I interviewed Polanski today - and discussed with him the challenge he faces.

Holborn and St. Pancras is an inner London seat, and there is much fertile ground there for a left challenger. Even at Labour’s supposed peak - its victory in the 2024 general election - Starmer’s majority collapsed from 27,763 to 11,572.

That’s for two reasons. One, the independent campaign of left-wing former anti-Apartheid activist Andrew Feinstein, who came second with 7,312 votes and nearly a fifth of the vote share. That was despite almost a total media blackout - with him written off as a total no-hoper.

And at the same time the Greens surged, too, chalking up 10.4% of the vote.

Alas, that was a divided left. But all of that, the combined left vote was approaching 30%.

In the local elections, the Greens surged in Holborn and St. Pancras - although the left there has still been hobbled by a lack of unity.

Now the circumstances are rather different. Andy Burnham is now prime minister and is enjoying his honeymoon, and is dressing himself - in rhetoric at least - in progressive garbs.

The frontrunner to be the Labour candidate is Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former Somali refugee who is said to be close to Starmer. (It is hard not to wonder what she thinks of Labour’s proposed introduction of one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe).

But Polanski has advantages. He is a national party leader with huge name recognition.

He will have the support of a Green Party which now has more than a quarter of a million members - and far more resources and experience than it once did.

He will surely be able to attract a huge grassroots army of supporters.

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This is a diverse community - many minority Brits have been attracted to the Greens from Labour - and many younger progressive-inclined voters live there.

That said, this is not Hackney or Haringey: as pollster Steve Akehurst notes, it has many financially secure voters with socially liberal attitudes, rather than their financially insecure counterparts who are more attracted to the Greens.

Polanski will surely have to be position himself as an MP who will stand up for the constituency - rather than a Labour MP who will represent the government.

He will have to hammer away at Burnham shifting in rhetoric, but not in policy, and not the various U-turns he’s already made. “Hold Burnham’s feet to the fire” and “send Labour a message” must surely be part of the approach.

There is no risk of Reform winning here, so Labour can’t fall back on “Vote Green, get Farage”. Voters can be encouraged to take a risk-free punt on the Greens, believing it will send a signal to the government that they want meaningful change in substance, not in tone and rhetoric.

That includes taxing the wealthy and big business to invest in crumbling services and infrastructure.

Here is a constituency with many voters from a migrant background, or who have friends, lovers and workmates who hail from other countries.

It’s certainly worth going for Labour’s anti-migrant, anti-refugee policies. If Polanski won, there’s a good chance Shabana Mahmoud would be driven from office.

Here’s an important truth to end on. It’s Polanski and the Greens who kicked Starmer out of office. That’s because of the Gorton and Denton by election, and the local elections: Labour lost four times as many votes to the Greens as to Reform.

So already the Greens can point to having made a huge political impact.

Burnham certainly has his honeymoon - but political reality will inevitably bite, not least as a Budget approaches.

There is a coordinated smear campaign against the leftist streamer Hasan Piker by the Democratic Party establishment over Israel’s US-armed and facilitated genocide against the Palestinian people.

The bottom line about what’s happening here is this: the American people have turned against Israel in revulsion at the genocide and want to stop facilitating its crimes. That opposition is overwhelming among the Democratic rank-and-file. But the Democratic Party establishment remains invested in the alliance with Israel – and they fear being swept aside by pro-Palestinian left-wing candidates in upcoming primaries.

So their response is to smear pro-Palestinian figures – in this case, to try to toxify Hasan Piker and nullify his ability to mobilise grassroots supporters to help progressive candidates win Democratic primaries.

They also clearly want to destroy the chances of progressive candidates like Abdul el-Sayed, who is standing for the Senate in Michigan, even if that destroys the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate – so they can say: look, if you select progressive candidates, they will lose against the Republicans. The aim is to deter other voters from following that example.

The Democratic Party establishment – like the rest of the pro-Israel faction which dominates the US political elite – knows it has lost the argument. They know they have lost public opinion. They know they have lost their base. So, to stay in control, they are resorting to fear, smear and lies.

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What Hasan Piker actually said

The smear against Hasan Piker which Democratic bigwigs are promoting is that he has threatened Jewish Americans with violence if they don’t stop supporting Israel, and that he is antisemitic. It rests on a total, wilful and deceitful distortion of what he has said.

We’re going to go through what’s going on here. Let’s start by listening to what he said. Here’s the first clip, in which he was responding to an anti-Zionist Jewish follower of his.

What he’s saying here is that US public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel – and that this has happened despite the efforts of the Western political and media elite. The latest polling, at the end of July, shows that 55% of Americans have an unfavourable view of Israel, with just 31% having a favourable view. That same pollster, back in March 2025, had Americans equally divided – with 43% favourable and 43% unfavourable.

Among Democrats, that unfavourability is overwhelming. But even among Republicans under the age of 30, 58% had unfavourable views of Israel, compared with 29% who had favourable views.

The polling also found that 52% thought the US gave too much military aid to Israel, while another poll by YouGov found that 44% of Americans thought the US shouldn’t send military aid to Israel, compared with just a third who said it should.

The polling has also found that half of registered American voters think Israel has committed genocide, while 35% believe it has not.

Despite the political and media elite being united behind Israel, the American people have decided they’ve seen quite enough mass slaughter and atrocities against innocent people, thank you very much, and they are done with Israel.

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So Hasan Piker is making an argument against conflation. He is arguing that conflating Jewish people with a state whose crimes have repulsed the American people is obviously going to drive antisemitism, and therefore put Jewish people in danger – something he does not want Jewish people to face. He is arguing that this conflation is a threat to Jewish safety.

Indeed, it should be noted that polling also finds that more than six in ten Jewish Americans think Israel has committed war crimes, about four in 10 believe it has committed genocide, rising to 50% among Jewish Americans under 35. Another poll also finds that around half of Jews under 35 want to replace Israel altogether with a binational state with equal rights for all.

So the conflation of Israel and its crimes with Jewish people – promoted by the pro-Israel lobby – is endangering Jewish people based on a lie. Because people who express views about Israel which are common among Jewish Americans are smeared as antisemites.

The point Hasan Piker is making is that Jewish Americans do not prioritise Israel in their voting habits, but they do prioritise antisemitism, quite understandably, and the pro-Israel lobby is trying to manipulate that concern to build support for Israel. He’s arguing specifically for a demarcation between Jewish people and the State of Israel and its crimes.

It’s fundamentally the same point made by Ezra Klein, a mainstream Jewish liberal columnist for the New York Times, who said:

“Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility. Yes, antisemitism often cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. So don’t do the antisemites’ work for them. If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.”

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Is this really ‘victim blaming’?

Now, obviously, anti-Zionism – opposition to an ethno-nationalism which strips the rights of Palestinians and indeed subjects them to genocide – is not antisemitism. What is absolutely true is that antisemites seeking to recruit people are helped if the argument is routinely made that opposing Israel’s crimes means you hate Jewish people.

The argument here is that this is victim blaming – which is total nonsense.

Look, it’s basic common sense that, say, the September 11 attacks increased Islamophobia. Should they have done? No. Did Islamophobes use the attacks to incite anti-Muslim hatred? Yes. Do we need to aggressively oppose the hateful efforts by Islamophobes to whip up hatred of Muslims because of terrorist attacks like 9/11? Yes, absolutely.

It remains the case that those attacks increased anti-Muslim hatred, and everybody knows that.

The difference is that the 9/11 attacks were not armed and backed by the US government, with a media and political elite vilifying anyone who opposed those attacks as anti-Muslim bigots. Imagine if that was the case!

Let’s listen to this other clip, in which he discusses the pro-Israel Democratic congressional candidate who has refused to endorse Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed.

In this clip, what Hasan Piker is doing is again opposing the conflation of Jewish people and Israel, and arguing instead for a demarcation between Jewish people and Israel.

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What about the ISIS comparison?

Some of the contrived anger has arisen because of the comparison between Israel and ISIS.

Let me just pick one quote – there are so many others – from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister and a key member of the Israeli government. He said:

“For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn.”"

Is it fair to make a comparison with ISIS there? Yes, it obviously is.

What about the UN independent commission which this year concluded that Israel was deliberately targeting children – up to and including deliberately shooting kids in the head and chest in order to kill them – backed up by testimonies from dozens of US-based medics who served in Gaza?

Or indeed the leading British surgeon, Dr. Nick Maynard, who testified that Israeli soldiers were shooting different parts of the bodies of Palestinian children on different days – one day the head, the next day the chest, the next day the genitalia, and so on.

Does that sound like ISIS to you? I’d say it does.

What about deliberately destroying hospitals?

What about deliberately blowing up ambulances and medical staff, including with double-tap strikes where there’s an attack on civilians, and then the Israeli army waits until medical staff arrive to attack again?

What about systematically attacking mosques and churches?

What about destroying up universities, libraries and archives?

What about destroying ancient monuments?

I could go on.

Don’t want to be compared to ISIS? Then don’t act like ISIS.

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The Democratic pile-on

Let’s go through some of the coordinated messages from the Democratic Party establishment.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Minority Leader, posted:

“The malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and antisemitic.

There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate.

We will fight the cancer of antisemitism with the fierce urgency of now.”

A deceitful distortion of what Hasan Piker said. Piker opposes these threats and this violence, and he is arguing against the cause of it.

US Senator Cory Booker denounced what he called Hasan Piker’s “dangerous and hateful language”, again claiming that Piker was saying Jewish Americans were responsible for hatred and violence, and arguing he was stoking hatred against our neighbours – the opposite of what Piker was doing.

Congressman Josh Gottheimer insanely claimed Hasan Piker’s comments were “sick, wrong and straight out of the Nazi playbook”.

We could go on – and I’ll explain what the Democratic Party establishment is up to.

But as Pastor Ben Dixon says:

“There is no question that the Democratic Party Establishment has coordinated more attacks on Hasan Piker than they have coordinated opposition to Donald Trump and his destruction of the Republic.”

Just a fact: this weak, pathetic party Establishment lay back and did nothing while Trump’s Republicans rampaged across an already deeply compromised US democracy. Yet it’s a left-wing streamer opposed to genocide who rouses them from their slumber and makes them go on the offensive.

Indeed, note that Fox News had 224 broadcasts in August mentioning Hasan Piker, compared with 44 broadcasts about the war on Iran. This is a Republican smear campaign which the Democrats have joined in on.

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What fighting antisemitism actually requires

Dov Waxman, Professor of Israel Studies at UCLA, has some really wise comments. He says:

“In response to the outrage expressed over Hasan Piker’s recent comments regarding American Jews and antisemitism, which many have interpreted as blaming Jews themselves for provoking antisemitic violence because of their support for Israel, I feel it is necessary to stress some basic points:

1. We must unequivocally condemn antisemitic acts against Jews and not make excuses for those who commit them.

2. We also need to acknowledge that Israel’s actions fuel much (but not all) of the anger and hatred directed against Jews nowadays.

3. Conflating Jews with Israel has been promoted by antisemites, U.S. politicians, the Israeli state and its officials, and by major Jewish organizations and mainstream institutions.

4. We should also recognize that while most Jewish Americans do not support the Israeli government’s policies or the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, most Jews are emotionally attached to Israel and care about it, and it is wrong to require them to sever or disavow their connection to Israel in order to avoid antisemitic discrimination or be safe from antisemitic violence.

5. The fact that hatred of Israel can cause hatred of Jews and that Jews are being attacked because they are associated with Israel does not mean that Jews deserve to be hated or targeted because of this association, but it’s not victim-blaming to note that people make this association at least partly because the Jewish state itself and major Jewish groups outside Israel continually emphasize the connection between Jews and Israel and between Judaism and Zionism.”

This is really wise, nuanced stuff.

Antisemitism is a grave evil and it must be fought. Within living memory it caused the Holocaust, the industrialised extermination of six million Jews. And indeed, making Jewish people in the diaspora feel safe itself helps undermine the arguments presented by Israel as some sort of liferaft for Jewish people.

Part and parcel of this must be to demarcate between Israel and Jewish people – and we should emphasise that both antisemites and defenders of Israel are seeking to conflate Jewish people and Israel.

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As Hasan Piker has said:

“do not let a coordinated republican smear campaign become ‘reality.’ my argument against the dangerous false conflation between zionism and judaism which in turn increases antisemitism is now turned on it’s head. zionism is not judaism. antizionism is not antisemitism.”

The Democratic establishment has lost its base

What’s really going on here?

Well, the Democratic establishment knows it has lost its base. New polling has just come out on the views of Democratic voters in the first six primary states. Take a look:

Completely overwhelming and decisive. The Democratic Party Establishment has lost its base – and that terrifies them.

So what have they just done? They just appointed Congressman Jared Moskowitz as Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. He is one of the most pro-Israel and pro-war members.

It is as deliberate and calculated an “up yours” to the Democratic base as it’s possible to conjure up.

They are doubling down.

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What Hakeem Jeffries represents

Hakeem Jeffries himself has repeatedly travelled to Israel, including on many trips linked to AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobby.

He has repeatedly justified Israeli war crimes. In 2014, he told a large pro-Israel rally in New York:

“When you live in a tough neighborhood Israel should not be made to apologize for its strength”,

adding that:

“the only thing that neighbors respect in a tough neighborhood is strength.”

He then co-sponsored a House resolution supporting Israel’s military response to Hamas.

He has repeatedly opposed conditioning US military aid to Israel, repeatedly voted to hike Israeli military funding, and voted down attempts to cut aid to Israel during the genocide.

And note how Hakeem Jeffries just privately met up with Jared Kushner, the unelected son-in-law of Donald Trump, to discuss who knows what (we are told it was housing, immigration, the cost of living and supposed areas of cooperation, but we should be sceptical if that was it).

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The hatred they ignore

Meanwhile, there is constant hatred and bile promoted by the US right – without this pushback from the Democrats.

Take Laura Loomer, a de facto adviser in the court of Donald Trump, who just posted this:

“I don’t want Muslims in positions of elected office and I don’t want Muslims having financial ties to the GOP.

I don’t like Islam. If I could wave a magic wand, I would round up Muslims and deport them from America.

Most MAGA voters agree with me.

Good luck running for office and trying to convince the MAGA base that we need more Muslims in America.

Good luck.”

This is Nazi-like hatred – calling for rounding up an entire minority – and yet where are the coordinated Democratic attacks?

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What this is really about

The truth is that the Democratic eEtablishment fears Hasan Piker because they know he can mobilise voters to replace them with progressive candidates, and they are terrified because they know they have lost the Democratic base.

They fear being swept away.

They want people like Abdul el-Sayed to lose in Michigan so that Democratic voters go: well, we’d better not vote to elect people like that, even if we agree with them, because otherwise we’ll let the Republicans win.

The Democrats would prefer to lose to the Republicans than win with the left.

They would prefer to keep facilitating Israel’s genocide and heinous crimes rather than win.

That’s what we are dealing with here.

And if it means destroying US democracy to defend Israel – that’s a price they’re willing to pay .

Hollywood superstar Mark Ruffalo is being smeared as antisemitic because he opposes Israel’s genocide. What he is saying is supported by most Americans, most people in the West – and most people on earth – and all of that is linked to why he is being smeared.

The Emmy Award-winning actor, known for playing the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as films such as Spotlight, Foxcatcher and The Kids Are All Right, is being smeared because he opposes the $111bn merger of Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Why Ruffalo opposes the merger

Now, there are lots of reasons he’s opposing the merger. He opposes it on media concentration grounds – this new company will account for over a quarter of wide-release theatrical distribution in the US, and it would mean three distributors account for three quarters of wide-release films, while four would control 86%. California and 11 other states are suing to stop the merger. It also means CBS News and CNN, as well as Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO and multiple other television networks, would be in the same group.

He opposes it because it will mean huge job losses, because it will be saddled with around $79bn worth of net debt, and because investment partners include the sovereign wealth funds of dictatorships like Saudi Arabia.

