In August, I visited Israel for the first time. Here’s what I learned.
The following essay was first published on Courage Media. The audio narration is available here for Substack subscribers.
“I think that we’ve not been winning [the propaganda war], to put it mildly,” Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in August. He blamed foreign bots for poisoning Western discourse during their war with Hamas. But Qatari cash isn't the sole reason why left and right alike have lost sympathy for the Jewish state.
Intersectionality animates progressives’ support for Palestine. Wokeness, being a unified field theory for how everything is white people's fault, treats Israel as a European settler-colonialist project. This revolutionary race-communism is used as a Trojan horse by Islam, for its imperial designs on Europe. But, having taken Douglas Murray's advice and been to the region, after a week arguing with academics and members of Knesset, I understand why Israel has also haemorrhaged support from the right.
This worries the government enough to send Netanyahu to meet MAGA influencers before the Iran strikes. Podcaster Tim Pool said the room scoffed when Netanyahu said, “After Israel, Iran is coming for America next.” Pool told the Israeli delegation that, “In ten years, your support will have evaporated.”
Pool is right: Zoomers aren't Zionists. The University of Maryland's Critical Issues Poll found 37% of Americans aged 18-34 sympathise more with Palestinians than Israelis (11%). Half the number of Republicans aged 18-34 (24%) sympathise with Israel as those over 35 (52%).
A new Harvard/Harris found that 60% of Americans aged 18-24 support Hamas over Israel, compared to only 26% of Americans total. This has increased from 48% in March — compared to just 7% of Boomers. In April 2024, Pew Research found Hamas had 33% favourability among 18-29-year-olds, and that 60% held a positive opinion of the Palestinian people. One in 10 British Zoomers support Hamas, 23% support Palestine, and 24% would call Hamas “freedom fighters”. Those not clad in keffiyehs are at best indifferent about Israel, focusing on their own failing countries instead.
Some of this is down to demographics. In America, Gen Z are the most racially diverse of any generation on record: only 52% are white, compared to 82% of Boomers. A Daily Mail & JL Partners poll found 21% of Americans aged 18-29 agree with the statement, “Hitler had some good ideas” — with 21% of Blacks and 19% of Hispanics agreeing, compared to only 9% of whites.
In Britain, Pakistanis (44.8%) and Bangladeshis (46%) have almost double the share of their population under-24 than white Brits (26.6%). The Henry Jackson Society found only one in four British Muslims believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7; with this belief most common among British-born, university educated Muslims aged 18-34. Jeremy Corbyn, who called Hamas and Hezbollah “our friends”, enjoys an +18 favourability rating among those aged 18-24 — especially radically left-wing young women. With Muhammad now the most common name for newborns in England, this trend will only worsen. Importing people from countries where Mein Kampf is on sale at train stations creates demand for anti-Jewish politics.
Commentators have recognised this trend. Interviews with Nethanyahu perform poorly. “Slop” debates chase the lowest common denominator of outrage and engagement-bait. It is more financially lucrative to condemn or “just ask questions” about Israel.
Mere moneyed interest is not the only reason these voices have emerged. Some cite libertarian principles for why America should end aid to Israel. This has been compounded by scepticism on the right of foreign adventurism and the Bush doctrine of bringing liberal democracy to dictatorships in the desert. Decades of squandering American blood and treasure on failed regime-change wars has invigorated an isolationist instinct in America First foreign policy. While Trump's peace-through-strength approach does not preclude limited strikes — like against Iran's nuclear programme — no MAGA patriot wants to see troops deployed in the Middle East.
Others appeal to the growing non-white and Muslim audience by triggering post-WW2 taboos. An overuse of Godwin’s Law (including by Godwin himself) to smear everyone Donald Trump, to Sydney Sweeney, to Pewdiepie has desensitised a generation to being called a Nazi. 64% of Americans polled think labeling people antisemitic is used to delegitimise critics of Israel. When wanting strong borders, having children, and being white, healthy, and happy is conflated with being Literally Hitler, it's no wonder the “Never Again” narrative is less potent.
