Too many want to cast acts of violence and antisemitism as blows against Israel’s government. But the fear and terror land on real people, thousands of miles away
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et us begin with a brief exchange on GB News, confirmed this week as the TV arm of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Following an attack on a synagogue last week in Michigan, in which a gunman drove a car packed with explosives through the entrance to the building before opening fire, a pundit on the channel sought to clarify what the attacker actually meant by his actions. “This was an Israeli temple,” she explained. “It was aligned with Israel.”
By way of evidence, she cited the name of the synagogue – Temple Israel – apparently unaware that Jews have referred to themselves as “the people of Israel” for millennia, long before there was a state of that name, and that there are, for that reason, countless synagogues in the US called Temple Israel. No, for her, the Michigan house of worship, with its on-site school where more than a hundred children were in lessons that day, was a de facto embassy of the Israeli state and therefore an understandable, if not legitimate, target. Hold that episode in your mind.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s head of counter-terrorism strategy, Joe Kent, quit in protest at the ongoing war on Iran. Kent is a luminary of the US far right, a conspiracy theorist with ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. His resignation letter suggested that Trump had been tricked into war by Israel and – telling phrase – “its powerful American lobby”. What’s more, he said that this was “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war”. That last line was the giveaway. It’s long been a staple of antisemitic orthodoxy, though easily debunked: in fact, Israel counselled against the invasion of Iraq, fearing that it would strengthen Iran.