He opposes it because the family who own Paramount – David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison – are close to the Trump regime. Trump has described Larry Ellison as “a friend of mine”, and since they took over CBS News, the channel has shifted its coverage to become more favourable to the Trump administration.

But he has another very strong reason to oppose it – and that is because Paramount Skydance is run by a family who are not just ideologically vehemently pro-Israel, but who have actual profound links to Israel.

Oracle’s relationship with Israel is longstanding to say the least. Its technology has been supplied across the Israeli state, including to military, government and police. That relationship formed the context for a clip circulated by Ruffalo on Instagram – footage of Oracle executive vice-chair Safra Catz, who also sits on Paramount’s board, discussing technology Oracle offered Israel after 7 October.

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On his Instagram story, Ruffalo shared a video of Safra Catz, an Israeli who serves as former Oracle CEO and now as executive vice-chair – and who is also a director on the board of Paramount since its merger with Skydance Media.

Amongst other things, in the video she boasts of Oracle offering “really profoundly scary technology” to Israel as it committed genocide from October 2023 onwards. A state which a consensus of genocide scholars, NGOs like Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières, and a UN independent commission say is committing genocide – and here she is, boasting of offering up “really profoundly scary technology” to support what she would claim is a military offensive, but is a genocide.

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Ruffalo then posted the following:

“This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.

These ‘really profoundly scary technologies’ will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.

There is an old saying. ‘The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.’

From one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world. Why has Trump pushed this illegal merger through?

Larry Ellison will own most of ‘Para Bros’. Larry is a classic Oligarch. They are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.

We have a chance to stop this. There are 12 state Attorneys General suing to block this merger. It will be catastrophic for our film industry.

There will be a loss of 4500 direct film making jobs and the loss of another 10k ancillary jobs. Merger like this are almost always bad for workers, consumers, and the industry they tend to dominate. It’s a classic antitrust case.

It will hike up the cost of cable and flatten out competition. This means less choice for our audiences. It also concentrates an enormous amount of creative control to companies that say and do things like this strange woman from Oracle.”

Paramount then released a statement which included the following:

“We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong – they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind – and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”

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Where is the antisemitism?

This is a lie. There was nothing antisemitic here – we’ll come on to that more.

Now two so-called “prominent Jewish advocacy groups”, as Variety put it, have accused Ruffalo of spreading “antisemitic tropes”. That is the Simon Wiesenthal Center and something called the Creative Community for Peace.

The CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said:

“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes.

“We commend Paramount for speaking clearly and refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism. At a time when antisemitism is too often minimized, rationalized, or repackaged in more socially acceptable language, this kind of moral clarity matters.”

The cheek of these people using “moral clarity” to smear opponents of an ongoing genocide.

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What the Simon Wiesenthal Center calls antisemitism

Want to hear more about what the Simon Wiesenthal Center thinks is antisemitic?

In 2016, they had their list of the Worst Global Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Incidents. Guess what was at number one? The UN’s treatment of Israel, with particular emphasis on the Obama administration abstaining on a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

That was above the white supremacist neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who attended a gathering featuring Nazi salutes, where Spencer questioned whether Jews were even people.

And in 2011 they issued a statement opposing Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders – that is, before the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory – with a press release with the headline “Israel Should Reject a Return to 1967 ‘Auschwitz’ Borders”. Let’s not mince our words here. These people are absurd extremists as well as apologists for terrible crimes.

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The Ellisons and Israel

Let’s just go through the facts about the Ellisons and their relationship with Israel.

In 2014 Larry Ellison gave $10m to Friends of the IDF. In 2017, he gave another $16.6m.

That’s what we know publicly.

In 2024, a Jerusalem Post article wrote about David Ellison taking over Paramount, saying it was a “groundbreaking strategic move reshaping the US media market”. They quote a source familiar with the details, who says:

“This is the next generation of global Jewish leadership. These two young men love Israel, are connected to their Judaism, have Zionist values, and it’s very encouraging to see that in such successful families, the values are passed on to the younger generations. Both quietly donate quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF. It is positive news for the Jewish world that Korff and Ellison are the next generation of global Jewish leadership, connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”

And what gives that source credence is that at the bottom of the article it says: “This article was written in cooperation with SkyDance.”

Was it indeed.

In 2014, Larry Ellison told Israel’s Channel 10: “We love our country of Israel and we’ll do everything we can to support the country of Israel.”

Larry Ellison’s first wife described him as “an ardent Zionist” and, according to New York Magazine, “remembered him taking a week off work to watch coverage of the Six-Day War in 1967.” It also noted that Larry Ellison is close to Benjamin Netanyahu, who it says vacationed on his Hawaiian island in 2021.

It further goes on to say:

“David once joined Larry on a trip to Israel and posted a photo to Instagram from a dinner with the prime minister. ‘I am very grateful for everything he has done and continues to do for the nation of Israel! #bibinetanyahu,’ David wrote. After October 7, David declared that ‘Skydance stands with Israel,’ and the Ellisons’ support for the country goes part of the way to explaining the hiring of Weiss.”

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Larry Ellison even offered Netanyahu membership on the board of Oracle in 2021.

As Drop Site News reported, in 2015 Israel’s then ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, asked Ellison whether Marco Rubio had “passed your scrutiny” and whether they had discussed Israel. Ellison replied that the meeting went well and that “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.” Ellison subsequently hosted a Rubio fundraiser and put $5m into a super PAC supporting him.

And as for Safra Catz, the subject of the Ruffalo video, she wrote the following in an email to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2015:

“We have all been horrified by the growth of the BDS movement in college campuses and have concluded that we have to fight this battle before the kids even get to college. We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture. That means getting the message to the American people in a way they can consume it.”

Need I go on?

These are unbelievably rich pro-Israel activists with direct, extensive links to Israel and to Netanyahu himself. They are going to wield massive power over US media and entertainment - indeed they already do. That is a fact, and it is not antisemitic to say this. It is not an attack on Jewish people to state the facts about these specific very wealthy and very powerful individuals.

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Ruffalo hits back

Now Ruffalo fired back with the following statement, which is worth reading in full:

It so far has 161,000 reposts, 856,000 likes and has been seen nearly 30 million times.

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The attempt to equate Israel with Jewish people

So in that context, what about this post by Jonathan Greenblatt, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, which routinely equates opposition to Israel’s crimes with antisemitism:

“Sickening”? What qualifies as “sickening” in anything Ruffalo says? Let’s be clear about what’s sickening: Israel wiping Gaza from the earth, slaughtering about 1 in 20 of its inhabitants by direct violence, and destroying its hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and universities.

Note how Greenblat doesn’t even say Israel, he says “the Jewish state” in order to promote the agenda of equating Israel with Jewish people. There is no antisemitic rhetoric in what Ruffalo said at all at all, and neither are there baseless claims about Israel’s monstrous crimes.

What is antisemitic is equating Jewish people with the crimes of Israel. The polling finds that 61% of Jewish Americans think Israel has committed war crimes, while 39% think it has committed genocide – rising to 50% among younger Jewish Americans.

Read what Hannah Einbinder - an Emmy-award winning Jewish American actor - had to say:

The truth is Ruffalo is being smeared because he opposes the genocide, backing a ceasefire way back in October 2023.

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Then came another smear

Here’s this example from Hadley Freeman, a columnist at The Times. She posted a picture of Mark Ruffalo wearing the Artists4Ceasefire badge, and wrote:

What on earth is she talking about?

Back in March 2024, even pro-Israel propagandist website IsraellyCool wrote a post entitled: “A Plea to My Fellow Israel Advocates: Leave The Fake News Sharing to Our Adversaries”.

It then wrote:

“While I think these celebrities are absolutely wrong in calling for a ceasefire, the claim that the red pin symbol derives from the Ramallah lynching is not based in fact.

“Artists4Ceasefire explain the symbol as such:

“The Artists4Ceasefire enamel pin is composed of a red background to symbolize the urgency of the call to save lives. The orange hand conveys the beautiful community of people from all backgrounds that have come together in support of centering our shared humanity. The heart being cradled in the center of the hand is an invitation for us to lead with our hearts, always, to lead with love. When we lead with love, we understand that all of our fellow beings deserve to be loved and protected.

“True, the pin design is reminiscent of the bloodied hands, and pointing that out as an irony is absolutely valid and useful. But to state as fact something that is based on resemblance alone – and does not seem logical – is an own goal.”

When I corrected Hadley Freeman’s outrageous smear, she blocked me on X and posted: “Wow, an OJ pile on. What is this, 2019?”

In other words, she accused me of being a bully after I corrected her for smearing Mark Ruffalo for opposing genocide.

She has since deleted her original tweet, but with no correction.

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The new McCarthyism

The truth is: this is just the latest example of the biggest attack on free speech since McCarthyism.

Across the Western world, people have been smeared, deplatformed, sacked, arrested, violently assaulted by the state, imprisoned and deported for opposing Israel’s genocide.

Yet public opinion has decisively shifted against Israel. These two facts are linked. The strategy is straightforward: use fear to prevent public opinion from being acted on.

But you can only turn the world upside down for so long.

933 days after five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab was killed alongside four of her cousins – all children – and their parents, Israel has finally admitted that its troops fired on the car carrying them.

This massacre goes beyond Hind and her family. Israel killed two paramedics sent to try to save her, after their ambulance’s journey had been coordinated with the Israeli authorities.

It comes after denial after denial, lie after lie, and fits a familiar pattern when Israel faces allegations over a particularly high-profile atrocity: deny, deflect, distort and sow doubt – and then, sometimes long after public attention has moved on, acknowledge facts that demolish the original story.

Most of the Western media plays along, refusing to assign responsibility even when overwhelming evidence warrants it. They instead encourage readers and viewers to retreat into a comforting shrug: who can possibly know what is real amid the fog of war?

So first let’s go through the truth and Israel’s lies – and then put it in the wider context of Israel’s record of relentless deception, and the culture of impunity which has enabled Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide against the Palestinian people.

What Israel has now admitted

On 19 August, the Israeli army announced that it had completed reviews of a number of what it calls “exceptional operational incidents” in Gaza.

It ordered Military Police criminal investigations into the killing of Hind Rajab and her family, and into the killing of 15 Palestinians – including emergency workers and a UN employee – in Tel al-Sultan in March 2025.

At the same time, it decided not to open a criminal investigation into the Israeli strikes which killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in April 2024. I’ll come back to that.

The Israeli military has stated that these reviews are conducted as part of its obligations under international law. Given the state’s wanton violations of international law, you might wonder about their motives for saying this.

It’s straightforward. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under the ICC’s principle of complementarity, the Court is supposed to act where states with jurisdiction are unwilling or unable genuinely to investigate or prosecute the same conduct.

But simply announcing an investigation does not, by itself, block the ICC: the central question is whether domestic proceedings are genuine.

There is therefore an obvious legal and political incentive for Israel to point to investigations of a handful of high-profile cases as evidence that international intervention is unnecessary.

The record tells us there will be no meaningful accountability for Israel’s murder of Hind Rajab and her family.

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What happened to Hind Rajab

On 29 January 2024, following Israeli evacuation orders – in practice, another episode of forced displacement – Hind’s aunt and uncle tried to flee Gaza City with Hind and her four cousins.

They were 15-year-old Layan Hamada, 13-year-old Raghad Hamada, 11-year-old Mohammed Hamada and seven-year-old Sara Hamada.

Israeli troops opened fire on their car. Five of its occupants were killed, leaving only Hind and Layan alive.

Layan called the Palestine Red Crescent. She said a tank was approaching and that her family had been killed. Gunfire can then be heard on the recording, followed by Layan screaming. The line went dead.

Hind was now the only survivor.

The Red Crescent re-established contact with her and spent around three and a half hours on the phone to a terrified five-year-old girl, wounded and trapped inside a car with the bodies of her family. As the day wore on, she spoke of her fear of the dark.

Eventually, an ambulance was dispatched after its movement had been coordinated with the Israeli authorities. The Red Crescent sent two paramedics: Yusuf al-Zeino, 35, and Ahmed al-Madhoun, 37.

As the ambulance reached the area, it was struck and both men were killed. Subsequent examinations of the wreckage found damage consistent with a tank round.

On 10 February, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, the bodies were finally recovered. The family car was riddled with bullets. The ambulance lay burned out nearby.

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The denial unravelled

Now consider what the Israeli authorities said after these killings.

Initially, the IDF said it was “unfamiliar with the incident described” and was “still looking into it”.

As the case attracted far more international attention than the vast majority of Palestinians killed in Gaza, the Israeli army issued a categorical denial on 24 February.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told the Times of Israel that its preliminary investigation found IDF troops “were not present near the vehicle or within firing range”.

Because Israeli forces supposedly were not there, it also claimed there had been no need for the ambulance to coordinate its movement with the IDF.

Both claims swiftly disintegrated.

Weeks later, an official from COGAT – the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating civilian affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories – told the Washington Post that COGAT had “coordinated everything … including the ambulance that wanted to go and find Hind”, while saying he did not know the specifics.

COGAT then failed to clarify the contradicting accounts when repeatedly asked, while the IDF continued to deny that coordination had taken place.

Then on 16 April, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the Israelis had told Washington that IDF units had, in fact, been in the area – while maintaining they had no knowledge of or involvement in the attack.

So the story had moved from: our troops weren’t there to our troops were there, but they weren’t involved.

Yet the IDF subsequently continued publicly standing by its original denial.

By October 2025, another explanation had emerged: the Israeli government argued that the hundreds of bullet impacts on the car were the product of a firefight between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.

Then, on 6 April 2026, a website called FactSignal promoted the possibility that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had been fighting in the area, suggesting that the family might have been struck in crossfire or by Palestinian mortar or small-arms fire.

This was not simply some random pro-Israel website. At the bottom of the page is this disclosure:

“This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.”

In other words, this material formed part of a propaganda operation conducted on behalf of the Israeli state.

That story has now been abandoned too.

Israel’s latest account accepts that its troops did fire on the family car, but says it was travelling contrary to an evacuation route previously announced to residents.

Just look at the progression:

Israeli troops were not there.

Then: Israeli troops were there, but did not attack the car.

Then: perhaps the damage came from crossfire involving Palestinian fighters.

Now: Israeli troops did fire on the car.

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The evidence was already there

Here is why the original Israeli denial should never have been treated so credulously.

During Layan’s final conversation with the Red Crescent, she told the dispatcher:

“They are shooting at us. The tank is next to us.”

The only military operating tanks in Gaza was Israel.

After Layan was killed, Hind herself repeatedly told Red Crescent dispatchers that tanks were around the car and moving closer.

To dismiss those accounts required dismissing what two terrified children reported about the murder of their family - which they had witnessed, and only temporarily survived.

Hind’s mother, Wissam, also said she witnessed fire directed at the vehicle:

“We saw them when they fired at the car but we didn’t believe they had targeted them, or we didn’t want to believe it.”

There were important investigations by two Western media organisations. But they not only lacked prominence, they remained isolated pieces of reporting rather than changing the wider way the story was framed - and these stories were largely ignored by other media outlets. This is typical of the reporting of the genocide.

The Washington Post had the audio independently analysed. Audio specialists identified at least 62 gunshots in six seconds, in two bursts. An acoustic specialist found that the rate of fire was faster than the sort of rifle Hamas fighters used, and was more consistent with “weapons commonly issued to Israeli forces”.

Then there was the satellite evidence.

The team at Planet Labs supplied the evidence, and a specialist reviewed it on on behalf of the Washington Post. They found at least four Israeli armoured vehicles around 300 metres further along the road from the family car at 3.31pm on 29 January, roughly an hour after Layan’s final call.

More than a dozen additional Israeli armoured vehicles were visible within a quarter of a mile.

Sky News conducted its own analysis and found at least 15 Israeli military vehicles in the area, with the closest roughly 300 metres from the car.

And note this. On 10 February, the IDF itself published a press release stating that “over the last two weeks” its troops had been conducting raids in Shati and Tel al-Hawa – the neighbourhood where Hind and her family were killed.