Regardless of motive, momentum is against Israel. Hence why the Foreign Ministry invited American influencers to tour the country, concerned that “positive perspectives towards Israel are falling across all younger age groups.” (I know some who declined, fearing their careers would suffer irreparable damage.)
I attended a different trip, run by Yoram Hazony's Herzl Institute. I accepted, because the explosive politics of the region mean I may never get another chance to walk the Dolorosa, pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, or visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before they are bombed to rubble. I am grateful that I did, because my hosts were kind and generous people, and provided an opportunity to explore the foundations of my faith.
The war in Gaza occupies little of my attention. Without decades of unwanted mass migration, it wouldn’t dominate British politics. But Muslim enclaves have forced the issue with incessant pro-Hamas protests, because the Ummah is more important to them than their host countries. We humble hobbits now hear the black tongue of Barad-dûr spoken throughout the Shire. The Elves can take care of themselves while we evict these Orcs from Bag End.
The trip aimed to emphasise what Israelis and Westerners have in common. It's not insubstantial: after all, King Alfred the Great based his Doom Book, the cornerstone text of English common law, on the Ten Commandments and the life of Moses. But I also noticed many differences that politicians omit when appealing to our shared heritage. Jews are an expressive, hospitable, and proud people. They feast like kings and drive like madmen. They don’t queue, and clap when the plane lands. When an American lifted our female guide's stroller onto the curb, she joked that Israeli men haven't learned our chivalry yet. They draw strength from their ethnocentrism, and a sense of purpose from Biblical prophecy. Hasidics walk in 40 degree heat in their uniform black suits, shtreimels, and payots. The same Chabad sect that tunneled under New York City has plastered posters of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who they think is the Messiah, on the back of most road signs.
This culture is very different to my own. I don't belong to any of the ethnic groups balkanised by invisible lines into Jerusalem's quarters. As a Catholic — who now outnumber Anglicans 2-to-1 among British Zoomers — I don’t buy the dispensationalist theology of America's evangelicals and Republican politicians. The old talking points don't have purchase. If Israel wants to win sympathy from young white men, it needs a new way to appeal to us.
I would, however, like to copy Israel's model of nationalism to build a homeland for my people. The ascendant new right in America, and burgeoning one in Britain, is more concerned with national identity than economics. In What is a Nation?, Ernest Renan defines a nation as a people with shared history, heritage, and a common experience of suffering. The people precede the land they establish as their state. Israel, which became a nation while enslaved in Egypt, is the Ur example. Britain, too, has suffered: from the Norman Conquest, and King Alfred burning cakes in exile after the Viking invasions, to the Second World War, and ongoing Pakistani Muslim rape gangs scandal. The gangs and Manchester Arena Bombing are our October 7th — and intelligence leaks suggest we are due another Jihadist massacre soon. Whereas Israel's government sided with its people, the British government told us, “Don't look back in anger.”
If we both fit Renan's description, surely Britain qualifies for emulating Israel's model of national identity? Why should we wait to become a persecuted minority and stateless people before learning Israel's lessons? Just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people, England should be a homeland for the English, Europe for Europeans, and the US for heritage Americans.
Israel codes right-wing: with its high GDP-per-capita, above-replacement birth rate, competent military, coherent ethnic and religious majority identity, and culture of national service. Accusations of discrimination and imperialism represent a thymotic politics and fighting frontier spirit that appeals to the post-liberal right more than Pride Parades in Tel Aviv. This aesthetic is celebrated by the Trump administration, posting paintings on X depicting Americans preserving their heritage and homeland, to appeal to young white men. Strength, not victimhood, earns our respect.
