His trip included smearing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain and had the added bonus of delaying his terrorism charge verdict.
Robinson, who founded the pro-Israel English Defence League after leaving the British National Party, has been in and out of prison and other legal troubles over much of his adult life. However, he remains the street-level representative of the xenophobic and far-right politics that are ascendant in the United Kingdom. He recently led a 100,000-person nationalist rally in London, in which several people were arrested.
As The Battleground’s UK editor, Josh White, put it, “Tommy Robinson might be the most significant far-right figure in Britain since Oswald Mosley,” referencing the fascist leader whose group was confronted by Jews, radicals and trade unionists at the infamous Battle of Cable Street in 1936.
“The huge demonstration [Robinson] mobilised was probably bigger than any of the marches Mosley led,” according to White.
Robinson’s welcome in Israel didn’t just further aggravate the Jewish left but also widened the rift between mainstream Diaspora Jews and the state of Israel. The British Jewish establishment, hardly left-wing, is angry about the choice, as are Tory politicians.
Even the UK’s conservative press expressed concern. According to UnHerd, a more complicated voice in the anti-woke outrage industry, “The optics are startling: a government ministry charged with combating international antisemitism is reaching out to a figure whose record is steeped in Islamophobia, conspiracy theories concerning ‘Jewish power’, and repeated convictions.”
A Times of London columnist opined, “This is the latest episode in Chikli’s belligerent assaults on British Jews and an ongoing conflict with their representative organisations,” adding that “Chikli’s invitation to Robinson is little more than an attempt to exploit the fear of British Jews after the attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.”
The Spectator responded with equal alarm: “[O]n the very day of the invitation, Robinson revealed his true colours in his response to criticism of it by the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council, the two leading communal bodies. Robinson posted (then later deleted) an attack on, ‘The elitist Jews, the ones who are not representative of the entire community, the woke liberal elitist Jews…they don’t represent all Jews…The ones who want mass open-border immigration, the ones who have created the hostile environment for most Jews…These so-called voices of the Jewish community, which are betraying the Jewish community with their cosying up to Islam and open-border immigration, they’re the reason all these problems are happening.’”
This is a common trope in far-right discourse: Immigrants are coming into Europe and the United States, changing the racial makeup through the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, and behind it all is the nefarious, international, liberal Jew. Think George Soros, whom Viktor Orbán blamed for Europe’s refugee crisis.
Chikli isn’t new to this rubbish. He had previously supported Elon Musk when he was criticised for engaging in similar anti-Jewish innuendo.
The Likud minister, too, has bashed other Jews, especially the religiously less observant, for being what he perceived to be an enemy within, telling The Jerusalem Post, “The Reform movement has identified itself with the radical Left’s false accusations that the settlers are violent.”
Chikli added, “I cannot identify with them. They are going back to their roots in Germany of anti-Zionism and anti-nationalism.”
That same newspaper embraced Robinson’s visit, featuring an interview with him that addressed none of these concerns. It quoted him saying, “I’ve had backlash for 15 years because I’m standing on the right side of history,” and reporting “Throughout the interview, Robinson stressed that his visit to Israel, and indeed support in general, is a matter of principle and not a publicity stunt or money maker.”
Israel’s far-right government is, of course, standing by its new friendship with Robinson.
“Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli has disparagingly called the British prime minister ‘Palestinian’ after Keir Starmer criticised him for inviting far-right activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson to Israel,” reported the Middle East Eye. And it’s no secret that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made alliances with the European far right.
“This shows that Israel has long ceased to care about Jews in the Diaspora and is willing to sacrifice their interests–and indeed their safety–for its own narrow nationalistic concerns,” Richard Kuper, an executive committee member of the UK’s Jewish Voice for Liberation (formerly Jewish Voice for Labour), told The Battleground. “Robinson and the English Defence League is a threat to all of us, Muslims, Jews and democrats alike.”