That press release was later deleted.

Sky News also geolocated footage released by the IDF to show three Israeli units operating less than 650 metres from the car.

The evidence contradicted the categorical Israeli claim that its forces were nowhere close enough to have fired on the family.

A weapons expert from intelligence agency Janes consulted by the Washington Post examined images of the car and concluded that its bullet holes were probably produced by a 7.62-calibre machine gun. They noted that Merkava tanks, Namer armoured personnel carriers and Puma engineering vehicles used by Israel all carry weapons of that calibre.

Then there is Forensic Architecture, the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Its reconstruction identified 335 projectile impacts on the car and concluded, using the bullet trajectories and acoustic evidence, that the firing came from close range. Its analysis found that whoever was firing would likely have been aware that children were inside.

Remember: this happened in broad daylight.

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The ambulance – and what the UN found

The ambulance presents another devastating contradiction.

The IDF had argued that the Red Crescent could not have needed Israeli permission to approach Hind because Israeli troops were supposedly absent. But we know that is a lie. Israeli troops were present.

The Washington Post reviewed the COGAT route map transmitted to the Palestinian health liaison, who said permission had been granted. A COGAT official independently confirmed that the ambulance had been coordinated.

The Red Crescent recordings also capture Wissam asking whether access had been coordinated and was safe. The dispatcher confirms that it had, saying they had spent around three hours arranging it.

The ambulance was subsequently found burned out around 50 metres from the family car. Munitions experts who reviewed the damage found it consistent with a large direct-fire projectile of approximately the size of a tank round.

Then came the international investigations.

In October 2024, the UN-mandated Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that the IDF’s 162nd Division had been operating in the area and attributed the deaths of the seven family members and the shelling of the ambulance to Israeli forces. It concluded that the killings amounted to the war crimes of “wilful killing” and “attacking a civilian object”.

In June 2026, the Commission went further. It found that the 401st Brigade of the 162nd Division deliberately fired on the car from close range in the full knowledge that children were inside. They held the same brigade responsible for the shelling of the ambulance.

The commander of the 401st Armoured Brigade at the time was Colonel Beni Aharon. Above him in the chain of command, the 162nd Division was commanded by Brigadier General Itzik Cohen.

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This pattern did not begin with Hind Rajab

There are many examples of Israeli authorities denying responsibility for crimes, only for the original account to collapse later.

During Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, Israel initially denied using white phosphorus. It later acknowledged its use.

In May 2022, Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in Jenin. Senior Israeli officials initially suggested Palestinian gunmen were responsible. Months later, the IDF acknowledged there was a “high possibility” that she had been accidentally hit by Israeli gunfire.

In August of that year, five Palestinian boys were killed beside a cemetery in Gaza. Israeli officials initially attributed their deaths to a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. An Israeli military investigation subsequently concluded that an Israeli air strike had killed them.

You can see the recurring pattern: an immediate dismissal of responsibility, evidence accumulating against it, and - as attention has moved on - a later admission that moves much closer to what witnesses and independent investigators had said from the beginning.

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What does an Israeli investigation actually mean?

Which brings us back to the newly announced Israeli investigation into Hind’s killing – and the separate investigation into the killing of 15 Palestinians in Tel al-Sultan.

The latter case is itself indicative.

Israeli troops opened fire on emergency vehicles in March 2025. The IDF initially claimed that the vehicles had been “advancing suspiciously” in darkness without headlights or emergency lights.

Video subsequently recovered from the phone of one of the dead paramedics showed the emergency vehicles moving slowly, visibly marked, with their emergency lights flashing.

Israel then withdrew key elements of its original account.

So what reason is there to believe that these newly announced investigations will produce accountability?

According to Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, 219 Palestinian fatalities in the occupied West Bank were brought to the military’s attention between 2018 and 2022.

Only one of those 219 fatalities resulted in a prosecution – a rate of 0.4%.

As Yesh Din concluded:

“The data shows that Israel is unwilling to conduct genuine investigation and prosecution procedures in cases of offenses committed by soldiers.”

And consider what that solitary prosecution actually amounted to.

In March 2019, an Israeli soldier shot dead 23-year-old Palestinian Ahmad Jamal Manasrah near Bethlehem. Earlier, the same soldier had opened fire on Alaa Ghiyada after falsely accusing him of throwing stones. Ghiyada was seriously wounded. Manasrah was killed when he stopped to help him..

The soldier was ultimately convicted of the military-law equivalent of negligent homicide

His punishment?

Three months of unpaid military service, probation and demotion to private. No imprisonment.

He was not prosecuted at all for shooting and seriously wounding Ghiyada.

What about Israel’s record during its genocide in Gaza?

A 2025 investigation by Action on Armed Violence identified 52 publicly reported cases in which the Israeli military said it had conducted or would conduct an investigation into alleged wrongdoing between October 2023 and June 2025.

Of those 52 cases, 46 – 88% – had either been closed with no finding of fault or remained ‘unresolved’ with no reported outcome.

Among the ‘unresolved’ cases was the killing of at least 112 Palestinians waiting for flour in Gaza City in February 2024.

In AOAV’s 52-case sample, just one case had resulted in a prison sentence.

That involved a reservist at the Sde Teiman detention centre who repeatedly attacked bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees. He was sentenced to seven months in prison and demoted.

Against the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, the fact that this was the sole custodial sentence identified in that sample is extraordinary.

And the contrast with trivial disciplinary offences is striking.

In March 2024, two Israeli soldiers were sentenced to 20 days in a military prison - because they warmed up hot dogs in a military kitchen on Shabbat.

In April 2026, four Border Police officers were sentenced to two weeks in a military prison - because they barbecued on a base, “harming religion and Judaism”.

In May 2026, an Israeli soldier was sentenced to 30 days in military prison for wearing an unauthorised Velcro patch bearing the word “Messiah” on his uniform.

These are the sorts of offences Israeli soldiers are imprisoned for - rather than the mass slaughter of civilians.

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Then there is World Central Kitchen

The decision over the World Central Kitchen killings is revealing for another reason.

Seven aid workers were killed on 1 April 2024. They did not die in a single strike.

An Israeli drone first hit one WCK vehicle. Two people survived and made it into a second car. Around two minutes later, that vehicle was attacked too. Again, two people survived long enough to reach the third vehicle.

Then Israel struck that one as well.

All seven were killed.

And consider what Israeli forces knew while this was happening.

The WCK mission had been extensively coordinated in advance with the Israeli authorities: the organisation had given them detailed information about the operation, its vehicles, its personnel and the route they intended to take.

There had been armed locally contracted security personnel associated with the convoy, and a man had earlier been seen firing into the air. But by the time the WCK vehicles left the warehouse, those suspected gunmen were travelling in a different direction.

Their vehicle went north. The three WCK cars headed west, towards the coast.

This was not something Israeli surveillance had lost sight of. A UAV followed the security vehicle north and continued watching the suspected gunmen.

Nevertheless, an Israeli operator claimed that a WCK driver appeared to be putting a gun into one of the aid organisation’s vehicles. This was false – something Israel’s own investigation later acknowledged.

The WCK cars were attacked anyway.

An independent Australian government review later found that the attacks on the second and third vehicles breached the IDF’s own Standard Operating Procedures and Rules of Engagement. The strikes also took place within an area Israel had designated a “humanitarian fire control zone”.

Why would Israel deliberately attack the World Central Kitchen?

Consider this. A senior brigade-level officer involved in the operation had previously signed a letter calling for restrictions on aid entering Gaza.

The consequences extended far beyond the seven people killed. Humanitarian organisations suspended operations in Gaza in the aftermath.

Yet Israel has now decided that the conduct of those responsible does not even raise a “reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct”.

There won’t even be a sham investigation.

World Central Kitchen has condemned that decision.

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This is what impunity looks like

The Israeli military lied and lied about the killing of Hind Rajab and her family.

This has been their modus operandi both before and during the genocide.

They are now using the case for cynical propaganda ends to undermine justice. There will be no accountability for those who perpetrated this crime.

The UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry has correctly concluded that the 401st Brigade deliberately targeted the family car while knowing that children were inside.

These murders cannot be separated from the wider destruction of Palestinian childhood in Gaza.

The same UN Commission reported in June that more than 20,000 Palestinian children had been killed between October 2023 and October 2025. It concluded that “Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces”, and that this formed a key part of the evidence establishing genocidal intent.

These are the most heinous of crimes - facilitated by Western governments and media outlets. It is our responsibility to fight for truth - and justice.

Last Thursday and Friday, around 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, almost doubling its population. Many of them swam. At least 72 died in the attempt.

Almost all have since returned to Morocco. But the episode provoked a major crisis for Spain’s government. Other European countries turned on Madrid, claiming that its migration policy was responsible. Italy’s hard-right government temporarily reintroduced border controls on arrivals from Spain.

The far right across Europe and the wider West was jubilant. Here, they claimed, was proof of their narrative about a migrant invasion of Europe – and of the supposedly inevitable consequences of Spain’s progressive government taking a more humane approach to migration.

The far right seizes the crisis

Spain’s far-right Vox party called the crossings an “invasion”, demanded the complete closure of the border and linked the migrants to sexual violence and stabbings. Vox could be in government next year through a coalition with the hard-right People’s Party.

Donald Trump similarly declared that the crossings “look like an invasion”, before turning the deaths and desperation in Ceuta into a campaign message:

“That same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse.”

The US State Department went further:

“This unacceptable incident is the direct result of the Spanish Government’s deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe.

“We are considering actions to defend Americans at home and abroad from this threat and stand ready to assist other European allies considering similar options.”

Vice-President JD Vance posted:

“Thank God @POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.

“These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.”

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s hard-right Reform UK, declared: “This is battle for the future of our civilisation.”

Other Reform politicians joined in. Suella Braverman claimed: “Make no mistake, these men are on their way to the UK right now.”

This was totally false. Almost all of the migrants have already been returned to Morocco.

Before turning to what actually happened – and to what could suggest possible Israeli and American involvement – it is worth challenging the claim that Spain somehow brought this crisis on itself through its migration policy.

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Spain did not cause this crisis

Pedro Sánchez’s government has introduced a regularisation programme under which undocumented migrants can apply for one-year residence and work permits, provided they had lived continuously in Spain for at least five months before 1 January 2026.

The purpose was straightforward: to bring migrant workers out of the shadow economy and into legal employment, where they could pay taxes, exercise basic rights and play a full part in Spanish society.

Unlike so many other European leaders, Sánchez was prepared to tell people the truth. Welcoming migrants, he has previously said, was “an essential step to guarantee the prosperity and sustainability of our welfare state”.

But the regularisation programme had nothing to do with those attempting to enter Ceuta. None of them qualified for it.

Italian politicians and others across Europe claimed that Spain’s policy would unleash a new wave of migration into their own countries. That was simply false. The permits applied only to residence and employment in Spain. They did not grant the right to work elsewhere in Europe.

Nor did reaching Ceuta provide an automatic route to the Spanish mainland. Those crossing the border would still face extensive further legal and physical barriers before they could travel across the Strait of Gibraltar.

The politicians pretending otherwise were not confused. They were cynically exploiting public ignorance about how the system works – and the hostility towards migrants that such ignorance can so easily be used to inflame.

It is true that Spain’s Supreme Court – acting independently of the government – had ruled that people arriving by water could not be subjected to the exceptional “hot return” policy used at land fences.

But it did not prevent Spain from returning migrants. In practice, it offered those crossing into Ceuta no right to remain in Spain. But Spanish intelligence believes that people smugglers did exploit a distorted interpretation of the ruling.

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Morocco let it happen

There is very strong evidence that the Moroccan state played a decisive role in this crisis.

Back in May 2021, 8,000 Moroccan migrants entered Ceuta over two days. On that occasion, Morocco had been antagonised by Spain admitting the leader of a pro-independence Western Saharan movement for medical treatment.

Western Sahara is under Moroccan occupation, and there is a powerful movement for independence. As the think tank Chatham House outline:

“Within months, Spain had abandoned its historic position on Western Sahara – supporting an independence referendum – and instead endorsed Morocco’s autonomy plan for the territory. The lesson for Rabat, perhaps, was that pressure on Spain’s enclaves works.”

This time, the supposed pretext may have been Sánchez’s visit to Morocco’s regional rival, Algeria. He was attempting to repair relations that Algeria had severed after Spain shifted towards Morocco’s position on Western Sahara. Sánchez also discussed increasing the gas supply through a pipeline that bypasses Morocco and runs directly from Algeria to Spain.

But this was an extraordinarily weak pretext for enabling such a vast movement of people and endangering so many lives. The meeting had been announced in advance, and it did not reverse Spain’s highly favourable position towards Morocco on Western Sahara.

An Associated Press photographer at the scene said Moroccan gendarmes made no attempt to intervene as thousands of people moved past their positions towards Ceuta.

El País reported the same pattern. Moroccan auxiliary forces managed the movement of the crowd while police and gendarmes stood guard. This non-intervention continued from approximately midday on Thursday until Friday morning. The newspaper described the initial inhibition as “patent”.

In other words, Morocco’s authorities maintained order while leaving the route into Ceuta open.

Only after tens of thousands had crossed did the authorities deploy tear gas, water cannon and physical force. That matters. Once Morocco’s security forces decided to stop the movement, they demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of doing so.

More devastatingly, a report published by El Español cites sources in the Guardia Civil’s general staff who claimed Spanish border-surveillance cameras identified members of Morocco’s intelligence service among those who entered Ceuta.

Those sources claim that the alleged operatives took part to supervise the movement, observe Spain’s deployment, and monitor the response of the Spanish security forces. Spain’s intelligence sources are reported to have corroborated the Guardia Civil’s identification. The paper says other such infiltrations had been detected in previous Ceuta and Melilla crises.

Another report suggests that Spanish intelligence was concerned by nearly a thousand people swimming into Ceuta in a 10-day period. They interpreted the growing pressure as a potential test from the Moroccan state.

Spanish government sources told El País that an entry on this scale would not have been possible without the passivity of Morocco’s security forces.

Spain has continued publicly to praise Morocco as an ally. But Madrid has every reason to avoid an open confrontation: it depends on Morocco for migration control, counter-terrorism cooperation and the management of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

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Morocco’s alliance with Israel and the US

All of this matters because Morocco is a close ally of both Israel and the United States, with deep economic, military, intelligence and security ties to both countries.

Morocco is one of the Arab and African countries closest to the US. It’s a major non-NATO ally which buys vast quantities of US weapons and host of African Lion, AFRICOM’s largest annual military exercise. Its security services have a strong relationship with US intelligence and law enforcement. It has a free trade agreement which underpins annual goods trade worth $7.4 billion a year.

In 2020, Morocco normalised diplomatic relations with Israel. Israel gained security access and influence in North Africa, while Morocco acquired Israeli weapons and defence technology, along with expanded intelligence and cybersecurity cooperation.

In November 2021, Israel and Morocco signed a defence memorandum establishing a formal framework for intelligence cooperation, military exercises, defence-industrial collaboration, Israeli arms sales and exchanges between the two countries’ security apparatuses.

At a meeting in January, Morocco and Israel signed a joint military work plan for 2026.

None of that proves that Israel or the US was involved in the Ceuta crisis. But it establishes the context in which the crisis took place – and the states with which Morocco’s security establishment is most closely aligned.

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The US connection

Donald Trump has been enraged by Spain’s opposition to the illegal war on Iran and to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He recently demanded an end to trade with Spain, calling the country “terrible”.

In February, written testimony from a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee stated:

“Morocco has been using migrants to change Spanish policy, and it has succeeded.”

In March, the right-wing, pro-war commentator and former Pentagon official Michael Rubin openly called on Morocco to organise a mass civilian mobilisation against Ceuta and Melilla.

He proposed that Moroccans gather at the frontier, send bulldozers forward and enter the cities unarmed in order to raise the Moroccan flag. Rubin is a prominent figure in Washington’s pro-Israel and national-security world.

