Free-Speech Activism – by Heather Brunskell-Evans

Gender critics in the UK, of which I am one, have cause to be very grateful to free-speech activists and their organisations. The Free Speech Union has helped fight legal battles on our behalf when we were penalised in the workplace for stating empirical facts, for example, that men who identify as women are not women, and that no child is born in the wrong sexed body. The Academy of Ideas platformed us as speakers, Spiked published gender-critical articles, and GB News broadcast our views when institutions and political parties silenced us for speaking the truth.

The Free Speech Union is the architect of the October Declaration set up in the aftermath of the massacre by Hamas of Israeli citizens on 7 October. All free speech proponents and most of the key figures in the gender-critical movement have become signatories. The three tenets of the Declaration are: Hamas is a terrorist group that started the war on Gaza; Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas; and solidarity with Israel and British Jews. For a list of gender-critical signatories see here.

What could go wrong with gender critics’ moral compass by becoming signatories to the October Declaration and committing to its seemingly innocuous tenets?

In this essay, I explore the paradigm of thinking of free speech activists to which these three tenets belong and who conclude that killing multiple thousands of Palestinian women and children, although deeply regrettable, is ultimately necessary to defend Western civilisation. My critique is less directed at free speech proponents and the intellectual contradictions and moral failings of their politics and more to gender critics who have signed the Declaration and their shameful silence or even active cheerleading of atrocities done to women and children by Israel in the name of defending Western women and children.

Hamas Started It!

In a discussion group about Israel’s war on Gaza, a male interlocutor who proudly insisted he is a defender of women’s sex-based rights said: “I don’t give a shit about Palestine before October 7.” We had been discussing the marches and student encampments in solidarity with Palestine. My interlocutor’s confident, blasé dismissal of Palestinian history sat alongside his complete sympathy for Jewish history. Jews, he told us are historic victims of anti-Semitism, of which the holocaust is the unspeakable example. Israel has a right to defend itself by whichever means it deems necessary against Hamas. To be sympathetic to the Palestinians is to support the view that the state of Israel, which provides a haven for Jews, should be wiped from the face of the world.

My interlocutor is in the powerful company in the UK of the newly elected Labour Government, the Conservative Party, government officials, and over 80,000 signatories to the Declaration.

In contrast to those who don’t “give a shit” about Palestinian history, I argue it is essential that as civilised human beings, sensible to the decivilising process when barbarism towards one ethnic/ cultural group becomes tolerable and even encouraged, we do care. An understanding of the complexities of what has previously been done, and not done, to shape the past for Palestinians as well as for Jews is necessary for making sense of the present and to find, if one cares about all life, not just the life of Jews, a way out of the existential crisis that Israeli Jews are suffering and the hell which is life on earth for the Palestinians.

Zionism

Toby Young, the Founder and General Secretary of The Free Speech Union, is the co-creator of the Declaration. He says he has been inspired throughout his life by pioneering Zionists who took control of their destinies by creating the state of Israel. Without shame, he delights that although not a Jew, through his marriage to someone with Jewish heritage he could become a full citizen of Israel (which Palestinians who have lived on the lands for millennia are denied by Israelis in the illegally occupied territories).

Professor Frank Furedi is an emeritus professor of sociology and a key speaker at the Academy of Ideas festivals. Furedi declares himself morally wedded to Enlightenment values that humanise humanity: the rule of law, representative government, free speech, personal liberty, and tolerance of difference. Furedi also tells us he is a proud Zionist and “a hard-core supporter of the war on Gaza.” He categorises Zionism as part of the teleological civilisational project of the West, as opposed to Hamas (and by implication, the Islamic culture out of which it has emerged) which he describes as barbaric and uncivilized.

Are the Zionists who created Israel the freedom fighters and heroic figures of Young’s imagination? Is Furedi’s unequivocal support for the war on Gaza compatible with his self-definition as a rational inheritor of the Enlightenment project and committed to its civilisation values?

The Zionism lauded by Young and Furedi is highly disputed by both Palestinian historians and Jewish historians-alike. Jews have suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of European anti-Semitism, yet the creation of Israel has involved additional moral crimes against an innocent third party: the Palestinians. Zionism is an ideology originally developed in the 19th century that supported the establishment of a political community composed of Jews and accountable to no one but Jews, unburdened by fear, prejudice, and persecution. In the late 1920s, the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein declared about the Zionist aspiration for a homeland in Palestine: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our two thousand years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us.”

In 1946 Menachem Begin, a leader of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel Party who later became Israel’s fifth Prime Minister, had organised a terrorist attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 people (an inconvenient truth that Zionist Jews were responsible for the first act of terrorism). Einstein turned down an invitation by American Friends to meet with the Party’s leaders. Einstein says:

When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first held responsible for it should be the British and the second responsible for it is the Terrorist organisation built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.

Einstein, with other Jewish intellectuals, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, signed a letter to the NY Times that the Freedom Party is “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority” and that it bore the “unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal.” The Holocaust buttressed the Zionist conviction that the world was anti-Semitic, and a Jewish state, as distinct from a Jewish homeland, was imposed in 1948 on Arab Palestine without the consent of the Arabs. The creation of the state crucially depended on the violent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by immigrant Jews. It is not possible to disentangle the link between the creation of Israel, the Zionist ideology that drove it, and the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”).