All of these virtues are downstream from a veneration of hierarchy. Jews are unquestionably at the top in their homeland. Israelis, both secular and religious, believe their people to be a tribe, based on ethnicity, whose inheritance of the land was foretold in Ezekiel 37. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion forbade any reference to God in the state's founding charter, but studied Tanakh with his ministers to ensure they understood their obligation to Jews as an ethnos. In fierce debates about the Nethanyahu government's judicial reforms, both left and right take the Jewish people remaining the pre-political “We” to whom politicians and public servants owe their allegiance for granted. Members of the left-wing Meretz party are to the right on demographic questions of anyone on the British right. Even liberal Jews, like Sam Harris, believe Jews need an ethnostate for their continued security.
But there is cognitive dissonance between the view that Israelis have of their home, and of the US, Britain, and Europe. The same Jews who were adamant that Israel is an ethno-state, and that civic nationalism does not work, would tell me America is a “melting pot” and “a nation of immigrants.” These phrases were coined by liberal Jewish organizations, and have been applied to Britain too. An Israeli-American explained that they were taught these fictions in Hebrew school. They did not comprehend that the Founding Founders were unanimously Christian Englishmen, or that England has over a thousand years of largely unbroken ethnic continuity.
Others became uncomfortable when I proposed we deport unassimilable Jihadists, while being at war with Hamas. They suggested we integrate Muslims, having denounced Islam as a doctrine of death moments earlier. They cited constraints of international law, despite disregarding its anti-Israel rulings as antisemitic and illegitimate. Their attitude was that Jews finally have their state after 2,000 years of exile and expulsions, and that Europe is too far gone to worry about. If, like the town of Judas Iscariot, it becomes majority Muslim, that's not their problem.
Resentment emanates from the natives of Europe and those of founding stock in the United States when they are denied that same insurmountable majority status by unilateral multiculturalism. If it's good enough for Israel, it's good enough for us too. Conservatives see a double-standard between Zionism and the liberalism forced upon us. The West wants what Israel has, and they won't support Israel unless they can have it.
Support depends on reciprocity. Israel's triumph over Hamas must not mean a loss for Britain, the US, and Europe. Our treacherous progressive elites need no assistance in conducting replacement migration against our people. However, in March, Finance Minister Smotritch said the government planned to expel Palestinians from Gaza. In 2023, Knesset members Danny Danon and Ram Ben-Barak wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Europe should accommodate displaced Palestinians, who hate us as much as Israel. Jihadist sympathisers are not the same as their ancestors who fled the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Keir Starmer's Labour party drew up plans to take Palestinian “refugees” before entering government; and now intend to import 300 Palestinian children to Britain each day for NHS treatment. While promising to end family reunification chain-migration, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced she will expedite visas for students from Gaza. Why should we support Israel if we are punished with more murderous third-world migration?
When I pressed state officials on this during the trip, they gave vague assurances that Palestinians would be relocated to Indonesia and Africa — but could not guarantee that they would not make their way to Germany, France, and Britain. Why should we accommodate another dangerous Muslim population if Israel recognises them as an existential threat that they cannot live alongside? There must be a guarantee that this will never happen. Otherwise, the right will withdraw its support.
Not all Jews feel this way; hence why Isiah Berlin defined antisemitism as “A hatred of Jews that is more than is strictly necessary.” They loathe how unsafe liberals have made Europe, where their ancestors laid roots for centuries. But their counterparts in left-liberal politics have been vocal. Eric Kaufmann traced the origins of multiculturalism to Modernism: an early twentieth-century movement to liquidate all identities and stop Jews from being discriminated against. Yoram Hazony and R.R. Reno explain how this doctrine of pluralistic “Open” societies was prescribed as the antidote to Nazi racism. This is based on a blank slate anthropology, shared by liberalism and Marxism. Since 1945, both the Axis and Ally nations have denigrated their distinct identities, histories, and heritages, fearing a favour for the particular will turn them into Adolf Hitler.