In the weeks that followed, the House Appropriations Committee published its report on the 2027 State Department funding bill. It did two striking things.

First, it directed at least $20 million in National Security Investment Programmes and another $20 million in Foreign Military Financing to Morocco.

Second, it stated that the “Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory”, noted Morocco’s claim to the cities and supported State Department efforts to encourage talks over their “future status”.

The House passed the accompanying bill on 15 July by 217 votes to 209 – just 15 days before the mass crossing.

Two days before the crossing, the US Trade and Development Agency agreed to fund a $5.7 million early engineering study for an ammonia project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. It was the first US government financing for a private-sector project there.

At the signing ceremony, the US ambassador declared:

“America is in the Moroccan Sahara.”

Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara was no longer merely diplomatic. Washington was now attaching concrete rewards to it.

The US first recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara in 2020, in exchange for Morocco normalising relations with Israel. The Trump administration subsequently announced initiatives intended to mobilise $5 billion in investment involving Morocco and the wider region, as well as a weapons package.

That has now increased to at least $40 million for Moroccan security and investment programmes.

Again, none of this proves that the US organised the Ceuta crossings. But the sequence is striking: growing US hostility towards Spain, open encouragement for Morocco to mobilise against the Spanish enclaves, congressional language backing Morocco’s territorial claim, increased military support and the first US financing of a private project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.

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The Israeli connection

Prominent Israeli figures were certainly jubilant about the crisis.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, declared:

“Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.”

Spain had not, in fact, declared any state of emergency.

Meanwhile, the far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir demanded that Sánchez “open the doors of Spain and grant refuge to the residents of Gaza who seek to emigrate”.

But the most important evidence concerns the online campaign that helped bring tens of thousands of people to the border.

Anonymous social-media accounts circulated a specific message: that the Spanish border was open and that people could enter without documents.

El País found that the anonymous campaign did more than claim the frontier was open. It distributed practical advice intended to help people reach and cross the border, while one of the communities promoting the journey attracted more than 20,000 followers before being closed. The original organisers have proved difficult to trace, and automated accounts may have helped spread their material.

According to El País, the original accounts largely vanished, automated amplification may have been involved and the initial trigger has still not been identified.

After the crisis exploded, the Spanish fact-checking organisation Maldita documented the rapid appearance of posts using the hashtags #FreeCeuta and #FreeMelilla from Israeli and pro-Israeli accounts.

Al Jazeera’s open-source unit conducted a broader analysis. It found dozens of known and anonymous Israel-linked or Israel-supporting accounts using almost identical framing. The same maps, phrases and hashtags appeared repeatedly.

They found that AI-generated scenes were used to exaggerate the disorder in Ceuta. Posts described the crisis as Spain’s punishment for supporting Palestine. Hananya Naftali, a former digital-media official associated with Benjamin Netanyahu, participated in the campaign.

The timing and wording were so closely aligned that the investigators regarded them as strongly suggestive of central coordination.

That does not prove that Israel was behind the original accounts. But it would be extraordinarily naive to pretend that Israel lacks either the means or the record to conduct precisely this sort of operation.

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Israel has form

France’s agency for combating foreign digital interference has accused the Israeli company BlackCore of targeting elections in several countries.

These included Scotland, where hundreds of coordinated accounts bombarded John Swinney, the SNP and the Scottish government after their criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Before effectively disappearing from public view after Reuters approached it, BlackCore had publicly promoted its ability to conduct sophisticated influence operations for governments and political campaigns.

Then there is Black Cube, founded by former Israeli intelligence officers and known as the “private Mossad”. It has been accused of using fake identities, bogus job offers, hidden cameras and manufactured corruption allegations against journalists, activists and pro-Palestinian politicians – including in an alleged attempt to destabilise Slovenia’s government immediately before an election.

One of Black Cube’s advisers is Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s national security council. Eiland has publicly advocated depriving Gaza’s population of food, water and fuel, and welcomed the spread of epidemics as a means of securing Israeli victory.

In 2023, an undercover investigation exposed another Israeli operation, Team Jorge. The group’s founder boasted to undercover reporters that his organisation had covertly intervened in dozens of elections around the world. Its technology allowed operatives to manufacture and manage elaborate digital identities across numerous platforms, complete with some of the financial and commercial accounts that would make them appear authentic.

Its software controlled thousands of fake online personas, some equipped with email accounts, credit cards, cryptocurrency wallets and carefully fabricated lives.

We also know that Israel’s government financed a covert campaign using fake social-media accounts to target American politicians with pro-Israel propaganda. Israeli Pegasus spyware has been deployed against politicians and dissidents around the world. Israel has also dramatically expanded its official propaganda budget.

So let us be precise. None of this establishes who started the Ceuta campaign.

But the techniques used there – anonymous accounts, detailed operational instructions, automated amplification and the rapid disappearance of the original network – bear an obvious resemblance to methods repeatedly used by Israeli firms and state-backed operations elsewhere.

The question is not whether Israel possesses the machinery to manipulate foreign politics in this way. It unquestionably does.

The question is whether that machinery was deployed here.

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A plan to help Morocco “reclaim its north”

There is another striking piece of context.

In April 2026, the Israeli news outlet Ynet published an article headlined: “Abraham Accords reach the Strait: how Israel can help Morocco reclaim its north.”

It was written by a Morocco-based analyst affiliated with the hard-right US-based Middle East Forum, which has previously supported the far-right British figure Tommy Robinson.

The article described developments in Washington as the “architecture of a coordinated strategic repositioning”. It argued that Israel was uniquely placed to help Morocco exploit Spain’s deteriorating relationships with Washington and Jerusalem.

The author proposed three roles for Israel:

• direct diplomatic signalling in support of Morocco’s position;

• lobbying and amplification within Washington;

• repeated attacks on Spain as hypocritical for criticising Israeli territorial policy while retaining Ceuta and Melilla.

He concluded that Israeli support for Morocco’s claim would both impose a political cost on Spain and strengthen a partner with a strategically important position on the Strait of Gibraltar.

Israel has also adopted a strategy of promoting the European far right and its anti-migrant narratives. That includes Vox - the Spanish far-right party which has a militant pro-Israel orientation, and which has links with Netanyahu’s Likud party.

In an interview on Fox News’ Hang Out with Sean Hannity, Netanyahu cited someone who had supposedly been asked:

“Why are you studying Arabic?”

The answer:

“Because I want to be able to go to London and Paris.”

Netanyahu continued:

“If you lose control over your borders, you lose control over your fate and your destiny and your future.”

To be clear, just 0.8 per cent of Londoners use Arabic as their main language, while Arab people make up around 1.6 per cent of the city’s population.

This was Netanyahu scaremongering about a supposed Arab invasion of Europe – the same narrative being used to exploit the Ceuta crisis.

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Spanish suspicions

Spanish politicians have themselves voiced suspicions about what happened.

After Danny Danon attacked Spain over Ceuta, the Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente responded:

“Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.”

The implication was obvious: Puente was hinting at Israeli involvement.

Gabriel Rufián, a left-wing Spanish politician, posted:

“The Moroccan dictatorship, in the service of the US and Israel, is once again blackmailing Spain and Europe this summer by turning its own people into disposable cannon fodder.

“Something that, instead of being the subject of partisan politicking, should be the subject of a cross-cutting State pact.”

Spanish experts have raised similar questions.

Pedro Rodríguez, a professor of international relations, said that the crisis occurred because “Morocco wanted it to happen”. He described it as a display of strategic realignment in which Morocco was aligning itself with the United States and Israel while demonstrating Spain’s inability to control its own territory.

And Kenneth Roth - former executive director of Human Rights Watch - posted:

“Why would Israel want its ally Morocco to control Ceuta as opposed to its critic Spain? One reason may be that Ceuta is the closest point in Africa to Europe, sitting astride the Strait of Gibraltar, meaning that Spain currently controls both sides of the strait. The Strait of Gibraltar is only 8 miles across, as opposed to the Strait of Hormuz, which is 21 miles. If Iran can control the Strait of Hormuz, Spain could easily control the Strait of Gibraltar and potentially block Israeli access to the Atlantic.”

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What can we conclude?

None of this proves for certain that Israel or the US helped orchestrate the crisis. That caveat matters.

But it would be equally unserious to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

Morocco is a close US and Israeli ally, with deep security and intelligence ties to both states. It has previously facilitated mass crossings into Ceuta to extract political concessions from Spain. On this occasion, its security forces were visibly passive until tens of thousands of people had crossed – and then demonstrated that they were entirely capable of stopping the movement.

Washington had just increased military and economic support for Morocco, financed a project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and endorsed language treating Ceuta and Melilla as territories whose future status should be negotiated.

Senior US and Israeli figures immediately seized on the crisis to attack Spain and promote the idea of an Arab “invasion” of Europe.

Anonymous social-media accounts of unknown origin played a crucial role in mobilising people, providing practical instructions and spreading the claim that the border was open. Many of those accounts then vanished. Israel has an extensive record of state-backed and private influence operations using precisely these methods.

That does not prove the case.

At the very least, Israel, the US and the far-right in general have shamelessly exploited this crisis.

Whether that involvement goes deeper surely demands investigation.

Nigel Farage and Reform are exposing themselves as massive, raging hypocrites - again - this time over the furore surrounding Zack Polanski briefly accepting a collaboration post on Instagram.

Farage is desperately trying to distract you from the undeclared £5 million personal gift from a Thailand-based crypto donor, and from donations linked to the convicted fraudster George Cottrell. Indeed, the latest Guardian headline about Cottrell has just dropped:

So Farage is playing a very obvious game: look over there!

Here’s the TL;DR of what actually happened

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, briefly accepted a collaboration request on Instagram.

For those unfamiliar with the feature, someone can tag you as a collaborator on their post. If you accept, the post also appears on your own grid.

This particular post was a carousel containing several photographs. All but one were innocuous campaign-style pictures. The first showed Polanski at an event called Green Space in Bristol.

Anyone who has looked at Polanski’s Instagram account knows that he accepts collaboration requests en masse. I don’t think that is a good idea - not least because it leaves you vulnerable to exactly this sort of thing - but I’ll come back to that.

Several photographs into the carousel, there was an image of someone wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “We’re Only Making Plans for Nigel”, alongside a man operating a French Revolution-style guillotine.

The words are a reference to Making Plans for Nigel, the song released by the English rock band XTC in 1979, which has often been linked to Farage for obvious reasons.

When Polanski became aware of the image, he immediately removed himself from the collaboration and said accepting it had been a mistake.

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But all hell broke loose.

Former Reform chair Zia Yusuf tweeted:

No. Zack Polanski did not “post” the photograph. He accepted a collaboration containing a series of images, the first of which was an entirely ordinary photograph of him speaking at an event. When he noticed the offending image several slides in, he removed himself.

Nor does the photograph actually call for Farage’s beheading. It does not make any demand at all. It is obviously crude satire. There is no shortage of jokes involving Madame Guillotine in British political culture. Let’s be serious here.

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Yusuf went on:

This bloke needs to seriously calm down. He is always so hysterical. It is completely one-note. At least Donald Trump occasionally intersperses the derangement with some levity.

And, again, it is a lie. Polanski did not post a threat to kill anyone.

Yusuf then declared:

Demanding that the leader of another political party be arrested over an Instagram collaboration request he accepted by mistake is not a serious response. It is unhinged.

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Farage then posted a video with the caption:

He went on Sky News demanding that the Metropolitan Police take action.

Again, let’s spell out what we are talking about: Polanski accepted a collaboration containing a series of photographs. The first showed him speaking at an event. Several photographs later came an image of someone wearing a very edgy satirical T-shirt. When Polanski realised, he removed himself from the post.

That is the basis on which Farage and his outriders are demanding consequences - and, in Yusuf’s case, police custody.

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The hypocrisy is staggering

This is the same Nigel Farage who said in May 2017:

“If they don’t deliver this Brexit that I spent 25 years of my life working for, then I will be forced to don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines.”

This was less than a year after the Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death during the referendum campaign.

This is the same Farage who said Reform would “take the knife” to the civil service.

The same Farage who called for “pure, cold rage” after the conviction of the murderer of Henry Nowak, with riots taking place just hours later.

But more to the point, Farage and Reform came to the defence of Lucy Connolly, a childminder jailed after the nationwide riots and pogroms of August 2024, portraying her as a free-speech martyr.

After the horrific Southport murders - committed, to be absolutely clear, by a British-born British citizen - Connolly tweeted:

The “bastards” she was referring to were asylum seekers.

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And during the riots, people really did attempt to set fire to hotels containing asylum seekers. The country was in the grip of a violent, fascist uprising.

Farage nevertheless declared:

“I want to make it absolutely clear: Lucy Connolly should not be in prison.”

He added:

“While she should not have said what she said, understand there were millions of mothers at that moment in time after Southport feeling exactly the same way.”

Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, visited Connolly in person and called her a “political prisoner”.

When she was released, Farage tweeted:

He even took her case to the United States.

Connolly was then platformed on the main stage of Reform’s September 2025 conference, introduced as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner” and publicly embraced by Farage himself.

So let’s get this straight.

A woman explicitly called for hotels containing asylum seekers to be set on fire not long before violent mobs went on to do exactly that. Farage and Reform turned her into a martyr, defended her, visited her in prison, took her case overseas and gave her a starring role at their party conference.

But Zack Polanski accidentally accepts an Instagram collaboration containing a crude piece of satire several photographs in - and Farage demands that he “face the consequences”, while Yusuf calls for him to be taken into police custody.

This is not a principled stand against violent rhetoric. It is a desperate attempt by Farage to distract from his own scandals - one which has instead exposed the grotesque hypocrisy of him and his party.

Indeed, the Metropolitan police have declared that no action will be taken against Polanski because the threshold for criminal action hasn’t been met.

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Polanski should change his social-media strategy

I do think Zack Polanski should alter his relationship with social media - and I say that as someone who is terminally online.

As a leader, constantly reposting other people’s material drowns out your own message. It also leaves you vulnerable to bad-faith attacks and accidental shares of material you have not properly checked.

Look at Zohran Mamdani’s social media. It is very disciplined. He posts sparingly and sticks closely to the key messages he wants to communicate at any given moment.

Polanski would benefit from taking the same approach.

But that does not change the absurdity of this attack. Nor should anyone allow Farage’s theatrical outrage to obscure the obvious reason he is promoting it.

He wants you looking anywhere but at him.

The world’s richest man is a thin-skinned megalomaniac defined by his ignorance, deceit and bigotry.

The interview Elon Musk gave to The Economist was certainly revealing. It helps underline why the West is in crisis - which it is.

The interview was conducted by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. Musk evidently realised it had gone disastrously, because afterwards he denounced her as “a traitor to the West, plain and simple”.

Now, I would not describe anyone as a “traitor to the West”. As it happens, the elite faction represented by The Economist has played a significant role in plunging the West into crisis: championing an economic order which enriches a tiny minority while hollowing out communities, cheering disastrous wars and treating Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an unfortunate public-relations problem.

But Musk and the far right have promoted the biggest lie of our time: that Muslims, migrants, refugees, trans people and the so-called “woke left” are responsible for the West’s decline.

They are not.

Muslims did not design an economic system which sucked wealth and power upwards while leaving millions condemned to insecurity and falling living standards. Refugees did not invade Iraq, destroy Libya and devastate Afghanistan, humiliating Western military power and spawning chaos across entire regions. Trans people did not deregulate finance, smash trade unions or privatise essential services. The “woke left” did not arm Israel as it obliterated Gaza, completing the West’s moral collapse before the eyes of the world.

The West’s elites did that - including Elon Musk.

The far right which Musk actively promotes is now manipulating the resulting anger, directing it away from those who possess wealth and power and towards people who lack either. At the same time, the authoritarian apparatus forged by the so-called “war on terror” is rebounding against Western societies themselves, with dissent increasingly criminalised and democracy placed under threat.