Arendt, a Zionist who firmly believed in a homeland for the Jews, nevertheless refused the idea of a racial supremacist state. By 1955, she wrote that for anyone who wanted to see, the truth of the consequences of the creation of Israel was already abundantly clear: “They treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

In 1977, Begin openly talked about stealing Palestinian land with the Torah in his arms and taking recourse to Biblical promises, went on to pursue turning the holocaust into an intense national preoccupation and a new basis for Israel’s identity. He states:

Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.

Begin was the first of the completely open exponents of Jewish supremacism who have continued to rule Israel, and where Netanyahu is one of the most hard-line examples.

Miko Peled, a former member of IDF Special Forces and son of an Israeli general, describes the distortions of history and reality at the foundations of Israeli identity. Israel is a settler colonial state whose existence and justification depend on the dehumanisation of Palestinians. It is a deeply militarised society whose citizens are raised in an environment of historical revisionism and indoctrination that whitewashes Israel’s crimes while cultivating deep-seated racism against Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is a genocidal campaign unfolding before our eyes whose roots, he argues, lie in Israeli society.

Do you condemn Hamas?

In October 2023, I gave a paper at the Battle of Ideas Conference (the annual conference of the Academy of Ideas). In discussing the unfolding tragedy of the massacre by Hamas and its aftermath with colleagues, I was asked: “Do you condemn Hamas?” This imperious question sought more than a condemnation of Hamas, it demanded I give unequivocal and “in principle” solidarity with Israel. My answer was “No, I can’t condemn Hamas, not on the terms you ask of me.”

Brendan O’Neill, the chief political editor of Spiked, argues that any criticism of Zionism means the critic is axiomatically a Jew hater. His simplistic, frankly crude response blocks any debate that includes the history of Palestine with its memories, and traumas.  Unlike the Holocaust, for which the Palestinians bear no historical responsibility, Israel was fully involved in the events of the Nakba. Free speech activists respect the Holocaust as a defining event in Jewish identity and political consciousness but erase the Nakba as a defining event in Palestinian identity and political consciousness. The Nakba involved the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their land at the hands of Israel and is also its continuing present, involving continuing repression, exploitation, and discrimination. These traumas are compounded by hopelessness that the international community has looked on, justifying it. Since 1948, the political and media class in the West “has ceaselessly euphemised the stark facts of military occupation and unchecked annexation by an  ethno-national state and have turned their faces in another direction.

In conclusion, the first tenet of the Declaration lays all moral responsibility at the feet of Hamas for 7 October. However, it is possible to both condemn Hamas and view the atrocity as the latest round in the tragedy of which Hamas is the product, not the cause. As we shall see below, any reference to the inconvenient historical, social, and political truths of colonisation and resistance is dismissed as the ignorant ravings of “the woke.”

Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself

Hamas is not only held responsible for the brutal killing of Israelis but also for Israel’s brutal killing of thousands of innocent Palestinian women, children, and men. No equivocation of Israel’s military strategies is countenanced as reasonable or valid. Yet a Zionist call for the slaughter of all Gazans, not just Hamas, has been systemically promoted, ideologically validated, and socially celebrated in broad daylight. A Holocaust survivor points out that Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians is justified using the terrible dehumanising language once in the moral justification of the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews.

A Rabbi explains that Jews have a sacred duty to kill enemies of the Jewish people, including women and children, in all times and places. Another Rabbi says “the Torah concept is clear” for fighting the Holy War in Gaza. “Do not spare a soul.” “In reality, it is the women who create the terrorists.” “Today he is a baby, tomorrow he is a fighter, we will shoot them all.” As Zionist and former MP Moshe Feiglin says on Israel’s most watched news show: “As Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left,’ we can’t live here if one (Palestinian) remains in Gaza.”

Senior Israeli officials say out loud that they have genocidal intentions for Gaza based on a Zionist ideology. The Prime Minister, the President, and the Minister of Defence, for example, do not hide their Zionist motivations signalling their intent to destroy the population of Gaza. Netanyahu, most disturbingly, cited the Biblical “Amalek” story to justify the Gaza killings. The Amalekites were a nation condemned to utter extermination in the Old Testament Bible, as mentioned in 1 Samuel 15:3: “Now go, attack the Amalekites, and destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

Since 7 October, “revenge” has emerged as one of the keywords in Israeli public life. We’ve heard discussions of revenge from the government, the Knesset, the media, the army, social networks, synagogue bulletins, and popular culture. Perhaps the most immediate and relevant invocation came on the same day of Hamas’s attack, from Netanyahu, who declared: “The IDF will immediately employ all its power to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will strike them until they are crippled, and we will avenge with full force this black day they inflicted upon the State of Israel and its citizens.” 

Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on 9 October: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

The Jewish writer Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books, (link) points out that most of Israel’s Jews, are unable or unwilling to look beyond the atrocities of 7 October. They regard themselves as fully justified in waging war until Hamas is destroyed, even—or especially—if this means the destruction of Gaza. They reject the idea that Israel’s conduct might have led to the furies of 7 October—its suffocation of Gaza, its colonisation of the West Bank, its use of apartheid, its provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, its targeted killings of Palestinians, checkpoints, home demolitions, land thefts by settlers driven by the Zionist idea that God gave the Jews the land, arbitrary and indefinite detentions, and widespread torture in prisons. Instead, the vast majority of Israelis insist that they are once again the victims of antisemitism, of “Amalek,” the enemy nation of the Israelites described in the Hebrew Bible.

To criticise the Zionist ideology that underpins the dehumanisation of the Palestinians is not to y with fundamentalist Islam (of which I’m extremely critical, including the patriarchal subjugation of women), it is to reject the theological fundamentalism of both Zionism and Islamism.