Antisemitism is the nadir of this liberal international order's “negative foundation myth.” In Britain, the likes of Baroness Ruth Smeeth and Attorney General Lord Hermer staple their Jewish immigrant identity to their support for communist politics and liberal immigration policies. When the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida) group wrote to Jewish groups to ask for their support, they were condemned as Nazis. “I do not see the danger of Islamizing Germany,” wrote Josef Schuster, the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Liberals have pushed a liquidation of distinct identities into a milieu of grey goo, leading ironically to importing deadly antisemitism from the Islamic world. One Israeli explained there is a Hebrew phrase for this: “למגן עצמו לדעת,” a play on “לאבד ,עצמו לדעת” which translates to “defending onself to death.” Fearing persecution, some Jews have treated the peoples most likely to befriend them like enemies. Interventions by rightwing Jews who reject this denial of ethnic identity and self-determination for European peoples are most welcome. Jews are not protected by international laws and abstract egalitarian principles, but by relationships with strong self-conscious majorities who befriend them.
Anglos and Europeans are impaired by a post-WW2 guilt complex when arguing for our countries on our own terms. Within the liberal paradigm, a nation can only justify its existence by prioritising minorities over majorities. Preventing antisemitism is prioritised over the wellbeing of majorities, and often incoherently paired with preventing Islamophobia, racism, and discrimination against the leftist coalition. As one Israeli explained to me: “It’s easier for Jews to link up with the intersectional rainbow, because they see themselves as a minority. In Israel, the majority asks, ‘How do we rebuild this thousand-year-old identity that has fractured in exile?’ In America, they think, ‘As a minority, how do we make sure they [whites] don't kill us?’”
This mindset persists on the establishment right. In May, 2024, Rep. Michael Lawler proposed Congress apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of antisemitism to discrimination cases investigated under the Civil Rights Act. This nebulous definition counts Holocaust denial alongside observing that Jews have a sense of solidarity with other Jews and Israel, or citing Bible verses blaming the Pharisees for encouraging Pilate to crucify Christ, as antisemitic. The motion followed Jewish students being intimidated on college campuses by pro-Palestine occupations.
I don’t want my Jewish friends or Jews in America to be mistreated. But why did it take students calling for global intifada for liberal Jews to withdraw support from Ivy League universities, when those same institutions spewed anti-White, anti-Western bile for decades? Why was that preceding, equally evil hatred not enough?
The Trump Administration has listed “espousing antisemitism” among the “anti-American” behaviours that will prevent immigrants from gaining citizenship, but not anti-White racism toward heritage Americans. In August, the Department of Homeland Security became embroiled in controversy when it published plans to withhold FEMA disaster-relief provisions from states engaged in boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) measures against Israel. (These plans have since been scrapped.) Not only would this have endangered innocent Americans for action against a foreign state, which they may not support: no such measures were threatened for states that allowed Black Lives Matter revolutionaries to burn down businesses and target Whites Americans. Likewise, a State Department report about human rights abuses by the British government dedicated a section to rising antisemitism, but did not allocate appropriate blame to Britain's growing Muslim population, nor condemn the anti-white discrimination against native Brits by the state.
This double-standard is obvious, and causes resentment. Why should we endure multiculturalism, turning ourselves into the South Africa or Lebanon, when the Israeli model of a state based on shared ethnic ancestry and religion works so well? If statelessness was a tragedy for the Jews, then the imminent statelessness of the English and European peoples is also a tragedy worth preventing. Israel should be encouraging us to copy their example: to favour majorities, and expel incompatible minorities.
There is some interest in this in Israel. When I raised the idea, it seemed novel and exciting. A number of state officials said they want to end the US special memorandum, and shift to mutual investment — “from patronage to partnership.” They resent how aid gave the Biden Administration leverage to meddle in their domestic affairs. Israel is seeking self-reliance by expanding domestic munitions manufacturing capacity, and developing AI with the assistance of its world-class intelligence services, without the Woke lobotomies once administered in Silicon Valley. They are anxious to snip the strings attached to subsidies, and to shed any accusation that they are a protectorate rather than a sovereign state. As one speaker said, “Friends don't pay each other.” Friendship relies not on neutral international laws or emotional debts, but on reciprocal goodwill between peoples. This goodwill will disappear if the people are disempowered and replaced.
