Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Eighteen months have passed since October 7 and Israel’s vicious reprisals against Gazans, Palestinians and various neighbouring counties. The response of Western powers has been at best passive, and at worst actively, materially supporting Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and regional warmongering.

Why is this the case? A common explanation is that western support for Israel results from politicians pandering to local Jewish communities, who believe that criticism of Israel is antisemitic and are generally hostile to Palestinian liberation. While this might be a factor, this is mostly an overcomplication. The reason why the US, the EU and the UK are supportive of Israel is because it is a reliable regional ally of the West and an important trading partner. To a greater or lesser extent, Western leaders do not have a problem with cruelty to people they view as racially other, although most leaders other than Trump view the intensity of the Israeli government’s violence as embarrassing.

Mythologies around British Jewish views on Israel, and their putative influence on government policy, end up placing diaspora Jews as a sort of firewall between our government and the Israeli government. This protects the British government, who can frame their passivity in the face of Israel’s war crimes as a matter of balancing the competing interests of different communities, rather than protecting their strategic and economic interests in the Middle East. Right wing Jewish organisations such as the Board of Deputies being more than happy to acquiesce in this (largely for their own personal reasons).

The idea that British Jews are uncritically supportive of Israel, or more egregiously represents some sort of extended lobby for Israel in the UK, fuels antisemitism (it should be noted that even if British Jews were uncritically supportive of Israel this would not justify attacks on them). CST statistics have shown a significant spike in antisemitic incidents in the last eighteen months, much of which has been characterised by the idea that British Jews are collectively responsible for the state of Israel.

What do Jews think?

The actual views of British Jewry about Israel are complicated. They cannot be characterised as uncritically supportive, nor are they exactly where I (a philosophical non-Zionist invested in Palestine liberation) would choose them to be.

On an anecdotal basis the modal British Jewish response to Israel is a form of ambivalent support. Most people I have spoken to say that they support Israel, or believe in Israel’s ‘right to exist’, but then immediately clarify that they don’t support Israel’s actions towards Palestinians, either contemporarily or historically. They like Israel, but don’t necessarily like anything it has ever done.

This is backed up by statistics. According to polling by JPR (the leading body which does demographic research in the UK), more than 50% of British Jews say that they feel strongly connected to Israel. However they are deeply hostile to the Israeli government and its conduct. In October 2024, more than half of British Jewry felt that Israel hadn’t done enough to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians, and a majority of those that expressed an opinion felt that the war since October 2023 had been a failure. Only twelve percent of British Jews express any support for Netanyahu. This is actually more than those that approve of his even more extreme coalition partners Ben Gvir and Smotrich, for whom approval sits at six percent.

While British Jews are deeply hostile to the Israeli government, and significant figures within it, this does not translate to comfort with the pro-Palestinian movement. This is viewed as vaguely threatening. Over 80% agree with the statement that they feel like they are held responsible for the actions of Israel, and most find common statements associated with the pro-Palestinian movement such as ‘from the River to the Sea’ threatening. Owing to the cultural proximity of Israelis to the British Jewish community, support for hostages is high and any romanticising of any other political groupings in the region (Hamas, the Iranian government) is anathema.

Support for Israel is not evenly spread across the community. Views on Israel are correlated with orthodoxy of religious practice, with the least traditional Jews (reform and liberal communities) and Jews not affiliated to a Synagogue (a mixture of primarily cultural Jews, atheists, those who aren’t that religious, and those that prefer to practice at home) most likely to agree with criticisms of Israel. The other statistically significant cleavage in support for Israel is generational, with younger Jews, especially those aged 16-29, less likely to say they have a connection with Israel, and more likely to agree with criticisms of Israel.

There are a couple of reasons for the generational schism. The first is that it reflects established patterns around politics and age, with younger people in the UK more likely to be poorer, and more left-wing. These trends are especially acute amongst the Jewish community, which is highly educated, economically downwardly mobile and heavily urban.

Generational memory also goes some way towards explaining this schism. One of the defining features of British Jewish views of Israel is Oslo-nostalgia. There is a strong attachment to the peace movement, and they view the model for that peace to be a negotiated two state solution as agreed in the Oslo accords in 1993. Discussion about Israel/Palestine within the community conforms to a framing of the region as a roughly equal bilateral conflict, in contrast to the pro-Palestinian movements preferred (and probably more accurate) framings of the conflict as occupation or colonial repression. Younger Jews can’t remember Oslo. They can’t remember a point where a negotiated, bilateral two state solution seemed an imminent plausibility. Instead, the defining Israeli political figure of their political memory has been Netanyahu, a peculiarly mendacious and violent figure. This means that younger Jews are more likely to be hostile to Israel and more likely to be critical of Zionism.

Opportunities for the left

The British Jewish community is not uniformly supportive of Israel or its political actions, despite some Jewish political organisations and many government figures finding it useful to present us as such. Nor should those invested in Palestinian solidarity romanticise the British Jewish community as wholly allied to their goals.

There are two approaches to Palestinian solidarity work within the British Jewish community:

One goal, and for me the most significant one is to build a coalition against the actions of the Israeli government which includes a majority of British Jews, working within the ideas about Israel established within the community. British Jews may be open to the goals of the Palestinian solidarity movement but find its framing off-putting and vaguely threatening. Sympathy for peace, and widespread support for an Oslo-style process means that there is potential support for a ceasefire. While BDS as a whole program is tarnished by years of campaigning against it within the community, it might be possible to build support for individual campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions, particularly if they are explained and justified using the frame of peacebuilding. To build this coalition might require rhetorical compromise and using language and ideas which are different to the ways in which the left has traditionally approached building coalitions on the issue with other communities.

Another more complicated and probably less impactful approach would be to try and challenge hostility to pro-Palestinian framings within the community, and to convince them that they have nothing to fear from the Palestinian solidarity movement. This is a challenge to do from outside the community, as non-Jews often lack the credibility to persuade Jews as to what is and isn’t a threat to their community, and the sense of threat is reinforced by high profile incidents such as the recent attack in Boulder. This is best done in situations where trust has already been established through careful community work.

Building coalitions with the Jewish community on Israel/Palestine issues is of deep personal importance to me, as a Jew on the left. It is also strategically useful to the left (although shouldn’t be the only priority). Governments have sought to use Jews as an alibi to explain their continued support for Israel through framing every criticism of Israel as antisemitic or implying that this is the way that Jews think. Having a broad movement on the issue that includes diaspora Jews can go some way to negating this argument and keeping my community safe from the violence encouraged by the belief that British Jews are an extended arm of the Israeli government.

Image credit: Number 10 Downing Street – Creative Commons