Psychoanalysis

Professor Jacqueline Rose, a Jewish British academic, argues that we should bring a psychoanalytic understanding to bear on the ideological binary narrative of good versus evil that is told and retold. The view that Hamas is making Israel do what it is doing has its origins in the playground, in the schoolboy’s claim that the other side started the fight, shedding all responsibility for Israeli state violence by lodging it inside the hearts and minds of the enemy (“You made me do it”).

I suggest we apply a psychoanalytic perspective to free-speech activists and the narratives they construct of Israel. Despite evidence to the contrary, Brendan O’Neill describes Israel as having higher humanitarian standards than other countries in times of war; the IDF is an exemplary military force, that exercises remarkable restraint and is selective in its strategies to avoid civilian casualties, including the limited use of air power and warning of impending attacks, even when this puts its forces at greater risk. Claire Fox assures that Israel’s aims are benign. Israel is motivated by nothing other than “the safe return of the hostages and the total defeat of Hamas.” “The horror of war is the horror of war.” “Although Israel’s military strategy is “savage” it is a response to the “savagery” initiated by Hamas.” She does not “relish” the killing, nevertheless, Israel’s right to wage war is “a necessary pre-condition for moving forward.” She naively states: “If Hamas just laid down its arms, it wouldn’t happen.”

One doesn’t have to be a military strategist to know that the war on Gaza is failing at every level at which O’Neill and Fox have child-like, chilling faith in its success. Hamas will not be destroyed by murdering thousands of Palestinians, if for no other reason, than that Hamas is an ideology that defines itself in opposition to the Occupation. Not recognising the despair of Palestinians under Occupation has been a fool’s errand that has produced frustration, despair, and terrorism. Razing Gaza to the ground has not secured the safe return of the hostages. No greater threat to the existence of a Jewish state is posed than by the words and deeds of Netanyahu.  The bad old Zionist idée fixe is bringing Israel to the brink of the abyss. Israel’s war on Gaza is a provocation for more conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Iran-backed militias in Syria, and with Iran itself.

Israel is not the powerful and vibrant democracy of Toby Young’s and Frank Furedi’s imagination. Netanyahu has been assaulting Israel’s limited fragile democracy for years. For the 10 months preceding 7 October, he was bringing in legislation aimed at dramatically weakening Israel’s judiciary and potentially rescuing him from the three corruption trials he faces. There is a strategic paralysis in the country’s leadership, while in the background the judicial coup continues, with its goal of establishing a racist, ultranationalist, messianic, and benighted religious dictatorship that is not making the world a safer place. Netanyahu and his government have constructed a moral paradigm for Israel’s alleged “right” to defend itself that is saturated with religious symbolism as deadly in its way as that offered by Islamism.

In conclusion, becoming a signatory to the second tenet of the Declaration is endorsing shielding Netanyahu from justice, continuing with arms sales to Israel, and condoning brutal attacks against a helpless civilian population with tens of thousands of victims—the dispossessed, crippled, wounded and the thousands of dead.

Solidarity with British Jews!

The third tenet that gender-critical signatories endorse is unequivocal support for British Jews in the wake of 7 October. I too want my Jewish friends and family not to be hated and discriminated against as a consequence of 7 October. But however monumental past Jewish suffering, it does not, a priori, preclude Jews-as-Zionists or the State of Israel from inflicting suffering upon others. I argue that denying this fact does not support Jewish sisters and brothers but will help fuel possible escalating violence in the UK. Free speech activists’ response to the pro-Palestinian marches and student encampments reveals dangerous partisanship and polarising discourse.

Pro-Palestine Marches are Hate Speech!

Free speech activists have been fulsome in their criticism of the concept of “hate speech.” Andrew Doyle has expounded at length on GB News that “hate” is meaningless and dangerous: the perception that speech is hateful is subjective and thus unprovable; the alleged victims—the ones claiming that another group hates them—are deemed to be always right. Without reflecting on the moral and intellectual contradictions and hypocrisies of their position, free-speech activists now designate those who march in solidarity with Palestine as having a craven disregard for Jews as full humans and are either expressing “hate” or “woke” idiocy.

Claire Fox warns people not to attend the marches. She alleges the solidarity with Palestine marches are examples of historic anti-Semitism bubbling to the surface and finding a new point of entry through identity politics. Despite the best efforts to portray the marches as a no-go area for Jews, the reality is that those people who march range across every age group, including the elderly, Jewish people (including Jews for Peace) as well as Palestinians, and middle-aged people of conscience who make up the majority. She crudely homogenises all marchers, attributing no other cause for the upsurge of sympathy for Palestinians than that we are Jew haters, Islamist fundamentalists, or young people who are the useful idiots for a new form of genocidal Islamism naively caught up in a “woke” discourse of “anti-colonialism” and “white privilege.”

The idea of white privilege, Fox argues, divides the world into two racial categories: Colonising (white) oppressors and the colonised (black or brown) oppressed. She alleges the wrong-headed opinions of those who march result from the construction of the Palestinians as the quintessential brown victims of Jews who are the white Occupiers. The inconvenient truth she ignores is that white Zionist settlers did occupy Palestine and were brutal to its indigenous people. She misleads by crudely reducing concern for the plight of the Palestinians with identity politics.