Hazony makes this case in The Virtue of Nationalism: arguing each people thrives in their own state, dedicated to the preservation of their ethnicity, identity, and religion. Hazony has explained that he doesn't use the term “Judeo-Christian” because he wants Jews to be Jewish, Christians to be Christian, and each people to be full and authentic expressions of themselves. This is the precondition for friendship. The peoples of Britain, the US, and Europe must remain majorities, running their states according to their ethnic identities and Christian faith, just as Jews do in Israel.
When Houellebecq's protagonist in Submission laments the flight of his girlfriend from Islamified France, he says, “There is no Israel for me.” But there can be. There should be. And Israel should help us have it.
I have read before that Israel is happy that muslims displaced by war in the Middle East should colonise Europe.
I thought this to be anti semitic,hard right conspiracy theory.
Is there then some truth in this ?
I prefer to see Israel as making the fight against Islamic terrorism, which we should all support, not just pushing the problem elsewhere.
Ethno Nationalism.
A dirty term. Implications of Nazis and jew hatred.
Was the BNP all bad ?
I find myself in limbo.
I detest politicians of the stamp we have endured for decades. I have an inbuilt patriotism and love for my country.
I resent the destruction and indeed degradation in some areas of England brought about by imported foreigners. I absolutely hate left wing dyed hair traitors. "No Nation! No borders ! ".
( Look at our war memorials and the names of young men who died to keep our country free - you idiots)
I am no Nazi and I don't hate Jews.
Where do I fit in ?
Even the Tommy "Unite the Kingdom" scene does not oppose multi culturalism - it's all about inclusivity not racism.
At the same time they chant "We want our country back, we want our country back !"
Now exactly what does that mean ?
Perhaps Frodo should just shut his front door and prefer not worry about Orcs.
"Others became uncomfortable when I proposed we deport unassimilable Jihadists, while being at war with Hamas. "
There is a deeper reason for this that might not be apparent at first glance. What's happened here is that you've wandered into a small minefield of local Israeli politics, of which you were not aware. This is the reason for the awkward looks. Let me try to explain.
For the English, the Muslims are newly-arrived, invited by the government, as distinct from the nation. Many of them have not deep roots, and might easily be induced to leave.
For the Israelis, the Muslims (as a group) were present at the moment of the establishment of the state, and the declaration of independence implores them to stay and behave peacefully. Many left during the 1948 war, but some were added in small land swaps during the cease-fire negotiations with Jordan in 1949.
Should the Arabs of Israel be deported, and their citizenship revoked? There was a small political faction (Kach) which advocated this policy, but the Israeli political body as a whole eventually rejected this suggestion as beyond the pale. So far neither the events of 2021 nor the ongoing war have changed this.
This is why, when a young man comes from Britain, and starts talking matter-of-factly about mass deportations, the Israeli politician begins to stammer. He cannot be seen to consider the idea seriously without being associated with the Kach faction. Anything he says about Britain will be immediate wrenched out of context and applied to the Israeli situation. So he hems and haws.
The answers you received are what they would answer if the question were applied to the Israeli case. They give this answer because they can give no other, due of the dictates of local politics. It's not a simple case of hypocrisy.
Integration is, in fact, the Israeli policy towards its non-Jewish citizens, even while Israel is at war with Hamas, though it is applied at the level of the group, not the individual. But there is another lesson to be learned here. How successful has Israel been in integrating its Arab & Muslim citizens over 80 years? In a country where the Jewish majority is strong, where the national ideology is unapologetic (mostly...), and where the army is willing to act against Jihadi threats? The answer is, not all that successful. The riots of 2021 paint a gloomy picture. How well could Britain be expected to do, when its own citizens cannot raise their own flag without risk? Even in the rosiest outcome, eighty years from now, you will still have primary schools in midland cities where no English is spoken.