This is what I explore in my forthcoming book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It. The subtitle has a deliberate double meaning. The West’s rulers have lost their dominance - and, as Musk demonstrates, many of them appear to have lost their minds, too.

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Musk’s civil war fantasy

A running theme of Musk’s interview was that Britain is overwhelmed with violent disorder.

He denied stating that Britain was collapsing into apocalyptic disorder - and yet has repeatedly tweeted that civil war in Britain “is inevitable”.

Notably, he tweeted this during the August 2024 violent uprising by far-right and racist extremists in the UK:

Then, there really was violent disorder - driven by those who views on migrants, refugees and Muslims not dissimilar to his own.

This was when these elements jumped on the horrific Southport murders - and attempted to burn asylum seekers alive in hotels, attacked mosques, assaulted people of colour in the street, tried to drag migrants from cars, attacked the homes and businesses belonging either to minorities or people suspected of being migrants - we could go on. It was a pogrom.

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In a speech broadcast to a protest organised by far-right criminal Tommy Robinson, he said:

This is a message to the reasonable centre, the people who ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives. They don’t want that, they’re quiet, they just go about their business.

My message is to them: if this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice. You’re in a fundamental situation here.

Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.

How can this not be understood as incitement?

But Musk’s portrayal of Britain as falling into violent bedlam because of migrants, refugees and minorities is false.

Homicides in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level in almost 50 years.

The murder rate in London is at the lowest level ever recorded. Admissions to hospital because of assault, knife assault, bodily force, blunt objects and firearms have plummeted.

Violence is much lower than in the US. There it has fallen, too, albeit from much higher levels.

Britain has certainly experienced a massive increase in immigration and become far more diverse over the last few decades. Yet, at the same time, violence has plummeted.

The real danger is that the far right persuades enough people that society is being overrun by violent foreigners, whipping up the fear and fury which produces actual mass disorder.

Musk accuses Minton Beddoes of living a “cloistered existence”. That’s almost certainly true - yet what world does he believe he inhabits? He is literally the world’s richest man, and admitted he hasn’t even visited the UK for years.

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“Normal people”

When challenged about his support for the far right, Musk insists that these are simply “normal people” who want “secure borders, safe cities and sensible spending.”

Yet this completely erases the actual reality of the far-right movements he supported.

Consider Restore Britain, the far-right party led by Rupert Lowe which Musk has enthusiastically promoted.

Restore proposes deporting legally resident foreign nationals if they live in social housing, claim benefits, cannot speak English or supposedly “fail to integrate” - an disturbingly elastic category which could mean almost anything. Lowe has declared that “millions and millions” must leave or be made to leave.

He has also threatened to use the state retrospectively against officials, judges and politicians who he claims placed “dangerous third world savages” in British communities.

Prominent members of Restore include neo-Nazis, Hitler sympathisers and advocates of ethnic cleansing.

These are not “normal people” being unfairly maligned by elite journalists.

They represent a mortal threat to democracy in Britain and across the West.

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A straightforward question

Minton Beddoes asks Musk a very simple question: is he anti-Muslim?

He could simply answer “no”.

Instead, after pausing at length, he says that he opposes people entering countries with “antithetical views”, and then announces that he is against rape and murder.

What is he saying here exactly? Asked whether he is hostile towards around two billion of his fellow human beings, he immediately jumps to talking about sexual violence and killing.

Musk says he opposes people with beliefs he says are “antithetical” to Western values. But his beliefs are antithetical to mine. I believe in democracy, equality, solidarity and the redistribution of wealth and power. He promotes authoritarianism, far-right extremists and racialised conspiracy theories.

So how do we define these shared Western values exactly?

The vast majority of human beings oppose rape and murder, wherever they were born and whatever faith they hold. Many of those arriving in Western countries are fleeing such violence - including violence that was unleashed or intensified by Western wars.

Yet Musk takes two crimes overwhelmingly condemned across humanity and attaches them, without prompting, to a question about Muslims.

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Loathed

When Minton Beddoes tells Musk that people loathe him, his response is to cite his quarter of a billion followers on X.

YouGov’s British tracker finds that just 21 per cent of people like Musk, while 62 per cent dislike him - a net rating of minus 41. According to YouGov in the US, 33 per cent viewed him favourably and 53 per cent unfavourably, putting him 14 points underwater.

Musk suggests that actually it is the media who are hated.

There are very good reasons to be angry at the Western media. Media outlets are mostly the playthings of a tiny number of rich moguls. Elite journalists routinely present the interests of the wealthy as basic common sense. Much of the media cheer on disastrous foreign wars, economic policies which benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary people, and redirect anger away from those with wealth and power towards migrants, refugees and Muslims.

But that makes the media very much like Elon Musk.

He is not angry because establishment journalism serves the interests of the powerful. After all, he is one of the richest, most powerful human beings on earth.

He is angry because he doesn’t believe that they go far enough in promoting the bigotry he promotes.

The West really is in crisis. Its economic model has imposed stagnation, decline and misery on millions. Its military adventures have produced disaster after catastrophe. Its ruling class has forfeited its authority, while its complicity in Gaza has destroyed any remaining illusions in its moral leadership.

But Muslims are not to blame. Refugees are not to blame. Trans people are not to blame. The left are not to blame.

The West’s own elites are to blame - and now rich men like Elon Musk are exploiting the ruinous consequences.

In doing so, he promotes far-right movements which threaten already deeply compromised democracies.

Elon Musk is not a prophet warning us about the fall of the West.

He is helping to bring it about.

It’s 25% off if you order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST - but only if you hurry!

Waterstones are doing a special sale until 24th July. If you go here and order with the code SUMMER26, it’s 25% off.

The book exposes how the West was plunged into catastrophe by greed, war, hatred, arrogance - and genocide.

It takes on the right-wing lie that Western decline has been caused by migrants, minorities and “woke”.

I’m beyond excited to tell you more about the book. It’s the most difficult and important project I’ve ever worked on. It’s based on a huge amount of research and took me from Palestine to Pennsylvania, Baghdad to Dresden.

Pre-orders really really help with the book - so huge thanks in advance!

The British people believe that Israel is committing genocide.

That’s according to a new YouGov poll which has been studiously ignored by the media.

50% believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza “constitute a genocide” - with just 17% saying the opposite.

Around a third opt for “don’t know”. That means those believing Israel is committing genocide outnumber those who do not by three to one.

The other polling results show overwhelming support for Britain to take action against Israel.

58% oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, compared to 18% in support.

57% support suspending arms exports, compared to 18% opposed. 52% support financial sanctions on assets of individuals (19% are opposed), 51% support tariffs and import restrictions (20% are opposed) and 48% support a trade embargo (20% are opposed).

Just 15% think the UK should be an ally of Israel, with 55% believing it should not be an ally.

Among those who voted Labour in 2024, 67% believe Israel has committed genocide, with just 10% disagreeing. About 64% of 18 to 24 year olds believe that it is genocide.

Strikingly, even a third of Tory voters believe Israel has committed genocide, with only a quarter saying otherwise - and 40% opting for ‘Don’t know’.

Even a quarter of Reform voters believe that it is genocide - although in their case, more than four in ten believe otherwise.

These figures should be placed in their broader context. The Western media has supported, legitimised and whitewashed Israel’s genocide. The scale of the atrocities committed by Israel has been kept from news bulletins and newspapers.

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Those who oppose the genocide have been demonised variously as hateful, dangerous and extreme.

The consensus at elite-level - that is, among politicians and the media - remains pro-Israel.

So the fact that British public opinion is so decisively hostile to their country’s alliance with Israel is striking. It means there is a chasm separating the views of the British people and the Establishment.

It’s in this context that the new British prime minister Andy Burnham has apologised for Labour’s position on Gaza.

To be clear - that apology isn’t enough. It wrongly characterises Labour’s failure as being too slow to support a ceasefire - when in fact the party actively supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught.

He used emotive language about 7th October - but not about Israel’s own actions. He said “There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed”: he knows full well they have been committed on an industrial scale. He’s just not willing to say so because that would then impose legal requirements on his government to take action.

But the point he’s felt compelled to say any of this shows an understanding that Labour’s position has repelled voters - and helped drive the surge of the Green Party.

More broadly, the polling reflects the trend across the Western world.

In the US, negative attitudes towards Israel are higher than ever. 60% of American voters have an unfavourable view of Israel, with 37% opting for favourable. For the first time, more Americans sympathise with Palestinians than Israelis.

The challenge, of course, is to translate popular attitudes into government action. But Israel’s cheerleaders should be in a state of panic - because they are losing.

This is deeply sinister.

The government is considering legislation which, in practise, could silence independent journalists like myself.

They’ve published a Green Paper that outlines plans to require social media platforms to make a select group of “trustworthy” news outlets more prominent and discoverable in searches, recommendations, and feeds.

The government would decide which news organisations are judged to be more “trustworthy”.

This would, in practise, suppress the content of independent journalists such as myself - as well as other left-wing media outlets.

This could mean my journalism challenging the status quo would disappear from your feed. That includes my work challenging Israel’s genocide in Gaza; opposing disastrous wars; confronting the rise of the far right and fascism; exposing the injustices of capitalism; scrutinising Labour and the Democrats; and platforming voices you rarely hear in the mainstream - Palestinians, Jewish anti-genocide activists, anti-war Iranians, dissenting academics, economists, experts on war crimes.

It would also suppress my work challenging the journalism of the mainstream outlets judged “trustworthy” by the government - whose output would now be boosted.

This could include YouTube as well as, say, Instagram and Facebook.

So before we continue - make sure you don’t just subscribe to my channel. Click on the subscription bell and choose ‘All’, rather than ‘Personalised’. If you don’t, my work could vanish from your feed.

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So what the hell is going on?

Last month, the government published a document with the grandiose title: ‘Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.’

It is a Green Paper: a document through which the government tests policy proposals and gathers responses before deciding whether and how to legislate.

It isn’t law - yet. The criteria have not been decided, and the government says it will develop its final policy positions after the consultation. But this is not an idle thought experiment either. It is an official proposal, published on 23 June, with the consultation closing on 31 August.

The government says it will “explore legislative options” for a new prominence regime, applying to social media platforms and potentially video-sharing platforms. That would require them to make designated news content prominent and discoverable within their interfaces.

They define “prominence” as giving certain content a “privileged position” - and, as an example, suggests this means “ensuring a specific channel appears at the top of search results or features on a recommendation feed.”

Under proposals under consideration:

• the government creating official criteria for determining which providers qualify as trustworthy;

• qualifying national and local publishers could be included alongside public-service organisations such as the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4 and Channel 5;

• imposing the desired outcome on platforms while allowing them some flexibility over its technical delivery;

• operating the intervention continuously or activating it during periods of crisis or “heightened vulnerability”;

• and deciding whether users should be permitted to switch the intervention off.

The core principle is extraordinary.

The government is considering the creation of a legally privileged tier of news organisations whose journalism would be given preferential access to the public.

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Who gets to decide what “trustworthy” means?

The government has not yet decided.

It says one possible starting point is the definition of a “recognised news publisher” in the Online Safety Act.

The likes of the BBC would automatically be recognised.

According to the White Paper publishers must satisfy a checklist, which means that publishing news must be their principal purpose; their material must be produced by different people and under editorial control; they must have a standards code, a complaints process, a UK business address and an identifiable person with legal responsibility.

This may all sound super reasonable. What it means in practise is that large, well-funded outlets are prioritised.

A large institution could satisfy all of these requirements and still publish journalism that is misleading, inaccurate, biased, deferential, and/or catastrophically wrong.

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The BBC’s coverage of Gaza shows exactly why this is dangerous

For example, I spent months working on a detailed investigation for Drop Site News into the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

It was based on interviews with 13 current and former BBC staff, an examination of internal complaints and a quantitative assessment of its reporting. It documented what those journalists described as a structural imbalance: greater credulity towards official Israeli narratives; a systematic devaluation of Palestinian life; the sidelining of specialists in war crimes; a failure to connect individual atrocities to an overarching strategy; and a tendency to frame events through Israel’s claimed right to self-defence, with proportionality treated as a secondary debate.

My own journalism is always vigorously evidence-based. On the question of Israel’s genocide, my work was far more accurate than the BBC’s much better-funded output. I exposed atrocities and genocidal plans they ignored; platformed the work of experts and organisations they sidelined; and combatted Israeli lies they amplified.

I explained from the start what Israel’s actual genocidal intentions were. The BBC’s approach was to portray Israel’s genocidal onslaught as a war of self-defence, with a side debate about whether its actions were “proportionate” enough.

The point is that - under the government’s plans - the BBC’s work on Israel and Palestine would be prioritised over my own.

That wouldn’t be based on comparing the evidence or the accuracy of each piece of work. It would simply be based on the BBC being judged as inherently “trustworthy” - and thus prioritised over my own work.

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You do not have to delete somebody to suppress them

The government’s defence will be obvious.

Nobody is being censored, it will say. Nobody’s videos are being deleted. Independent journalists will remain free to publish.

But you do not have to physically remove somebody’s work to suppress its reach.

Imagine two people speaking through microphones. The state orders one microphone to be turned up and leaves the other barely audible. Technically, both people are still allowed to speak. In reality, only one is being heard.

A video that is never recommended, rarely appears in search results and is excluded from the feeds of potential viewers may remain online while becoming effectively invisible.

The speech has not been prohibited. The audience simply rarely encounters it.

That means fewer views, fewer subscribers and less revenue.

For large broadcasters with multiple sources of funding and distribution, YouTube reach is useful. For many independent publishers, it is existential.

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“Official” journalism is not the same thing as trustworthy journalism

There is another fundamental problem.

Too much political journalism is built around access: private briefings, anonymous quotes, lobby relationships, off-the-record lunches and the hope of securing the next exclusive.

This “access” journalism deters reporters from saying things which might upset politicians - because they risk being frozen out.

I spent years scrutinising Keir Starmer and Labour’s leadership. I warned what would go wrong before much of it did. Compare and contrast what I said to the analysis of mainstream outlets.

They applauded Starmer for his deceitful, factional war on the left - without diagnosing the lack of vision or strategy for the country. They were invested in the idea that Starmerism represented competent, stable, sensible government.

I have my contacts, but I am not dependent on access to ministers, party machines and official sources. Neither do I have a worldview that is deferential to power.

Yet my political journalism faces being suppressed in favour of work which was discredited by events time and time again.

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“Crisis mode”

The consultation asks whether this system should be permanently switched on or activated only during periods of “crisis” or “heightened vulnerability”.

Elsewhere, the Green Paper points to periods of “community tension, social unrest and democratic events”. It also asks whether users should be allowed to switch the intervention off.

Would an election count? A wave of riots? A mass protest against a government policy? A huge strike movement? A terrorist attack? A public-health emergency? A constitutional confrontation? A disastrous war in which the government itself was involved?

These are my examples, not situations specifically listed in the document. But that is precisely the problem: the boundaries have not been defined.

Imagine a government leading the country into a catastrophic war and activating a system that privileges officially recognised broadcasters over independent anti-war voices.

Imagine a mass movement against an unjust law, while reporting sympathetic to the government receives greater algorithmic weight in the name of responding to social tension.

Imagine an election during which established outlets broadly share the assumptions of the political class, while those challenging its record are pushed further from public view.

No videos are banned. No journalists are arrested.

The volume is simply turned down.

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There is a real problem. This is the wrong solution.

It’s obviously not the case that there isn’t an underlying problem.

Algorithms can promote inflammatory nonsense, calculated lies and blatant disinformation to mass audiences. Business models based on engagement reward content which provokes fear and rage, regardless of whether it is true.

The Green Paper notes the violent unrest following the Southport murders - in which there was essentially an attempted national pogrom. It cites Ofcom’s assessment that algorithmic recommendations helped spread misleading and divisive narratives.

That deserves a serious debate.

Platforms should be forced to disclose far more about how recommendation systems operate. Their algorithms should undergo independent audits. Qualified researchers should receive access to the data needed to investigate systematic harms. Users should be offered chronological and genuinely subscription-based feeds rather than being trapped inside opaque profiling systems.