Protestors remind us that Palestinian history did not begin on 7 October and cannot be understood outside the historical context of Israel’s apartheid regime and its Occupation of Palestinian land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Some Jews hear “From the River to the Sea” as a call for the dismantling of the Israeli state; other Jews hear it as a just call for the dismantling of the apartheid nature of Israel. One would expect free-speech activists, dedicated to the open exchange of disparate and conflicting ideas, to embrace exploring the tension between the two different ways of interpreting politics. In contrast, they have done little other than cast us as virtue-signalling

ignoramuses while simultaneously demonstrating a uni-vocal historical understanding of Israel/ Palestine and mock protestors’ shock and grief by filtering these human emotions through the lens of “hate.”

Brendan O’Neill says the marches are an “unholy alliance between wokeism and barbarism.” He describes those who march as:

… that unholiest gang of Waitrose shoppers and jihad fanboys, of plummy liberals and the people who’ll be giving them a hundred lashes if the Islamic Revolution ever sweeps Britain. This was no ‘pro-Palestine’ march—it was a viscerally anti-Israel march that frequently crossed the line into the darkest hatred of them all … Jew-hatred.

The editor of Spiked, Tom Slater, also characterises the marches as “hate marches” and insists this is “almost too polite a phrase to describe the sewer that has consumed London recently.” The marches are “organised by Hamas fanboys and stuffed with anti-Semites.” While not all the protestors at these “carnivals of Jew-hatred” are “racist pricks” and “Islamist scumbags,” he tells us the rest, are just “woke leftists” or “supposed centrist sensibles” either “blissfully ignorant” or too preoccupied with “simplistic moral posturing.” Slater says what is disturbing about “the left” and “its distortion of history is not that it reveals “moral concern for Palestinians” but “its sinister embrace of Islamism.”

Professor Kathleen Stock, academic and commentator notes, that the identitarian tactics familiar from social justice activism are now deployed in pro-Israel discourse and identity politics of victimisation. Because some Jews have a perception of “hate” when they hear chants calling for the liberation of Palestine, this ergo is evidence that actual “hate” is the purpose of the marches. Free speech activists prioritise the subjective feelings of Jews who find criticism of Israel intolerable over the feelings of others, including anti-Zionist Jews who participate in the or the Jews in the UK who feel unaffected.

I do not minimise the existential crisis into which many Jews have been thrown but a perception that the marchers are inciting hate (“proof” of which is, for example, defaced posters of Israeli hostages) and that violence might ensue (parents afraid of sending their children to Jewish schools) is qualitatively different from actual violence. As someone who has been reported to both the police and university authorities for “hate” (objecting to the harm to children’s bodies and psyches of “gender medicine”) and thus violence (by allegedly making trans-identifying students unsafe, while in the meantime the actual violence done to children went unacknowledged), I am extremely disinclined to participate in such moral blackmail. I will continue to listen to my conscience irrespective of whether the marches make some Jews feel unsafe.

Academic Freedom

Claire Fox, speaking on GB News, quite rightly, rails against the cancellation by the Labour Government of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 which would have put a stop to the suppression of views expressed by staff and students that contradict the established orthodoxies of what free speech activists call “the cultural elite.” It is fascinating therefore to look back at the tactics employed by Fox, Furedi, and others to clamp down on student free speech about Israel.

Frank Furedi performs a feat of intellectual contortionism to preserve his credentials as a free-speech advocate while objecting in the strongest possible terms to students’ free speech criticising Israel on the American campus. He argues that unlike the alleged free-thinking students of the 1960s who protested over “real issues” (for example, against the USA War in Vietnam) American students protesting their country’s foreign policy exemplify “unfree” speech. In the 1960s, public acceptance of police brutality and the clampdown by the US state authorities on the anti-Vietnam protestors was made palatable because the students were accused of not being concerned about the Vietnamese but being “lefty” anti-American, anti-Western mouthpieces for their communist overlords. Furedi uses almost identical language to talk about today’s students. The students are mouthpieces for “the cultural elite” who are hostile to Western culture and for whom they have become useful “foot soldiers.” It is the impulse to conform to a woke ethos rather than the plight of the people of Gaza that drives the student protests.

Brendan O’Neill, with his usual inflammatory invective that dirties any moral concern for Palestinians as loathsome, describes the student encampments, (Spectator link) as “a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel.” He says that the “fake anti-war posturing” reveals “the nuclear-level loathing for the Jewish State,” “solidarity with a pogrom,” “sympathy for fascism” and “rage against civilisation.”

At one point, Claire Fox comes near to calling for student speech to be managed by the police and authorities. Ignoring multiple examples of Zionist students in the US shouting abuse and attacking pro-Palestinian students, Claire Fox described the “truly horrific scenes” of the US student encampments which “when replicated in the UK will be grim for Jewish students” if it brings to our shores “the kind of anti-Semitic bile and threats we have seen in the US.” She sought reassurance from the British government that “guard is being taken of what is happening on the US campus where levels of antisemitism  are routine and normalises.” She does not tell us what “guard” might be taken and moves from the subjective perceptions of anti-Semitism on the part of particular Jewish students to the authoritarian encouragement to suppress lawful speech, calling for protective or punitive action.

In all the hysteria about the alleged lack of safety of Jewish students, no one seemed to care about how “unsafe” anti-Zionist Jewish students felt who argued they could not stand silently by as Israel inflicts unimaginable violence on Gaza. They say they are heartbroken, grief-stricken, and morally enraged, and denounce 75 years of Occupation as the conditions for this crisis. In arguing that Jewish students are made unsafe by words, she uses the hurt-feeling argument she has previously described as the “snowflake” response of LGBTQI+ students to any critique of “trans.” She translates the perception of hate of the Zionist students as actual hate leading to violence. In contrast, she describes the Palestinian students whose relatives were being killed by bombs as having a wrong-headed perception that this might signify hate by Israel.

