The Tory newspaper portrays British Jews as under constant threat from pro-Palestine activists, edgelord singers, and two-tier policing.
Just before Christmas, The Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that the British state has failed Jews. You’ll likely never read such an editorial declaring that the British state has failed Blacks or Muslims.
The paper wants British Jews to feel afraid, particularly of Muslims and the left. It would never suggest that Jews have any common interests with other minorities facing racism in Britain.
The Telegraph has been running the kind of editorials on Antisemitism that it would dismiss as examples of “woke” identity politics in other circumstances. This can’t be separated from the paper’s pro-Israel coverage.
Reading The Telegraph, you would easily get the impression that Israel’s war on Gaza was a justifiably measured response to the horrors of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Any opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza is nothing more than Antisemitism, the paper would have you believe.
This line became increasingly absurd as the war dragged on. That’s why the March for Palestine became a public expression of British anger at the situation.
Nevertheless, The Telegraph can’t admit to getting Gaza wrong. The Tory newspaper works hard to look after its right-wing base. If Hamas represents Islamism for Telegraph readers, the ultimate evil in the British far-right imaginary these days, then the Palestine marches must constitute another woke Islamo-leftist assault on Britain.
The Antisemitism Exhibition
To be sure, there are plenty of reasons for Jews to feel unsafe in today’s world. We’ve all seen the terrible scenes of the Bondi Beach shooting spree and the Yom Kippur attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester.
After the Bondi Beach attack, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called for the government to crack down on the chant “Globalise the intifada!” at pro-Palestine protests. As a result, police in London and Manchester have proceeded to arrest demonstrators over the slogan.
The Telegraph supports such a ban.
Writing in the newspaper, Nicole Lampert has argued that there is a vast organised network of pro-Palestine activists in the UK. She claimed that they began a campaign on 7 October, before Israel technically declared war.
According to Lampert, it is this campaign that has driven the rise in Antisemitism since October 2023, not Israel’s actions in Gaza. She claims that Israel is being “cancelled” just for defending itself. Meanwhile, British universities like UCL are supposedly dogged by Antisemitism and “extremist rhetoric” on Israel.
This way of framing Antisemitism has had a significant impact.
The activist group Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist organisation, leading to hundreds of arrests, despite not committing violent acts against people.
The London Met police have tried to restrict protest routes to BBC Headquarters ,claiming that the location is too close to a synagogue. This was after more than a year of peaceful protests at the broadcaster.
Overreactions like these fuel Antisemitic conspiracy theories. Any crank who thinks Jews have “too much power” in Britain can cite these stories as evidence.
The Telegraph’s charge of Antisemitism against anonymous activists for Palestine has a darker side still. When right-wingers declare that activists condemning the killing of women and children are Antisemites, they communicate a terrible message: Antisemitism is right.
How many people truly support drones shooting kids? Even if they think it’ll help stop Hamas? It’s not unreasonable to reach the conclusion that, if purported Antisemites are leading the opposition against Israel doing these things, then Antisemitism must be correct.
The culture war has certainly led The Telegraph to some strange places. Last year, The Telegraph was one of the major papers promoting the idea that the so-called ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans coming to British stadiums meant that Jews aren’t safe at English football games.
Poppy Coburn, acting deputy editor of The Telegraph’s opinion pages, talked up the rights of Maccabi fans – notorious for their racism and violence – as if British Jews were no longer able to watch football.
The market for such coverage is increasingly narrow. Most Brits haven’t heard of Maccabi Tel Aviv and sympathise more with Palestinians than Israel, with the Netanyahu government and its actions seen in a particularly unfavourable light.
This is proof that The Telegraph, and right-wing media more generally, have lost the big battle for hearts and minds. The drift into subcultural minutiae about Israeli football represents a clear retreat.
This is why right-wing media heralded Donald Trump’s fake ceasefire as a great victory over the pro-ceasefire movement. Despite the fact that the war in Gaza isn’t over, with Palestinian civilians still being killed regularly by the IDF.
Because the politics of fear have always been a powerful weapon for the right, we can expect more Antisemitism content.
In this case, the target audience includes pro-Israel reactionaries and conservative British Jews, who may feel uneasy about the Gaza war but worry about being targeted.
The End Game
Long gone are the days when The Telegraph was tentatively supportive of peace talks between the Israeli government and the PLO in the early 1990s. Max Hastings, who was editor at the time, has made his disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu very clear.
“All my life, I’ve loathed Bibi Netanyahu,” Hastings said in one interview. “And, of course, for him and people like him, it always suited their interests to seek to entwine Antisemitism and opposition to the policies pursued by him and his kind.”
It’s impossible to imagine a Telegraph journalist making this statement today. On the contrary, Hastings’ statement is exactly the sort of comment the newspaper would attack.
The Telegraph’s decline has played out over a longer period, in step with the accelerating tabloidisation of the last decade, as the UK has reeled from one crisis after another. Now, with The Daily Mail set to buy the paper, it is poised to get even worse.
Once the Conservative flagship newspaper, The Telegraph is now caught between faithful Tory readers and Nigel Farage fans.
The Telegraph has done more to feed red meat to the British far right than any other respectable newspaper. It’s The Guardian for disaffected right-wingers, who still read it because it’s the only mainstream option for them.
These are the ex-Tory voters, so appalled by the Conservative Party, they’ve defected to Reform UK and taken up demands for “remigration” which is code for mass deportations.
Some Reform voters want limited remigration for asylum seekers. Others would go further, including foreign-born minorities who have already become British citizens in these deportations. Some go so far as wanting to see entire ethnic communities removed from Britain, especially British Asian ones, for not being “truly British”.
Many of the most salacious claims made by figures such as Tommy Robinson, Carl Benjamin, and others can be traced back to The Telegraph. The newspaper has almost outdone The Daily Mail in exerting influence on the radical right.
What the push for remigration could mean for British Jews, many of whom have origins in Eastern Europe and Russia, should be obvious. Yet this sentiment is still being promoted and mainstreamed by right-wingers who are passionately pro-Israel.
The Telegraph isn’t uniformly pro-remigration. But its coverage is consistently anti-migrant and anti-refugee. The red line separating arguments for closing British borders and dismantling rights for people who are already in the UK is disappearing fast.
Although The Telegraph’s stance on Israel has limited appeal, its coverage of the anti-war marches has produced a ripple effect that goes far beyond conservative Jewish readers and pro-Israel right-wingers.
More journalists should be worrying about where this might lead. The Telegraph is playing with fire by dancing with the anti-migrant right. In the end, the paper’s treatment of Antisemitism and Israel seems likely to make matters worse for British Jews.
If the British state has failed Jews, it’s partly because of newspapers like The Telegraph equating Jewishness with the State of Israel and Netanyahu’s policies against the Palestinians.
Photograph courtesy of Alisdare Hickson. Published under a Creative Commons license.