But none of that requires the state to dictate which news organisations and journalists are deemed trustworthy.

Indeed, note that many mainstream media outlets promote inflammatory disinformation and hatred - and there’s no meaningful action being taken there to deal with that.

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Think of the precedent

Imagine what a right-wing authoritarian government would do with this precedent. They would simply reclassify right-wing outlets as “trustworthy” - promoting propaganda in their favour, and suppressing their critics.

For those who think we’re scaremongering, note how critics of anti-terrorism legislation argued that it would end up being used against protesters and activists who are clearly not terrorists. That is exactly what ended up happening - with the proscription of Palestine Action as the most striking example.

We need to act before this becomes law

You can respond either by:

1. Going to the official consultation page and clicking ‘Respond online’ under ‘Ways to respond’. You can answer as many or few questions as you like - you don’t need to complete the whole thing.

2. By email: send a response to watchthisspace@dcms.gov.uk.

The deadline is 11:59pm on 31 August 2026.

The directly relevant section is “Prominence of news on social media”, particularly:

• Question 4: should “trustworthy” news be made more visible?

• Question 4a: how should access to trustworthy news work in practice?

• Question 5: should prominence be permanent or activated during periods of crisis?

• Question 6: should users be allowed to switch it off?

This isn’t a defence of the tech bros and their secretive, profit-driven algorithms. Their systems urgently democratic regulation.

That means transparent, pluralistic and accountably regulation.

It doesn’t mean the government dictating which institutions to promote - and which to turn down the volume.

Apologies for the lack of posts: I’ve been finishing my new book The Fall of the West. After a break, both my video channel and Substack will go up a notch…

Israel is conspiring to keep the US at war with Iran indefinitely. That’s according to Vice President JD Vance in a new interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, who believes he is being specifically targeted.

Outlining a US strategy that he claims is both negotiation and military, he says:

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to like actually shift us away from that policy because they want to continue the military campaign.

He goes on:

I mean, you know, the ambassador of Israel to the United States I think is actually a really good guy. Obviously, he cares about Israel first. I care about America first.

But there are some people within their system we know beyond a shadow of a doubt who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely. Again, not towards any objective, but just indefinitely.

He goes even further:

People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they’re allies of ours or whether they’re enemies of ours.

But again, when I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell.

I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first.

He’s referring here to an article in Time magazine headlined ‘Trump’s Ex-Campaign Manager Is Running An Israeli Influence Operation Targeting the MAGA Base’.

It details how online MAGA influencers turned on Trump’s Iran deal, noting “Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone.” A senior US official concluded that these influencers were being paid by Israel in an operation led by former Trump presidential campaign manager Brad Parscale.

As well as seeking to prevent young conservatives from turning on Israel, the operation aims to use them to promote Israel’s interests in US politics. These influencers receive “coordinated messaging through private group chats, synchronized the timing of their posts, and were compensated based on the reach they generated.”

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There’s a lot of money to be made for conservative influencers willing to push Israeli propaganda:

It remains unclear how much Parscale’s outfits paid creators as part of the Israel campaign. Another recent Influenceable campaign offered influencers a base payment of $2,250, plus $1 for every 1,000 views, up to 2 million views—allowing influencers to earn as much as $4,250 per post, according to internal text messages reviewed by TIME.

Amusingly, an Israeli official claims to be “pissed” at Pascale, adding: “He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse.”

What they mean is that US public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel despite their efforts. It turns out that no amount of propaganda can stop people being repulsed at the genocidal slaughter of civilians.

In this context, when asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, JD Vance explained:

Oh, it’s social media posts. It’s, you know, they’re leaking to reporters. They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely.

And that is their explicit position. And coming after me saying that, you know, people have come after me and say that I’m influenced by Qatar, that I’m influenced by foreign governments, that, you know, I take my marching orders from Tucker Carlson.

In other words, Israel has concluded that JD Vance is a weak link in the US administration because he is insufficiently subservient to their interests.

None of this is to sow any illusions in Vance, who is a leading figure in a far-right authoritarian government. He just hails from the more authentically right-wing isolationist tradition.

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What it helps us understand is how Israel organises to manipulate US public opinion and put pressure on the US government. There is a lack of understanding of this, partly because weaponised false claims of antisemitism shut down scrutiny.

There was another fascinating detail, too. When Rogan suggests most people thought Epstein was a Mossad agent, JD Vance says:

Yeah, Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country, or both. You know, look, was he— he clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.

Meanwhile, it is reported that Trump plans to expand the military assault against Iran, including “enhanced airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait, and bombing Pickaxe mountain.”

Trump is trapped between two disastrous outcomes. One is that he accepts that the US has suffered a shattering military defeat - on a scale much greater than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indeed Vietnam.

The other is that he seeks to avoid that outcome by dragging out the war, suffering ever-mounting economic costs, inflicting severe damage on Gulf states, and depleting US munitions.

The conclusion is unavoidable

Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children.

That’s the conclusion of a new detailed report published by a United Nations independent international Commission of Inquiry.

It builds on an overwhelming body of evidence that the Israeli army is deliberately killing children.

Israel’s atrocity deniers claim that stating the truth constitutes a “blood libel”. We’ll come on to a statistic which explains the intentional killing of children by Israeli soldiers.

As the report notes, at least 20,179 children have been killed by Israeli forces, and another 44,143 injured. Children made up 30% of those killed and 26% of those injured since the genocide began.

The report says the children killed represent around 2% of Gaza’s child population

Of those killed, 5,031 were under five, 1,029 were under one, and around 420 were newborns.

Note these figures are underestimates.Save the Children estimate that another 5,160 children were buried under the rubble.

The Commission further documents “the use of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children.”

A baby shot while breastfeeding

In one example, on 12th April 2024, a 10-year-old baby was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother. He survived but with brain damage. As the Commission noted:

Considering that the shooting occurred in broad daylight, the Commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby.

In another case, in the Al-Faraa refugee camp in Tubas, the Israeli army shot a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, and when his mother rushed to his help, they shot at her, and then they put a red laser on the head of the paramedics who tried to save his life. He bled to death in front of his mother, surrounded by Israeli soldiers who did nothing to help him and showed no concern about a boy they had shot bleeding to death in front of them.

In Khan Younis, a 15-year-old boy stepped out of his family home holding a white cloth during evacuation. He was shot in the foot, then shot again in the back and neck. His 20-year-old brother ran to him and was shot dead too. His mother tried to signal for an ambulance and was shot in the hand. The Commission says the 15-year-old was likely shot by a sniper rifle from around 200 metres away, and that the shooter should have been able to see he was a child holding a white flag.

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A four-year-old girl in Khan Younis was shot in the head while eating with her family in their tent. No one else in the family was injured. She survived but the left side of her body was paralysed. The Commission concluded she was targeted by a quadcopter mounted with an assault rifle.

Not tragic mistakes - targeted killings

In Sheikh Radwan, the report says Israeli soldiers threw four grenades into a house with 30 family members, badly injuring a five-year-old boy. Israeli forces then entered, shot dead eight family members including his parents, and did not provide medical assistance. A doctor at a school reinserted the child’s exposed intestines using diapers and tape. He later needed multiple surgeries and was left with permanent disability. His six-year-old brother also survived; both had witnessed their parents’ killing, including their pregnant mother being shot.

The report describes the decomposing bodies of four babies found in Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit after staff were forced to evacuate and could not safely move the most vulnerable infants. The babies were reportedly still attached to life-support equipment rendered useless by the electricity outage and attacks. The Commission says the video was digitally verified and notes that Israel did not claim Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital was used by Hamas.

After the October 2025 so-called ceasefire, two brothers aged 10 and nine were killed by an Israeli drone strike near Khan Younis while gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father. Israeli forces said they were “suspects” and an “immediate threat”. The Commission rejected this, noting they were more than 300 metres from Israeli soldiers, were visibly children, and were collecting firewood.

Note that none of these children are named. Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and one of the UN Commissioners, explained why.

In other words, the UN fears that if they name the children, their families are risk of reprisals from the Israeli army.

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Killing in the West Bank

This reports builds on the overwhelming evidence of Palestinian children being deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli army.

In 2024, the NGO Defence for Children International published a report documenting 141 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, between 7 October 2023 and 31 July 2024.

116 of the 141 children were shot dead with live ammunition or by snipers. DCIP says nearly all were shot in the head or torso, and 18 were shot in the back, which it describes as “a crystal clear indicator” that the child posed no threat.

Most were killed with a single bullet either to the head or the torso., which DCIP says indicates shooters targeted them “with intent to kill.” They described how Israeli forces “order Palestinian paramedics and ambulance drivers to leave the scene at gunpoint”, as well as firing at people trying to offer aid to injured children, as well as blocking roads and detaining ambulance crews.

In some of the cases, Israeli soldiers surrounded children they had shot as they bled out, “alone and in pain, with the intent to ensure death”.

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It says there is no evidence warnings were issued by Israeli forces in advance, and that the evidence “indicates that Israeli forces in practice have a policy in place that amounts to wilful killing.”

A report just published by Israeli human rights’ organisation B’Tselem finds that 235 Palestinian children and teenagers were killed in the West Bank since October 2023, with another 5 killed by settlers.

In nearly a quarter of the cases they examined, Israel delayed or completely prevented medics or residents from reached wounded children to offer help.

Nine minors, including two girls, were killed during military raids where no arrests were made.

What the doctors saw

There are the testimonies of doctors. A New York Times piece in October 2024 carried the testimonies of dozens of US-based medical staff who served in Gaza. 44 of them testified that they saw “multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza”.”

, too. I interviewed Dr. Nick Maynard, for example, a leading consultant surgeon from Oxford who served in Gaza three times during the genocide.

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He described treating “very young teenage boys, sometimes as young as 11 or 12,” shot by Israeli soldiers and quadcopters while trying to get food for their starving families at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. What horrified him most was the pattern: one day boys arrived with gunshot wounds “to the head,” another “to the neck,” another “to the chest or the abdomen,” and on one day four young teenage boys arrived together with gunshot wounds “to the testicles.” The “clustering” was so striking, he said, that it was “inconceivable that it was coincidence”: it looked like “some sort of obscene target practice,” with Israeli soldiers “playing a game.” Maynard added: “I would not have thought it possible if I had not seen this with my own eyes.”

Meanwhile, Jewish-American surgeon Mark Perlmutter - who also served in Gaza - testified that Israeli snipers are deliberately targeting children in Gaza. Recalling witnessing children shot twice, he said: “No child gets shot twice by mistake.”

And even despite the BBC’s dire failures, the World Service year examined 160 cases of children being shot in Gaza. They found that in 95 cases, the child was shot int he head or the chest, and in most cases, they were under 12 years old.

The society that justifies killing children

We could go on. The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.

We are told that it is a “blood libel” to state this obvious fact.

So consider this. According to a poll last year, 76% of Jewish Israelis believe there are no innocents in Gaza.

Process that again: no innocents in Gaza. That, of course, includes children and babies.

In another poll, 47% of Jewish Israelis answered yes to the question:

Do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, ie to kill all its inhabitants?

In other words, half of Jewish Israelis support killing all Palestinians in Gaza. That includes those, of course, who are actually serving in the military.

But what makes this even worse is that polling consistently shows that Israeli soldiers are more extreme than the average Israeli citizens.

The polling shows that soldiers skew right. That is partly because - unlike in many societies - younger Israelis tend to be more extreme than older generations.

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Every child becomes the enemy

Furthermore, Israeli television frequently features guests who make clear their murderous intentions towards children, partly on the basis they claim they will one day become “terrorists”. (This is exactly the same logic the Nazis used during the Holocaust).

In one interview, the Israeli politician Amit Halevi - a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said:

In the Al-Shifa Hospital, they caught 150 terrorists and killed them. At the same time, 300 terrorists were born in the maternity ward.

On Israel’s Channel 14, while commenting on footage of devastation in Gaza, Israeli journalist Yaki Adamker said:

I do not think anyone in the State of Israel, in the Land of Israel should feel sorry for these Gazans, not for the adults, not for the elderly, not for the young, and not for the children (...) The Gazans? For all I care, let them starve to death. What do I care about them?

Another Channel 14 journalist, Yehuda Schlesinger said:

There are no innocents in Gaza. There are no ordinary citizens in Gaza. Every adult was trained to kill. Every woman is a monster. Every boy aspires to be a martyr Every baby will grow up to be a terrorist. wipe out, kill, destroy, annihilate.

In another example, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin went on Channel 14 to say: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy.” He added: “Every child you are now giving milk to will, in 15 years, rape your daughters and slaughter your children,” as well as calling to conquer and settle Gaza so “not one Gazan child remains there”.

This is the genocidal hothouse of Israeli society - where politicians and journalists openly describe their murderous intent towards children.

There is no doubt. Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children on a mass scale - and the atrocity deniers who claim otherwise must be disgraced.

Years before he entered No. 10, it was obvious that Keir Starmer’s project would end in catastrophe. It was entirely predictable - and indeed, predicted.

Well, by those of us on the left. Not by the vast majority of “mainstream” commentators.

I told you so’s are always undignified. I offer no apologies. These predictions were ridiculed at the time - but we can’t move forward unless it’s understood why Starmerism has fallen apart.

In years of Opposition, Starmer proved that his project was always defined by dishonesty, that it had no vision for the country, and that its arrogant architects weren’t even up to the job.

A caveat. I didn’t vote for Keir Starmer to become Labour leader - I voted for the left-wing standard-bearer Rebecca Long-Bailey. When he won the 2020 leadership contest, I nonetheless accepted his victory in good faith, conditional on him sticking by his leadership pledges.

The political direction of his leadership swiftly became very clear. Here is what I criticised - and predicted.

In October 2020, after Labour abstained on a Conservative bill making it legal for undercover agents to commit sexual assault, torture and murder, I wrote:

For the second time in as many weeks, Labour offered a vacuum in place of leadership against state-sanctioned violence against civilians. It has paid a profound moral price, and conceded yet more ground to its opponents.

(I should note that, in this period, Keir Starmer would repeatedly contact me to object to my criticisms, in one case telling me I was better than this).

In February 2021, I wrote a piece headlined ‘By ignoring young voters, Labour is creating an opening for the Greens’.

I warned:

If the new Labour leadership insists on alienating young people who prefer a strong state to intervene to achieve greater economic and social equality, and transition to a greener economy in order to reduce the impact of the climate crisis, then it may find, as in Scotland and with the red wall, another chunk of Labour’s electoral coalition finds somewhere else to go. A similar phenomenon is happening in Wales, where Plaid Cymru is on the rise and nearly half of young Welsh citizens support independence.

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The same month, I wrote that Starmer’s Labour had placed itself to the right of the Tories on tax, adding:

Labour’s opposition to tax increases is yet another illustration of an increasingly obvious truth: the party’s leadership lacks a political soul and is devoid of any meaningful coherent vision for the country it seeks to lead.

I added:

Political direction is coming from the focus groups because Starmer’s team lacks a political vision to guide them. They desperately want to win power, but they don’t know why.

And concluded:

Instead, the Labour leadership seeks power without a vision. That is, to be fair, an interesting political experiment, but one that is unlikely to end well. It is not too late to change course.

In May 2021, I wrote:

Starmer’s team are on safari, knowing nothing about communities they didn’t grow up in, leading to cosplay, caricature and flag-waving, which screeches inauthenticity and nothing more.

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The same month:

After a year as leader, Starmer has shown a lack of political vision, a thin-skinned aversion to criticism, and an over-dependence on a small circle of inexperienced advisers, all of which have been on display over the past few days.

Then in June 2021:

Many Muslims, like many young people, who felt listened to under Corbyn’s leadership now feel sidelined, only deemed of use as voting fodder. Whether in this byelection or next time around, they want to give Labour a kicking until they are listened to. That is, after all, how many diehard Scottish Labour voters felt: but when they crossed the electoral Rubicon, they never came back.