Fox, Furedi, and O’Neill did not protest at President Biden’s compliance with Netanyahu’s advice to shut the encampments because they reminded him of the pogroms. Nor did they have anything to say about the political and financial pressures on the universities’ administrations by the pro-Israel lobby to invite local police forces onto their campuses where police in riot gear were massed against the students. 

Criticism of Israel is an absolute provocation to free-speech activists. If their commitment to free speech, rather than their emotional unequivocal solidarity with Israel, held fast they would permit criticism of Israel and not fall into the trap of the identity politics of race they have decried. The reality is that Jewish students were very much included in the student camps. Raz Segal, a Jewish professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies says that anyone visiting these American encampments sees the students engaging in peaceful protest. UK Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan commends the student protesters, saying they are not rabid militants, they are “filling a moral vacuum created by inadequate politicians.”

In conclusion, to offer Israel in-principle, carte-blanche moral support denies the context of the Israeli-Palestinian national struggle and replaces it with a clash of civilization narrative As Gideon Levy puts it, “What sort of civilisation kills tens of thousands of people indiscriminately?” Perhaps we should turn back on free-speech activists that marchers for Palestine are “useful idiots” who “stand with Hamas”—in creating the Declaration they are “useful idiots for Israel.” Free-speech activists match the deranged language, contradictory intellectual positions, and partisan reasoning of the “woke.” Students who criticize Israel are: Anti-Semitic (a replacement for “transphobic”); left-wing bigots (a replacement for “right-wing gender conservative bigots”); and wish to erase Israel from the map (a replacement for the alleged wish to “erase” all trans-identifying people from the face of the earth).

Israel and the Far-right

A new phase of accommodation is taking place between European politicians where nationalism is gaining ascendency and finding a common cause with Israel and its alleged civilisational fight against Islamism. These politicians have been very successful in divorcing themselves from the memory of European fascism. Viktor Orbán , the Hungarian leader, for example, has denounced his country’s relationship with Nazi Germany and has promised Netanyahu that Hungary will always protect its Jewish citizens. Free-speech organisations are implicated. Frank Furedi has given his unequivocal support to Nigel Forage, leader of the right-wing Reform Party with views on the dangers of immigration. More significant is Furedi’s role as Executive Director of the Hungarian government-backed think tank MCC Brussels. Jacob Reynolds, Former Academy of Ideas Manager, is MCC’s head of policy. MCC exists to push forward the right-wing populist agenda of, Viktor Orbán at the heart of European politics. 

Orbán opposes the Western paradigm of political thought and the disintegration of the nation-state. The importance of the nation-state is in its sovereignty and has anthropological and historical depth and shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. Westerners believe that nation-states should no longer exist and deny the necessity for a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. In this view, migration is not a threat or a problem, but a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. In the West bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds that are God; the national bonds that are the homeland; and family bonds.

Netanyahu justifies the war on Gaza by arguing it is not only a domestic battle between Israel and Hamas but also a war to preserve civilisation:  “If it weren’t for us, Europe would be next.” When he was interviewed on French television recently he declared: “Our victory is your victory! It’s the victory of “Judeo-Christian”civilization over barbarism.” The concept of a “Judeo-Christian” civilisation is deceptive since the anti-Semitism that led to the holocaust was perpetrated not by Arabs but by Christians in Europe. But it serves an ideological purpose to bind Israel and European countries together against a perceived common enemy.

The immigration debate in the UK has been dragged into previously uncharted territory with the approval of European political parties who demonise Muslims in the same way fascism nurtured hatred for the Jews. Furedi and Matt Goodwin, a right-wing historian and advisor to the Free Speech Union, endorse the principles of National Conservatism, a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a new UK public affairs institute dedicated to developing a revitalised conservatism. It defines itself in opposition to the global cultural liberal elite who support “woke” and who foster a process whereby Muslims are taking over white European populations through mass migration and demographic growth, helped by a falling birthrate among the white population. Yoram Hazony, a Zionist and orthodox Jew, currently serves as Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The political ideology of national conservatism says that as sovereign nations we must return to the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring:

A proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honour and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.

Furedi and Goodwin argue that Western nations are under grave threat from expansionist political Islam such that the existing Western social order (its values and social norms) is being subverted and undermined not only from without but from within.

Furedi sums up his apocalyptic predictions about the threat of Islamism:

The convergence of Islamic Barbarism and Woke Zealotry in the immediate aftermath of 7 October indicates that we are now headed towards a territory where the pre-existing Culture Wars have acquired the form of a civilisational conflict. As the war in the Middle East demonstrates, Western civilisation is tested from without but more ominously it is threatened from within.

Furedi says that “the woke” and the LGBTQ “mob” are closer to Hamas than to a “civilized nation like Israel.” They would destroy everything about our civilisation given half a chance, and “do not believe we can make a distinction between right and wrong.”

Matt Goodwin encapsulates that immigration is one of the main issues for ordinary people about which the “cultural elite” take no cognisance. There is a growing sense in this country, he argues, that we are approaching a “‘civilisational moment’—a time when ‘we’ are starting to lose the very things that make us a ‘we’.” The “elite,” intent on undermining Western values, would allow “Islamist extremists who, to be blunt, hate who we are”—to destroy the country from within. He argues the implications for British culture that, in his view, the pro-Palestine marches signify:

One of the most alarming sights on Britain’s streets today has been the open display of support for the violent Islamist terrorist Hamas, the blatant antisemitism, and the visible disdain for British institutions, values, and ways of life.

