CLIVE LEWIS is right. Calls to sanction the Labour MP for Norwich South for expressing the connections between the slaughter in Gaza and the far-right violence on our streets must be resisted.
Some are maliciously claiming that Lewis blamed Jews for the riots. That would of course have been an absurd and anti-semitic allegation.
But that is not what he said. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “The link between the daily inhumanity being meted out to Palestinians and rising Islamophobia in the UK, are not unconnected. The inhumanity being shown to one is giving ‘permission’ for the other. These actions diminish us all.”
That is a truth which hard-line supporters of Israel simply cannot swallow. In their blinkered view Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinian people in Gaza and, for that matter, the West Bank, has no read-over into events in Britain.
Even before considering Lewis’s views, that is nonsensical. Solidarity with the Palestinian people led directly to the triumph of several independent MPs in last month’s general election, and to a huge loss in support for Labour among Muslims.
But the impact of the Gaza war, which anyone can follow on their mobile phones in horrifying detail, is not confined to the left or the pro-Palestinian side of the argument.
The far right has increasingly made Israel’s cause its own. Traditionally anti-semitic, it is prepared nevertheless to identify with Israel. The only basis for this is a shared Islamophobia.
Thus the Israeli flags flying at the protest organised by “Tommy Robinson” in London before his precipitate departure from our shores. Robinson’s own view is that “the average British person stands with Israel in its battle,” and that if “they” — presumably Muslims — prevail in Palestine “they will come straight for Europe.”
That Robinson is also anti-semitic does not distract him from his main target — Muslims.
Thus, too, we see far-right media provocateur Douglas Murray being honoured by the president of Israel for his support since October 7.
Murray, in an interview with an Australian politician recorded before the riots, declared himself “perfectly happy” to tell migrants “I don’t want them here” and warned that the public might take matters into their own hands if the army failed to act, with “brutal” consequences.
Receiving his award from Isaac Herzog, Murray said: “It’s an extraordinary privilege for me to align with the state of Israel, to stand with you.”
But the Islamophobia which is clearly the main animating factor behind the riots, and for which Robinson and Murray in their different ways are representative spokesmen even if they do not endorse the violence themselves, can only have been reinforced by the continuing Gaza genocide and by the world’s inaction in response, a clear demonstration of the small value placed on Muslim and Arab lives by Western leaders.
So Lewis is correct to say that Israel’s actions have ideologically enabled those seeking to attack Muslims and burn down mosques here in Britain.
That is not to argue that Israel has instigated the riots, nor that sinister “zionists” have funded them. Those would be preposterous claims, and Lewis does not make them. Racism in Britain has roots entirely independent of anything Israel does or doesn’t do.
But there is a connection between Israel’s aggressive anti-Palestinian racism, the increasing support the far right here offers Israel and their Islamophobic violence on our streets.
Lewis has done a service by drawing out those links. The response is to fight for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and justice for the Palestinian people while driving their Islamophobes off the streets here.