It’s one thing when leftist Jewish groups outside the mainstream tent of Jewish organisations–the ones with quick access to national leaders, philanthropists and corporate titans–stand against actions of the Israeli government, especially when it has to do with occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. But it’s quite another when its national antics offend the core of the Jewish establishment.
In Kuper’s telling, this has all been a reflection point for mainstream British Jewish institutions.
“The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Chief Rabbi’s Office have long been loyal to the state of Israel and have supported Israeli actions uncritically, although they know there has been increasing dissent within their ranks,” he said.
“They speak only for certain sections of – mainly religious – Jews. They do not represent the ultraorthodox, the fastest growing Jewish community in the country, nor non-religious Jews who comprise perhaps half the Jewish population in Britain.”
The BOD, for example, suspended several of its deputies for speaking out against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“These were not voices raised against Judaism or the Jewish community or even against Israel, but in the finest Jewish tradition of critical ethical protest — the sort that gave us prophets, not press releases,” said one Financial Times reader in a letter to the editor about the suspensions. “The board’s heavy hand does not strengthen the Jewish community.”
And perhaps the reckoning has begun. Consider, for example, this column at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Daniel Pipes, an outspoken Jewish-American neoconservative. Pipes is far from making the crossover into being pro-Palestine, but he is saying that Israel’s decisions are eroding the safety of the Jewish Diaspora.
Israel should “reject the old Israeli saw about Diaspora Jewry keeping its mouth shut and its pocketbook open” and that the Diaspora should “organise to lobby Israel’s government and demand that, when making critical decisions, [Israel] take Diaspora voices into account,” Pipes wrote, because while the “Diaspora cannot aspire to formal seats in the cabinet room or literal votes on policies, it can and must stand up for its rights.”
Given Daniel Pipes’ lifelong devotion to Western imperialism in the Middle East, this is radical stuff. It’s long been assumed in mainstream Jewish affairs that Israel was on the frontlines and should be free to make its own decisions with Western support, and Diaspora Jews should accept that.
This speaks to the giant gulf that has developed between Israel, a garrison state, and global Jewry, the community that it claims to speak and act for.
If anything, this is all vindicating an often quoted 1948 prediction by Hannah Arendt, who said, “Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defence interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people.”
Antizionist Jews will scoff at Pipes’ idea that what Israel needs is more input from the Diaspora–we should concentrate on helping our own communities resist the apartheid state rather than advise it, they’d respond.
However, what Pipes’ comments and the Robinson row reveal is Israel’s increasing isolation from the rest of the world.
A growing number of Diaspora Jews are shocked by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They no longer view Israel as a liberal democracy where politicians shake hands and debate issues, but increasingly as a far-right Euro-American ethnocracy, whether it’s embracing a fascist thug like Robinson or celebrating the hatemongering and McCarthyism of the late podcaster and far-right, Antisemitic organiser Charlie Kirk. We shouldn’t be surprised.
In 1980, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin set the stage by welcoming the right-wing evangelist Jerry Falwell, whose extreme conservatism included blatant Judeophobia. Chikli, like other Likud politicians, is simply following precedent. Robinson doesn’t advocate Falwell’s backcountry grifterism. But he is similarly provincial and hates Muslims with equal vigour. That’s his appeal.
The more the Israeli government can weaponise far-right politics in the West on its behalf, supporting racist, violent populists like Tommy Robinson, the more it can encourage Western states to back its policies against the Palestinians. That’s the logic behind Amichai Chikli’s outreach to European fascists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s longstanding courtship of Christian Zionists.
The rift between the British Jewish establishment and Israel over Robinson could have a silver lining, though. “It is time to recognise that Jews in Britain do not speak with one voice on the subject of Israel,” Kuper said. “There should be no further claims from those who believe they represent ‘the Jewish community.’ On this issue, no single voice exists.”
Photograph courtesy of Steve Eason. Published under a Creative Commons license.