Goodwin attributes justifiable outrage to UK citizens at immigration policies. He says the Conservative Government “failed to control our borders, lower legal immigration, cut taxes and the size of the state, to take on woke, exposing our children to ideas with no basis in science and level-up the left-behind regions.

Race Riots in the UK

Nigel Farage has caused outrage in mainstream media by commenting on the recent murder of three young girls in a knife attack in the UK, suggesting the killer’s identity was withheld by the police because they did not want to reveal the killer’s immigration status and stoke racial tensions. Farage has been condemned as contributing to an atmosphere in which riots have taken place in various towns in the UK, including the violent attack on a local mosque. These incidents had been almost immediately preceded by a London event organised by Tommy Robinson, a right-wing activist, attended by hundreds of people. A spat erupted on social media when a gender-critical feminist suggested that not all individuals attending should be assumed to be racists. Jan Macvarish, Education and Events Director of the Free Speech Union supported her view. She responded:

If armchair critics paid attention to what motivates people to attend, instead of obsessing with Tommy Robinson, they would have more interesting things to say about Britain today and the challenges we face.

Ella Whelan, a Spiked columnist, and the co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival, exemplifies this in October 2023. She is sympathetic to the Dubliners who, only weeks after 7 October, set alight to cars and shops in response to the murder of a child by someone they believed to be an immigrant, a rumour which turned out not to be true. She fulsomely condemns the violence but criticises the “cultural elite” who demonised the perpetrators rather than dealing with the substantive issues that caused it, the immigration policies imposed on people without consultation.

Like Whelan, Claire Fox pleads that the government reflect on the underlying causes of the recent riots in the UK, which again were sparked by the rumour which turned out not to be true that the murderer was a Muslim immigrant. The murders were a lightning rod for a whole range of public discontents: fury and fear about a sense of lawlessness; real Islamist intimidation in this country which the authorities refuse to accept exists; and the double standards of two-tier policing which she alleges exists on the marches. In a stunning example of hypocrisy and brazen partisanship, she casts the pro-Palestinian marches as hate marches even though for the past 10 months countless thousands of people have congregated weekly without violent incident. She cautions us not to see the recent riots as racist hate, despite the burning of police cars, the violent attacks on the police, and the screams of invective about Muslims. She seems insensible to the irony that pro-Palestinian marchers are also protesting about oppressive immigration policies where Palestinians are forced, and have been for the past 75 years, to accept that Jews can come from all quarters of the globe to settle on their land and have been brutally punished at any insurrection.

Having colluded with Israel that the war on Gaza is a fight against Islamism, free speech activists portray themselves as on the side of the ordinary people in the UK who are oppressed by the immigration policies of the “cultural elite.” However, in embracing the narrative of Israeli civilisational unity pitted against Islamic barbarism, they too are safely embedded in a powerful “cultural elite.” Israel has been allowed to break international law with impunity for over 70 years The instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony daily obfuscate the liquidation of Gaza. The Israel Lobby in the USA is extremely powerful, as well as elsewhere. The U.S. has given billions of dollars of tax-payers money to Israel, the majority military aid, and has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in U.S. law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes. While Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by Western states, those same Western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), created after the revelation of Nazi crimes, rules that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A Senate and House of Representatives recently worshipped Netanyahu, a politician suspected of war crimes. He received rapturous applause “very similar to the rapturous applause that other demagogs receive when they speak in front of those they view as ‘useful but very necessary idiots’, who will cheer them as they spout their lies and fear-mongering.”

In conclusion, the clash of civilisations narrative is very persuasive in contributing to a populist uprising that is anything but civilised. Stopping an influx of unvetted migrants arriving daily by boat is one thing; becoming irrational racists and hating an entire religion is another.

Gender-Critical Signatories to the Declaration

When much of the world looks on horrified at the violence done to women and children in Gaza, some gender critics were afraid to publicly declare their criticism of Israel, fearing social exclusion from colleagues with whom they had previously fought shoulder to shoulder in the “culture wars.” Others signed the Declaration and have remained silent about the women and children or defended Israel.

The journalist and author Julie Bindel, a veteran feminist campaigner against male sexual violence, now a signatory to the Declaration, has remained silent about the slaughter of women. Writing in 2008, she tells us she has previously “avoided Israel for nearly two decades.”After visiting the West Bank that year, she witnessed first-hand that the Palestinians lived under “the apartheid-like conditions in which they are forced to live under punitive Israeli rule.” There is a misogynistic religious fundamentalism embedded in Israeli society and a deep schism between liberal Jews and orthodox Jews. The Hassidic men, for example: “will not touch or even shake hands with any females other than their wife, mother, sister, or daughter. In extreme cases, they will not even look women in the eye.”

Bindel confesses she has always suspected Israel of “pink-washing” its liberal credentials. After signing the Declaration, Bindel to my knowledge has never contradicted the views expressed by our brave feminist key-board warriors for whom the complex history of Israel/ Palestine is largely unknown nor has she challenged Friends of Israel who narrate Israel as a bastion of democracy and women’s and LGBT rights in the middle of a civilisational desert.