In September 2021, I wrote about Starmer’s dishonesty:

Dishonesty corrodes democracy like acid. If politicians make promises they renege on, voters conclude that none can be trusted and disengage from the political process. Accountability – a prerequisite of any functioning democracy – becomes impossible, because if dishonesty is normalised, a priced-in background hum of politics, then objections to the stench of deceit can be shrugged off by politicians on the grounds that all of their colleagues are in the sewer, too.

I added:

When I described Starmer’s team as “maniacs” because of their abortive attempts to reintroduce an electoral college granting MPs disproportionate power in the next leadership election, a shadow minister responded to me: “It’s worse than that: they are incompetent.” Starmer, whose own allies describe him as a man without politics, is surrounded by crude factional figures with an obsessive grudge against the left and no vision for the country.

And I further added:

There is nothing to recommend Starmer’s leadership. He is, as we have seen, unprincipled. He is not honest. Where Blair and Neil Kinnock were talented orators, Starmer lacks any charisma or warmth. He extolled “integrity” in the leadership election, but as his sacking in May of deputy leader Angela Rayner from her role as Labour chair underlined, he has none. That more Labour voters than not desire his resignation, that more than six in 10 people do not see him as a prime minister in waiting, and that he lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seat Labour retained even in the landslide defeat of 2019 – shows he is unelectable. Starmer is Labour’s version of Theresa May – who was originally lauded as a serious, public-spirited politician before being undone by her own cynicism and woodenness.

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What I got wrong here was about Starmer being unelectable. But this was entirely down to the Tories’ self-destruction. The column was written before partygate and all of the other Boris Johnson scandals which destroyed him. It was written before the Liz Truss catastrophe. And then there was the return of a ferocious squeeze in living standards, and a collapsing NHS - and all the dire failures of the Rishi Sunak era.

And yet despite being handed the election on a platter - and indeed the Tories’ calamitous election campaign - Labour only won a third of the vote on a dire turnout. They were saved by Nigel Farage dividing the right-of-centre vote.

The points I was making here - about Labour’s dishonesty, their lack of vision for the country, their hatred of the left, and Starmer’s own lack of leadership qualities - are exactly why it all fell apart.

In February 2023, I wrote:

While Starmer’s team behaves as though it’s 1997, Britain’s current state is more like 1974 – that is, in crisis and turmoil. If a Labour government offers only tinkering around the edges of the economy, and the lives of struggling households do not substantially improve, mass disillusionment may soon kick in. It remains the case that the most interesting ideas are bubbling away on the left: banishing them from Labour’s future is an act of self-harm. If a meek Starmer administration disappoints, a now cowed left may find an audience willing to listen. Starmer’s team is buoyant now, and understandably so: but history tell us where hubris leads.

Again, I noted Labour’s lack of vision for the country - and how the left could win an audience as a consequence. We can now see that with the surge of Zack Polanski’s Green Party.

Here’s what I wrote in October 2023, when Labour had a colossal opinion poll lead:

So consider this for a scenario. Labour triumphs at the next election, but wins by default and with no enthusiasm for Starmerism in the tank from the start. Unlike 1997, the new administration rules a country defined by turmoil and decline, but offers no transformative policies to answer our multiple and overlapping crises. Disillusionment sets in, while the Tories complete their metamorphosis into loud, proud, brash rightwing populism, hoovering up votes from the disaffected. In the general election of 2029, a new model Tory party – flushed with British Trumpism – stages a stunning comeback.

True, this is not the US: your gut instinct may say it can’t happen here. But when, in the past, you looked in bemused horror at their culture wars, you may have assumed they’d never arrive on our shores – but they did. Farage marched through conference not as a hostile outsider, but as a conquering general. His mission is not yet complete, however, and a final prize may beckon.

What I got wrong here was the suggestion that Nigel Farage could take over the Tories. But my basic point - a government with no answers to a turmoil-afflicted country would open the door to a Farageist insurgency - was obviously correct.

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Here’s what I wrote in December 2023:

Those hoping this is all one big pretence and, once safely ensconced in No 10, Starmer will yell “Surprise!” and enact a new shiny progressive dawn are set to be most disappointed. And this is now the most interesting question in British politics. When Starmer wins his decisive victory – which he will – and little changes after two years, what happens next?

Alas, there were no shortage of Starmer supporters predicting he would enact a shiny new progressive dawn. Here’s Andrew Marr predicted Starmer would be a “radical” prime minister - two months after I penned that column. Alas, it was not to be!

A day after Andrew Marr’s video, in February 2024, I wrote the following:

An administration that lacks meaningful answers to domestic crises and is wedded to a toxic foreign policy will soon find itself in trouble. Look at Starmer’s political equivalents in the US, Germany and Australia: they won but swiftly became unpopular, and none U-turned so comprehensively as him on their original promises. If he enjoys a honeymoon, it will be short-lived.

And here was a key point - Starmer-like politics in Germany was particularly instructive, given the insurgency of the far-right AfD. But of course we also saw what happened to Joe Biden.

Just after the general election was called, I wrote:

Labour will win this election not because there is any real enthusiasm for the party’s agenda nor any real belief in Starmer’s capabilities as a leader. It will win because the Tories have set one of the lowest bars in British political history. And then, when Labour is in power, enjoying so little support and enthusiasm among its natural voters, what next? Winning because people wanted to rid themselves of the incumbent party is not the same as winning because you offered a vision that voters rallied behind.

After this week, the mask is off. Labour’s leaders are sending a clear signal that once they have secured No 10, they will behave with the same power-drunk arrogance and the same disregard for democratic norms that they are showing now towards their own MPs. Starmer should consider, for a moment, the cautionary tale of Boris Johnson – another leader who purged his parliamentary party. Yes, he scooped an 80-seat majority. But then, in less than three years, he was driven from office in disgrace, and the Tory party was left in tatters.

Bear in mind, Labour had a 20 point lead in the polls at the time.

But this is indeed what has happened!

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When the election results came in, I noted there was hope:

Despite the excessive media focus on the Farageist insurgency, the left revolt is just as significant. If the Labour leadership was rational, it would acknowledge this disaffection and seek to reverse the rot. The party, after all, has secured the same share of the vote as in 2019, winning its landslide thanks to Nigel Farage dividing the right and the vagaries of our electoral system. The juxtaposition between its dominance of the House of Commons and the lack of enthusiasm it enjoys in the country will be increasingly felt.

But here’s a prediction. Those surrounding Starmer are too politically defined by their hostility to the left to learn from this. There will be precious little conciliation: quite the reverse. In the coming years, growing numbers of voters will be driven to the Greens and other leftwing formations. As long as leftwing forces in Britain build on this moment and find common cause – yes, a big but – then this could be a new beginning indeed.

As I predicted, Starmer’s team ignored the evidence of disillusionment from the left - and simply doubled down on further antagonising the left.

My view was that the big challenge facing the left was a question of leadership. After Zack Polanski assumed the leadership of the Greens, he did indeed build on this moment.

It should have been obvious that Starmerism was an empty project - a vacuum filled by dishonesty, arrogance and a craving for power for its own sake.

But instead Starmer was treated as a competent, serious “grown-up in the room” who would offer a new found stability. The idea, basically, was that we were trapped in a Tory psychodrama - and when the party was ejected from office, all of that would go away.

The basic problem is that most political journalism treats politics as a soap opera.

It’s driven by personality - who’s up and who’s down - rather than ideas and the realities affecting ordinary citizens. There was no understanding of the crises afflicting this country - and Labour’s lack of answers to them.

That’s why Starmerism was so badly misreported.

The raging dishonesty of Starmerism always told us that this would end in catastrophe.

But political journalists ignored his dishonesty.

Why?

Because he used it to destroy the left - and they admired that, and saw it as smart politics.

None of this is evidence of my prophetic skills. It should have been obvious what would happen. It is a damning failure of political journalism that this was not understood.

(This is an updated version of this piece from last year)

Forget the World Cup. This is where the real entertainment is right now.

Israel is in meltdown, and so are its cheerleaders. That’s after Donald Trump capitulated to end the illegal Israeli-American war in Iran, agreeing — according to reports — to proposals including permanently ending the war, ending the naval blockade, a $300bn reconstruction plan for Iran, ending sanctions, and allowing the free export of Iranian oil.

This was a war launched to overthrow Iran’s rulers and secure what Trump described as UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

Instead, it has ended with Trump signing up to terms which have left the people who spent years inciting this catastrophe - and then cheering on their fantasy as it opened with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls - in a state of total despair, anguish and terror.

It is not tasteless to find this funny. These people are furious at peace breaking out - after they bet the house on a cataclysmic war which has produced the literal opposite of everything they hoped for.

The unfunny bit is the death and destruction they helped cause.

Let’s start with the United States, shall we?

Nikki Haley

What about Nikki Haley, Trump’s former US Ambassador to the UN? When the war began, she was beyond delighted. This was a “history-defining” and “legacy-defining” thing that “needed to happen”, she said.

Well, she was certainly right about one thing. This is a legacy-defining and history-defining moment.

With the war she cheered on now over, Haley responded to reports that the deal allows Iran to immediately sell oil by tweeting:

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John Podhoretz

Podhoretz has long been a passionate supporter of war with Iran. When Trump first attacked Iran in June 2025, Podhoretz was so delighted that he wrote an article declaring its impact potentially “enormous” and “world historic”, before concluding:

Trump has said since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., that he believes God spared him for a reason.
And now, so do I.
This was—is—the reason.”

John Podhoretz believed that God literally saved Donald Trump from being assassinated so he could bomb Iran.

Parking, for a second, the theological question of why God did not just stop the assassination attempt from happening in the first place: does that mean God spared Trump in order to go to full-blown war with Iran, only for Iran to emerge victorious?

Because Podhoretz is very clear that this is the outcome of the Iran war.

In a video call, another panellist suggested Iran wants “to humiliate Donald Trump and move on to the next president.”

Podhoretz spluttered: “And they’ve already succeeded!”

His conclusion was bitter: “There is no person on Earth who is going to say that America didn’t lose this war” - unless he said, “you are literally a paid agent of MAGA related to Donald Trump or some lunatic who is really excited by the possibility of Trump turning on Israel.

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John Bolton

What about John Bolton, professional warmonger, George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN and Trump’s former National Security Advisor?

Boy, has this man been a supporter of bombing Iran. It is his one true passion in life. “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” was the headline of his New York Times column in March 2015.

Just after Trump started the war, he told PBS:

“I’m sorry it took so long finally for somebody to take action. I think the world would have been a much safer place if somebody did it 20 years ago.”

What’s he saying now? He says of Iran:

“They’ve played him like a violin. That’s why they’ve got the deal that they want.”

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Batya Ungar-Sargon

A month and a half into the war with Iran, when it should have been absolutely obvious that it was a terrible catastrophe, right-wing US presenter Batya Ungar-Sargon tweeted:

Now she tweets:

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Will Chamberlain

When the war began, prominent right-wing US activist Will Chamberlain tweeted:

On 14th April, he tweeted:

Now he tweets:

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Laura Loomer

At the beginning of the war, Trump rang Laura Loomer, a far-right fanatical anti-Muslim bigot named Laura Loomer, who recalled the conversation at the time:

I said it’s a great job and people all around the world are cheering you on. He’s making us proud to be American.

Now she tweets:

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Israel

What about Israel?

When the war began, an astonishing 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the war with Iran, with just 3% somewhat opposing it and 1% strongly opposing it.

At the end of May, Trump had a net positive rating of 23 points in Israel.

Three weeks later, it had dropped by 46 points to minus 23.

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Emily Schrader

The Israeli journalist Emily Schrader was ecstatic when the Iran war was launched. She said it was pure elation the part of Israelis, that “it’s been absolutely incredible” and praised Trump to the hilt.

“No other leader has had the courage to do what President Trump” had done, she said.

Where’s she at now? She shared Trump signing the memorandum with a picture of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain after his infamous visit to Munich, adding the caption: “Peace in our time. Coward.”

In another tweet, she wrote:

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Yinon Magal

When the Iran war began and the Supreme Leader was killed, an Israeli programme hosted by journalist Yinon Magal opened with singing and dancing. The panel even shared chocolates.

What’s he saying now?

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Zvi Yehezkeli

When the war began, the Israeli TV presenter Zvi Yehezkeli declared “the regime will fall”, declaring “A historic move that will change the face of humanity, the Middle East, and certainly the face of Islam by taking down the Shiite head.”

Now he declares that “Trump has thrown Israel away”

Itamar Ben-Gvir

When the war began, Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared:

You will wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven, you will not forget “The State of Israel has embarked on a historic campaign against the Iranian terrorist regime - I support the Prime Minister, President Trump, the IDF fighters and all security forces who are working courageously and determinedly to defend the State of Israel.

Now he declares:

Trump’s agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subordinate to the United States. We are an independent and sovereign country. We are not partners to this agreement, which does not safeguard our security. We must not withdraw from any territory [in Lebanon] that our fighters have captured.

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Bezalel Smotrich

At the start of the war, his colleague Bezalel Smotrich said: “We embarked on an existential campaign to overthrow the Iranian regime.”

Now he declares: “’It’s impossible to escape the sense of bitterness that characterizes all of us today,” adding “the agreement with Iran is a bad deal for Israel and for the entire free world.”

Yair Lapid

When the war began, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declared:

“We are united behind the pilots, fighters and security forces in the most justified operation there is. We are all united on the operation.”

Now he says:

“Netanyahu promised us a historic victory – and we got a crisis with the Americans, Hormuz open to the Iranians, money for the Revolutionary Guard, ballistic missiles aimed at Israel, and Israel waiting in the corridor like a scolded child.”

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Jake Wallis Simons

Here in Britain there was no bigger cheerleader for the Iran war than Jake Wallis Simons, odious pro-Israel propagandist and former editor of the Jewish Chronicle.

Just look at some of his headlines.

There’s been a little gear shift.

Take a look at his more recent headlines.

Completely discredited

The warmongers have been discredited again and again and again.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Iran.

They must never be listened to ever again.

Donald Trump has turned on Israel.

Not because he has a conscience or undergone a Damascene conversion. Let’s get that out of the way immediately: do not give this man any credit. Along with Joe Biden, Trump has armed and facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its other war crimes across the region, including in Lebanon. Mouthing off about Israel is one thing. Doing anything practical to stop its crimes is another.

But what Trump said at the G7 should still be understood for what it is: a confession. Before the cameras, he complained that Israel’s war in Lebanon has dragged on too long, and that “too many people are being killed.”

Then he said something striking:

You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. There are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.

Trump here admitted that Israel - thanks to the weapons and support provided by the US - is destroying apartment blocks full of civilians.

Of course, the evidence for this is overwhelming.

That includes in Lebanon itself.

Take the Israeli attack on an apartment block in Ain El Delb in September 2024. The justification was that Israel was targeting a Hezbollah commander. The Israeli air raid hit the six-storey building, tipping it over down a hillside, killing 73 people and injuring 60 others. Of those killed, 23 were children.

AP carried the testimony of one survivor, who said it was worse than being trapped in a coffin.

The BBC also carried the story of Julia Ramadan, a young woman who was terrified about Israeli strikes in Lebanon and so went to stay at their family home in Ain El Delb, hoping for safety. She was killed.

In Gaza, this crime has been particularly widespread.

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The Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 magazine has extensively covered Israel’s destruction of entire residential blocks in Gaza in order to kill a purported Hamas military target - including Hamas targets of no military value, or people with no military connection branded as legitimate Hamas targets, or indeed people who have no connection to Hamas at all.

They covered one example in which the Israeli army authorised the killing of around 300 civilians to target a Hamas commander, involving the destruction of several large multi-story apartment buildings. “Entire families with children were killed,” as one paramedic they quoted tells them.

In another example, the Israeli army destroyed a high-rise building to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, a Hamas commander. They didn’t kill him, but they killed dozens of civilians.

