The Green party’s open declaration of war on Britain’s Jews is not really about the Green party or Britain’s Jews for that matter. The party is just a vessel for a form of politics and Jews are a perennial scapegoat for that politics. The Greens have adopted a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism – a ploy originally devised by the propagandists of the Soviet Union – while rejecting an amendment that said Jewish party members should not be targeted for attending synagogue, the vast majority of synagogues naturally being Zionist in orientation.
The effect, and perhaps even the purpose, of the motion is to establish an institutional home for the Islamist-leftist alliance which can be traced back to the Salman Rushdie affair. It grew exponentially thanks to a series of factors, beginning with 9/11 and taking in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, mass immigration, illegal immigration, the British state’s hostility to integration, and finally Gaza’s murder and rape spree inside Israel on 7 October 2023. Also relevant is the British government’s policy of appeasement towards Islamists at home and abroad, as seen in its recognition of a Palestinian state, bans on Israeli ministers entering the UK, and a crackdown on trade with Israelis and Israeli firms in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
Among those changes will be an ever more intense focus on sectarian politics
Just as Iranian leftists saw the Khomeinists as allies against US imperialism and the Shah, British leftists regard Muslims as righteous victims, Islamists their authentic voice, and natural allies in a common cause to topple imperialism, Zionism, racism, and the other terms leftists use to articulate their contempt for Western civilisation and their Rousseauian impulse to tear down all that represents tradition, order and beauty. Following the 1979 revolution Iran’s leftists were purged, imprisoned and executed by their former allies. We can only hope the same fate does not await today’s leftists but their welfare is a secondary consideration to our national welfare. Between now and the inevitable break-up of this red-green coalition, it could do substantial damage to our country and the wider international order.
The left previously attempted a marriage of convenience inside the Labour party, efforts that bore some fruit between 2015 and 2020 but which were relocated to the Green party thereafter. There is no guarantee that the partnership will remain within the Greens – extremists have a tendency to fall out – but we can rest assured that it will find another institutional home should one be required.
This is not an aberration. The Islamist-leftist movement is here to stay and will very likely grow with further immigration and radicalisation. Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine Islamist-leftism enjoying much purchase beyond certain areas of London, Leeds and Birmingham, or the university towns, but as populations change so too do political cultures and electoral outcomes.
Among those changes will be an ever more intense focus on sectarian politics. Expect the British government to distance itself further still from Israel and to adopt increasingly radical anti-Israel policies. Expect calls to defund organisations like the Community Security Trust, which secures Jewish schools and synagogues from attack, and to strip charitable status from pro-Israel and Zionist Jewish charities. Expect a renewed push to define and eventually criminalise ‘Islamophobia’ and to accommodate or facilitate alien customs and practices at the expense of the rights of others, in particular women. Expect pressure for the British government to use its diplomatic heft to promote the interests of certain origin countries and direct international development funding, visa programmes or NHS recruitment drives towards these countries.
Naturally, Islamist-leftist politics will provoke other demographics to adopt sectarian and identity-based politics of their own, including white nationalists. After all, it cannot be the case that ethno-religious political organising is permitted only for favoured groups and not for others. The further fracturing of Britain’s political and social architecture beckons as does a rise in extra-political and in some cases extra-legal activity, with habitual escalation in divisive, sectional rhetoric and policies driving the most radical (and, typically, the most psychologically vulnerable) beyond breaking point and into the realm of violence.
What I am describing, for want of a better term, is the Lebanonisation of Britain, our transformation from a country into closed-off, inward-looking clusters of cultures, ethnicities, religions, and other characteristics that unite rather than divide a nation which refuses to enforce its borders or require integration and deference to national norms and conventions from those settling here, whether legally or otherwise.
If this sounds far-fetched, I am not making a prediction but describing the preconditions for a process, and several of these preconditions are in place or on the cusp of becoming so. If you think I am the one who has been radicalised, well maybe I have been – but only in so far as I am forcing myself to confront and analyse the lethal contradictions in Britain’s cross-party governing philosophy of maximising global welfare while disregarding the national interest. If you’re wondering what happened to that sopping wet liberal Jock who could always be relied on to file 1,000 words of centrist hand-wringing to Coffee House, he became another liberal mugged by reality and terrified by what reality looks like.
British Jews will be feeling anxious, fearful, and yet again targeted, and that breaks my heart because there is scarcely a minority group in Britain that has contributed more and asked for less. Excel through hard work and education; contribute far beyond your demographic size to the professions, academia, the arts, entrepreneurship, and civic life; raise your children to love their country, take pride in their heritage, keep their traditions, tolerate difference, and never imprison themselves in the mindsets of self-pity, entitlement, or victimhood. Do these things and the state will not reward you; if anything, it will see you as the problem.
I won’t tell my Jewish compatriots that they are becoming unnecessarily alarmed, because they are not. I won’t tell them it will all blow over soon enough, because I don’t believe it will. What I will tell them is that among their countrymen and women there are those, including me and, I believe, a great many others, who will not stand by silently while British Jews are intimidated, isolated, calumnied and assaulted. Your people are our people and your enemies are our enemies. Amalek, Haman, Hitler, Stalin, Arafat – all gone, but the Jewish people still live and will go on living, beyond the latest menace and all its miserable imitators to come.
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