Josephine Bartosch is a journalist and sub-editor of The Critic, a pro-Israel magazine and National Conservatism’s favoured media outlet. She reflects on the term Islamophobia and argues it is used to silence criticism of Islamism. Islamism is “an inhumane ideology, with violent implications in its most militant international form.” Islamists, she declares, are “democracyphobes, humanrightsphobes, and libertyphobes.” It is not hateful, she says, to name Islamism as a scourge for every British citizen, including Muslims. She insists that valid criticism of beliefs and behaviour should not be equated with hateful bigotry. As with its cousins, “transphobia” and “whorephobia,” “Islamophobia” is “wielded by ideologues hoping to slyly elide criticism of an ideology with an irrational hatred of individuals.” 

I agree with Bartosch about the politics of shutting down critique through the use of language and slogans. The use of the term anti-Semite is used to elide criticism of Zionist ideology with an irrational hatred of Jews. It is emitted whenever the critic exposes to the disinfectant of daylight the truth of Israel’s apartheid regime and the Zionist fundamentalism that underpins the savagery of Netanyahu’s genocidal military strategies. Free speech about Zionism should be discussed openly, even if that offends. In discussing how the intimidation by Islamist parliamentary constituents of some candidates in the general election “impacts upon politics,” she does not refer to the pro-Israel constituents and lobby groups and their impact on democratic politics, not through direct threats of violence but by the exercise of their considerable power and influence. The UK parliamentary groups supporting Israel’s interests in Britain consist of Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour Friends of Israel, and Liberal Democrats Friends of Israel. Conservative Friends of Israel is beginning to resemble the Westminster outpost of Netanyahu’s coalition (for a list of parliamentarians funded by the Israeli Lobby see here).

Dennis Kavanagh (LGB Alliance, Director of Gay Men’s Network), who protests against the mutilation of same-sex attracted children (at the time of my writing) as a lawyer has not commented on the ICJ legal challenges to Israel but has reduced himself to vapid comments and macho posturing with the lads who “don’t give a shit” about Palestinian history, putting the Israeli flag on his social media bio even though he is neither Israeli nor a Jew, jeering at transactivists who want to “queer” Palestine, and supporting the Israeli competitor in the Eurovision Song Contest (itself a travesty of “non-binary” nonsense), regardless of whether or not she could sing. He has not commented on the extremes at his end of the political spectrum—the open, violent racism on the right. Although his initial passion for expressing solidarity with British Jews has somewhat abated, his most recent erudite contribution to the debate about ethics is to sympathise with a podcaster’s injunction to Jeremy Corbyn: “Get fucked, you dusty old terrorist sympathiser.”

The comedy writer Graham Linehan, who to his professional cost defended women for years against macho men, has performed a seeming political and moral volte-face. He recently cheered a US pro-Israeli Republican Senator who summarily dismissed as silly two American women (a Jew and a Palestinian) who belong to a feminist grassroots organisation CodePink, when they tried to prick his conscience about the slaughter of thousands of women, children, and babies in Gaza. Linehan shamelessly declared “Oof, love him.” He comments on the Palestinian flags raised in Glastonbury, and like the child following the Pied Piper follows a crudely reductionist typology of which one would have hoped his own experience would make him wary. He slurs the flag holders as “middle-class, faux-left, NPC wankers.” Concerning the flags, he says: “I hope the rest of them are up your arse.” Perhaps somewhere he is troubled by his position. Having slurred the middle classes he turns to the middle-class right-wing unequivocally pro-Israel Douglas Murray for whom the suffering of Gazans is all due to Hamas. With an obsequious “sorry to bother you” Linehan asks him of all people, whether “the rapes, beheadings … that took place on October 7th, have been debunked by any authority”? I can answer you, Graham, even if Murray won’t: Yes, they have! (See my forthcoming article.)

On the day even President Biden threatened to withhold from Israel the bombs the USA has been supplying to Israel (but of course then didn’t enact), a gender-critical key-board warrior, taking her “ethical” lead from the language circulated by free speech activists, tweeted from the comfort of her sofa:

I’m completely comfortable with Israel going into Rafah. War is hell, but the IDF has had huge success in avoiding collateral damage. Israel is on the frontline of a war for liberalism, pluralism, freedom of conscience and religion, and defending gay and lesbian rights. This is a war we will all have to fight, eventually, because radical Islamists are radicalising the Ummah.

Pro-Palestinian Feminists

A bewildered gender-critical pro-Palestinian feminist asked on X the same question I ask: How can gender critics who have spent years saying they are against the mutilation of children, for example by “gender medicine,” remain silent about the mutilation and killing of Gazan children by Israel?

A feminist responded by refuting what she assumed to be the moral premise of the question. She attributes to the questioner a belief that since gender critics share the same stance on biological sex, we should axiomatically share the same ethics. “A shared belief in the truth of the immutability of sex does not, and cannot, imply a united belief or passion in any other viewpoint.” The gender critic’s point is so obvious that one wonders why she states it. It is amply demonstrated for example by Netanyahu and his right-wing religious coalition: Netanyahu’s knowledge that women are women has not prevented him from treating their lives as expendable. The pro-Palestinian feminist was alluding to the feminist politics of the body and that sex matters not only at the level of the body—what the Italian philosopher Antonio Agamben calls “bare life”—but in social life and law. The pro-Palestinian woman asks: “What has happened to the dissident, rebellious, and courageous women—the ‘kick-ass’ rebels against LGBTQI+ alphabet soup ideology—who were once prepared to take on the establishment”?

