hungrier than before.
History backs the warning. The Russian Revolution, too, had its love affair with Jews. After centuries of Tsarist pogroms, the Bolshevik promise of equality looked like salvation. Jewish revolutionaries filled the ranks of the early Soviet state, believing they’d helped build a new world free of prejudice. But once Stalin consolidated power, that embrace curdled. “Anti-cosmopolitanism” replaced “antisemitism” on the charge sheets, and the purge began. By the 1950s, Jewish doctors were accused of plotting to poison the leadership – the so-called Doctors’ Plot – a grotesque echo of medieval blood libel dressed up in Marxist language. The revolution that once promised safety ended by devouring the very people who had believed in it most.
But the betrayal goes further back. The Crusades – that sacred touchstone of the flag-shagging right – were drenched in Jewish blood long before a single Saracen was seen. The First Crusade of 1096 began not in Jerusalem but in the Rhineland, where “armies of Christ” butchered entire Jewish communities in Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. Men, women, and children slaughtered in the name of purity, cheered on by preachers who claimed divine sanction. That’s the real heritage behind their beloved red cross: not holy chivalry, but Europe’s first mass pogrom.
As Phyllis Goldstein wrote in A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism, every era finds its own excuse. When hatred becomes unfashionable, it disguises itself as admiration. In our time, that “convenient hatred” has mutated into a “convenient friendship” – just as self-serving, and just as dangerous.
British Jews can sense the rhyme. They’ve seen this routine before – the sudden warmth, the flattering invitations, the whispered promises of protection. It’s the same cycle that’s played out for centuries: embrace, expectation, betrayal. Older generations remember what comes next when nationalism starts declaring its friendship.
Politically, Jews have never been a bloc. For decades, they leaned left – drawn to Labour’s ideals of fairness, education, and tolerance. The Corbyn years drove many to the Conservatives, not out of conviction but disgust. Under Starmer, some have drifted back. Today, most sit somewhere between – moderate, pragmatic, wary of zealotry in any colour. They vote by trust, not ideology. Which is precisely why they feel that twinge of unease when the far right proclaims its sudden love affair with Israel.
The right’s philosemitism isn’t love; it’s camouflage. Israel fits their mythology – strong borders, proud nationalism, the West under siege. They admire it for the same reasons they once feared Jews: power, resilience, survival. They don’t see Israel; they see a mirror.
If they truly cared about Jewish lives, they’d care about Jewish values – justice, compassion, memory. But those don’t feature in culture wars. What plays better is outrage, flags, and the illusion of righteousness.
So yes, the right defends Israel – but only as long as Israel plays its assigned role. Once the script changes and a new enemy is needed, the same old lines will return – and Britain’s Jews, with history as their witness, will hear the cue long before the orchestra starts again.
No comments:
Post a Comment