One justification for a seeming lack of challenge is that many wars are waged globally, and it would be self-destructive to allow ourselves to be permanently triggered by all the gratuitous deaths of women and children when we are powerless to intervene. The war in Gaza is one of several horrible events that are going on in the world: There are actual genocides in Congo, Sudan, Myanmar, and arguably China; there are wars in Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria. The right-wing social commentator Douglas Murray argues that since war is ubiquitous to care about the specific war in Gaza is proof of virulent anti-Semitism. He is disingenuous. The war on Gaza is a war fought in our name, which is why he briefly engaged in “boys-own” playfighting with the IDF in Gaza but has not donned the uniform of another army and offered his services elsewhere.

Signatories are not exercising pragmatism, or agnosticism about the rights and wrongs of the war on Gaza. They are endorsing it as a just war fought for women’s rights. Their consciences may be untroubled because gender-critical royalty in the form of JK Rowling has likened the oppression of Jews to the historical oppression of women. She says:

There’s always been a huge overlap between hatred of Jews and hatred of women, and uncanny similarities in the way they’re stigmatised: manipulative, privileged, weaponising trauma, always acting in bad faith, always asking for it, only getting what they deserve, etc.

I beg to differ. Palestinians fit Rowling’s example much more accurately than Jews. Whenever Palestinians are unable to endure their misery any longer and rise against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as the mighty Goliath hell-bent on perpetrating another holocaust or “pogrom” (the go-to word of Brendan O’Neill) on the vulnerable David. Gazans have broadcast their destruction in real-time in the desperate vain hope that the world might help. Billions of people have witnessed the extraordinary onslaught by Israel on these stateless victims. Thousands have been slaughtered, the land has been reduced to what resembles an apocalyptic scene from a horror film, and the dead lie unburied under the rubble. They have been denied access to their most essential needs: water, food, medicine, and electricity. Yet the victims of Israeli barbarity cannot even secure straightforward recognition of their ordeals from Western elites.

An Immoral Universe

The arc of the moral universe is not bending toward justice in Israel’s war on Gaza. The Israeli government has used the deprivation of food and water as a tool of genocide in Gaza and has accused UNRWA (the United Nations organisation that has sustained material life for refugee Palestinians since 1948) of containing Hamas members, thus prompting the US and the UK to withdraw funding for the very organisation that could mitigate some of the harms. An independent review found no evidence to support Israel’s claim, yet the US has stood by its decision. UNRWA explains how women, children, journalists, and humanitarian workers have paid a high price. When The new Labour Government reinstated the funding, the response of those committed to the idiocy that Israel’s fight is our fight has been to insist that “the renewed UNRWA funding arms Hamas and abandons Israel.” As I write a key gender-critical feminist is tweeting her view that the UK restoration of the funding of humanitarian aid by UNRWA is “a deeply regressive and dangerous step.”

Care International UK reports the testimonies of Gazan doctors, some of whom are female (Palestinian girls, contrary to the myth, are as educated as boys) and who have also given birth during the war. Pregnant women are forced to give birth without painkillers in a tent, a temporary shelter, or even in the streets amid the rubble. To my knowledge, gender-critical feminists have offered no sympathy for pregnant women and mothers or commented on the images of corpses or the smaller corpses held by grieving parents. Of course, there are the usual platitudes—“We grieve for the Palestinians, but war is war.” In contrast, they side with the apoplectic fury of free-speech organisations if pro-Palestinian supporters take the same approach—“We grieve for the Israeli civilians murdered on 7 October but resistance to brutal Occupation is resistance.” The Spiked columnist Jonathan Foreman advises we should not listen to the testimonies of Gazan and international doctors and treat their statements “like those given out or approved by the Assad regime in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Kim government in Pyongyang—that is, with skepticism.”

No horror seems persuasive in encouraging gender critics to reconsider the limits of their commitment to the three tenets of the Declaration. George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” comes to mind: calling for a ceasefire is a call for war; standing up for the rule of international humanitarian law is support for terrorism; slaughtering Palestinian women upholds the rights of Western women; bombing universities, museums, ancient monuments, churches and mosques back to the Stone Age is a civilising project.

Conclusion

In the face of the impunity given to Israel by the signatories to the Declaration, I’m mindful of the wise counsel of the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi. As a holocaust survivor, he reflected for the rest of his life on which lessons we can learn, both as support and warning, from the attempt in Europe at the genocide of Jews. He reminds us that ordinary people, not evil monsters, believed, admired, and even adored fascist leaders as gods, and embraced racism against Jews.

Levi advises freedom of speech as the first bulwark against fascism: Rather than reifying individuals as truth-bearers, it is best to content ourselves with more modest and less exciting truths. Truths are acquired painfully, little by little, without shortcuts, and through study, discussion, and reasoning, where they can be verified and demonstrated. However, he warns the free speech formula can be too simple to suffice in every case when a new fascism is born either outside our country or imported into it. At this point, free speech and dialogue may no longer serve, and one must turn to the second bulwark, and find strength in resistance.

In a staggering shift in sensibilities, having refused to kowtow to the cult of transgenderism, many gender critics have become handmaidens to the cult of Israelism. As such, they have participated in an anti-Enlightenment project. Once upon a time, I couldn’t have imagined this of my compatriots in the fight against “trans” ideology, although sadly I have learned. I suggest that their compliant solidarity with free-speech organisations and the adjacent far-right agenda might eventually prove antithetical to women and girls here in the West, as most far-right politics have proved to be in the past. I develop this theme in a forthcoming essay.