So when Trump suggests Israel is destroying apartment blocks full of civilians, he is not revealing something new. He is saying aloud what the US administration knows to be true - as it delivers weapons and support.

Trump further said:

I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that’s the deal with Iran.

That’s not all. Following an Israeli attack on Beirut, Axios report that Trump told its reporter:

Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgement. I let him know that.

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At the G7 summit, Trump also said:

Without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did.

It’s certainly true that Israel is dependent on US weapons, aid and support - whether that be subjugating the Palestinians, including occupation, apartheid and genocide, as well as invading and attacking Arab states.

Israel has received about a quarter of a trillion dollars in inflation-adjusted terms in US aid over the decades.

Trump also dismissed Israel as “the very small partner”.

What the hell is going on?

Trump has not suddenly been awakened to the horrors perpetrated by Israel. There’s a more straightforward explanation. He feels hoodwinked by Israel into launching a war he believed would be a devastating success, which has instead plunged his presidency into crisis, imposed mounting economic costs, and completely humiliated US power.

Trump further feels that Israel is now trying to sabotage attempts to end the war it promoted and which ended in humiliation for an already flailing superpower.

Indeed, the official agreement between Iran and the US represents a surrender by the aggressors .

It means the US signing up to such proposals as permanently ending the war, ending the naval blockade, a $300bn reconstruction plan for Iran, ending sanctions, and allowing the free export of Iranian oil.

As an article in Foreign Policy magazine puts it, it’s “a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.”

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Obviously, Trump cannot admit to feeling tricked by Israel, because that would make him look extremely gullible and weak. After all, Israel did not force him to launch the war with him.

But this catastrophe offers an opportunity. In the US, public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel. Among Democrats, that’s overwhelming - but it includes a majority of younger Republicans, too.

The US patronage of Israel could come to an end, and those who perpetrated terrible crimes could, in time, face justice.

That may once have seemed utopian. It no longer is.

Earlier this year, the high court ruled that the government’s banning of anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action using anti-terror legislation was unlawful.

That has now been overturned by the Court of Appeal, who have ruled that the government’s ban is lawful. That means expressing support for Palestine Action can lead to a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

Palestine Action focused its actions against Israeli weapons firm Elbit, in the context of the British government facilitating Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Their proscription puts them on the same legal footing as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

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Thousands have been arrested for holding placards. As a result, as the i paper’s security correspondent Lizzie Dearden notes: “The average terror suspect arrested in England and Wales is now a white woman in her 50s as a result of the Palestine Action ban.”

But I want to focus on comments made by the lady chief justice, Sue Carr, as she read the judgment. She said:

It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties. Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage.

What the hell is this judge talking about?

For a start, the suffragettes engaged in far more extreme acts than Palestine Action. The anti-genocide activists have smashed up the equipment of an Israeli weapons’ factory and thrown red paint at two RAF planes. One person has been convicted of GBH without intent after an altercation with a police officer.

The suffragettes planted bombs, burned down residential homes, attacked churches and schools and smashed up art galleries. Between 1913 and 1914, they were responsible for more than 300 incidents of arson and bombing.

They killed at least four people!

By any sane measure the suffragettes engaged in far more extreme acts than Palestine Action. Indeed their actions would unequivocally be criminalised as terrorism today.

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If the distinction is based on being covert or transparent, then it is as pedantic as it is ludicrous. Yes, the Women’s Social and Political Union ran a public-facing campaign, employed staff, organised huge demonstrations, and printed a weekly newspaper.

But when they were carrying out acts of sabotage or indeed violence, they were clearly not “operating transparently in the open”. They did so in secrecy, and many of the perpetrators were not caught.

The WPSU even had a secret group called the Young Hot Bloods which organised arson attacks, acid bombs, and attacks on homes.

Academic researchers who studied the suffragettes concluded that they became more covert in their final phase, meeting “the definitional criteria of what we call a ‘covert social movement network’ (CSMN).”

Palestine Action was a public-facing campaign with a website, social media accounts, press releases and a membership. It had two identifiable co-founders, Huda Amoori and Richard Barnard, who did public media interventions.

The lady chief justice has desecrated our history - and erased the truth about activists who fought for the rights of women like herself.

The proscription of Palestine Action is a sordid episode in our history, and marks our continued march towards authoritarianism. It is obvious what a Reform government would do with the repressive legal precedents and infrastructure it would inherit.

But we should note that proscribing dissident groups as terrorists is one hallmark of authoritarianism. Another feature is rewriting our past.

On Thursday, the people of Makerfield will vote and decide whether Andy Burnham win and replaces Keir Starmer - or Reform UK triumph, with Nigel Farage on course to become prime minister.

I went up there and recorded this video. It’s not public yet, but wanted to give paid subscribers a sneak preview. Your support makes all of these videos possible.

I’m currently finishing the edits of my book ‘The Fall of the West’, but we’ll do far more of these videos when that’s done!

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I’m really delighted to join newly launched in the UK. You can read my first article here:

Zeteo UK

The Belfast Riots Are an Anti-Migrant Pogrom - and the British Media Has Serious Questions to Answer

A note from our Editor-in-Chief…

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3 months ago · 400 likes · Owen Jones

It’s an offshoot of Mehdi Hasan’s hugely successful project in the US - and we desperately need it here.

Despite some bright spots, our media landscape is catastrophically dire. It’s dominated by aggressively right-wing outlets that focus on inciting fear and hatred, deflecting accountability from elites, and shutting down any challenge to our broken status quo.

Britain is currently heading towards the abyss. Years of scapegoating migrants have brought us the growing threat of violent pogroms - and the very real prospect of an authoritarian right-wing government which threatens democracy.

Both our politicians and media outlets are to blame for this.

This is the soft launch of Zeteo UK - it gets into full swing in September. But there’s incredible names involved - not least Shehab Khan, poached from ITN, who is Political Editor, Sangita Myska, Peter Oborne, Afua Hirsch, and Grace Blakeley.

Nothing will change in Britain unless we have a different media landscape.

So I hope you’ll sign up to Zeteo UK - with lots of excitement developments to come!

“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension,” said the grieving father of Henry Nowak. “We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone.”

Nowak, of course, was brutally murdered by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist attack by Nowak, leading police officers to handcuff the dying 18-year-old.

Shortly afterwards, Nigel Farage declared - in some sort of contrived address to the nation: “Henry’s family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way, but I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.”

Later that evening, far-right extremists rioted in the streets of Southampton. They threw rubbish bins, traffic cones and bricks, bared their backsides, performed Nazi salutes. They included members of outright neo-Nazi organisations.

We are heading to a dark place. As I wrote in the Guardian this week, Reform are committed to sweeping authoritarianism, and it would be much easier to establish a tyranny on British shores than in the federal, constitutional United States.

Racists are emboldened by many things: the ongoing social and economic crises, a disastrous government and its failure to address a broken social order, and the ascent of the far-right across the West and beyond.

There is no cordon sanitaire anymore which keeps the far-right out of legitimate, respectable politics. Indeed there is no longer any consensus on what constitutes unacceptably extreme right-wing politics.

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Reform is being outflanked by Restore, founded by one of its former MPs, the millionaire Rupert Lowe, which has positioned itself in an even more extreme position. Reform thus adopts more extreme position to stop itself from bleeding support to its new competitor. The Tories then do the same with Reform. Labour then does the same with the Tories. We are trapped in a right-wing ratchet.

It is striking how racists go through a list of targets. The likes of far-right criminal Tommy Robinson long claimed to champion Sikhs, in a sort of divide-and-rule attack on British Muslims.

Yet despite some far-right activists portraying them as loyal subjects, Sikhs have been repeatedly attacked by racists who think they’re Muslims. In one recent hideous case a Sikh woman was raped by a man who screamed that she was a ‘fucking Muslim bitch’ during the attack.

But now British Sikhs find themselves under attack. The far-right will come for all minorities - and anyone deemed subversive - eventually.

Indeed it should be noted that Henry Nowak was British-Polish. For a period, British Poles were in the firing line.

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One study in 2008 found that crime was one of the main topics that came up in British newspapers when Polish migrants were discussed.

In that same year, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain said of media coverage:

In our view, the worst examples linked Poles with words and phrases like ‘feckless’, ‘chancers’, ‘race riots’, ‘swamp the NHS’, ‘fears for schools’, ‘cut-price treatment’, ‘push British graduates to back of the jobs queue’, ‘killers, drug smugglers and rapist’. We consider that this has made Poles living in the UK feel vulnerable and persecuted.

We need to unite people of different minorities under a common banner. That is: unity of the majority - irrespective of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation and identity - against the elites.

The far right exist to deflect fury away from those elites. Right now, the wind is in their sails. We need to focus our minds on the present danger.

“Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

That is reportedly what Donald Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu: the Israeli prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

There is more - which we will come on to.

But it’s first important to confront the inevitable sense of deja vu. Under Joe Biden, there was a near-constant drip of leaks to the media suggesting that the then-president was displeased with Netanyahu, exasperated by Netanyahu, furious with Netanyahu, losing patience with Netanyahu. These leaks often found their way to Axios, and especially to its reporter Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist and former Israeli intelligence officer.

Take January 2024: four months into the genocide. It was reported that, on 23 December 2023, Biden ended a phone call with Netanyahu by saying, “This conversation is over,” after the Israeli prime minister refused to release Palestinian tax revenues he was withholding. A US official summed up the mood like this: “The situation sucks and we are stuck. The president’s patience is running out.”

The following month, Politico reported that Biden had called Netanyahu a “bad fucking guy”, which the White House denied.

That same month, NBC News reported that Biden had called Netanyahu an “asshole” and “this guy”, complained that he was “giving him hell”, and found him impossible to deal with. One US official anonymously briefed that Biden “just feels like this is enough. It has to stop.”

In March 2024, Biden was caught on a hot mic being pressed by a Democratic congressman over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The then-president replied: “I told him, Bibi, and don’t repeat this, but you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting.”

In April 2024, after Israel slaughtered several foreign aid workers and their Palestinian driver in the bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy - and therefore provoked outrage because white Westerners were among the victims - a US official told Axios’s Barak Ravid: “Biden is pissed. The temperature regarding Bibi is very high.”

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That same month, Axios reported that Biden told Netanyahu that, if Israel did not change course in Gaza, “we won’t be able to support you.”

And in October 2024, it was reported that Biden had repeatedly accused Netanyahu of having no strategy, and had shouted “Bibi, what the fuck?” at him in July, after Israeli strikes near Beirut and in Iran.

What did all this mean? To be blunt: it meant shit.

All of it was blatantly for the benefit of domestic US audiences, because growing numbers of Democratic voters were rightly enraged that their administration was arming and facilitating a genocide.

At least $29bn worth of weapons were signed off by Biden so Israel could continue wiping Gaza from the face of the earth and exterminating the Palestinian people. Netanyahu behaved exactly as he wished. He committed whatever war crimes and crimes against humanity he wished. And all of it was facilitated by Joe Biden’s administration.

Now, under Trump, we are seeing a similar pattern.

In May 2025, Axios reported that Trump was frustrated by what it described as the “ongoing war in Gaza” - it is, of course, a genocide - and told aides to inform Netanyahu that he wanted him to “wrap it up”.

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In September 2025, the Wall Street Journal published a story headlined: “Trump Has Heated Call With Netanyahu Over Israeli Strike on Qatar.” According to the report, Trump told Netanyahu that his decision to target Hamas political leaders in Qatar was not wise.

Then, in May this year, Barak Ravid reported for Axios that after a phone call in which Trump and Netanyahu discussed a new effort to reach a deal with Iran, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire.”

Which brings us to the latest Axios report.

A US official summarised Trump’s remarks to Netanyahu as follows: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Another source claimed that Trump was “pissed”, and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: “What the fuck are you doing?”

Well. Whatever the motives for this leak, if Trump really did tell Netanyahu that “everybody hates Israel”, then he has finally processed something which has been obvious for some time: there has been a dramatic shift against Israel in Western public opinion.

A poll earlier this year found that 60% of US adults had an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with just 37% who had a favourable view. In other words, unfavourable outstripped favourable by 23 points. In 2022, the opposite was true: favourable views led by 13 points. Even more strikingly, 28% now had a very unfavourable view - nearly triple the 10% recorded in 2022.

The partisan split was revealing. Some 80% of Democrats and Democratic leaners viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 53% in 2022. Among Republicans, Israel still retained majority support: 58% favourable, 41% unfavourable. But even that represented a dramatic narrowing. And among Republicans under 50, 57% now had an unfavourable view of Israel.

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We have already seen the MAGA coalition fragmenting over Israel, with high-profile examples including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene. So is Trump feeling pressure from within his own coalition? Or does he simply believe that Israel’s mayhem is undermining US strategic interests?

Because those interests are under strain. This week, Iran indicated it would suspend peace talks with the US in protest at Israel’s murderous onslaught in Lebanon. The US and Israel, of course, lost their war with Iran. Netanyahu played a pivotal role in convincing Trump to join that calamitous war, as New York Times reporting made clear. Iran now has leverage, not least because of the Strait of Hormuz, and it is using that leverage to try to win concessions - not just for itself, but elsewhere in the Middle East, most notably over Israel’s criminal war against Lebanon.

Trump is clearly frustrated because the longer the Iran crisis drags on, the greater the economic costs for the United States - and therefore the greater the political costs for him. Asked by CNBC about the possible collapse of peace negotiations with Iran, he reportedly said: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.”

Because of course that is exactly how someone who does not care speaks.

Now Mark Levin, the right-wing commentator who called for Trump to nuke Iran, is furious. He thundered that the Axios leak was “a violation of federal law” and had “provided support to the Iranian regime and its Hezbollah proxy.” He demanded to know whether there would be an FBI investigation into whoever leaked the call.

Many have pointed out that, in practice, this means Levin is calling for Trump to be arrested - something, finally, we can all unite around - because, like Biden before him, Trump is apparently angry at Netanyahu while refusing to do anything meaningful about it, and therefore may well have leaked it himself.

And while Washington leaks, Lebanon is being slaughtered.

About 3,500 people have been killed by Israel, and more than 10,000 wounded, since Israel’s dramatic escalation in early March. That includes at least 121 paramedics and first responders. In one horrific example I watched, first responders were treating a father and his daughter injured by an Israeli strike - and then a second Israeli strike hit them.

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This is known as a “double tap” strike. You attack once, wait for first responders and bystanders to come to the aid of the wounded, and then attack again. ISIS used double tap strikes. That is the company Israel keeps.

Israel has occupied much of Lebanon. It is demanding residents flee entire cities. It is razing villages to the ground. But none of this is achieving victory. It is achieving only mass slaughter and destruction.

Hezbollah, we were told, was supposed to have been defeated, not least after the pager attacks. Instead, it is inflicting far greater damage on the IDF than expected. Israel has been here before. It was previously forced out of Lebanon by attrition.

A new poll shows that 87% of Lebanese people regard Israel as their enemy — a figure which cuts across religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions. Strikingly, 51% believed Israel should be destroyed, while just a third supported a peace agreement with Israel. If Israel believes there is a military solution to Lebanon, it is deceiving itself. Its crimes are simply generating ever greater hostility.

And this brings us to another phone call between a US president and an Israeli prime minister.

In 1982, Israel launched its second invasion of Lebanon, seeking to crush the PLO led by Yasser Arafat. Israel committed hideous crimes. Ronald Reagan - a right-wing Republican president - recorded in his diary that he was “angry”. He rang Israel’s then-prime minister, Menachem Begin, and told him that the assault “had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.” He specifically used the word “holocaust” to describe what Israel was doing, and said the symbol of the war was becoming the image of a seven-month-old baby with its arms blown off.

Twenty minutes later, Begin rang Reagan back to say he had ordered an end to the barrage, and pleaded for their continued friendship.

Think about that.

Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump - even though Israel is committing far graver crimes today, armed and facilitated by the United States.

Both presidents have armed and facilitated war crimes. Both are complicit. Whatever they allegedly say behind closed doors, both must face justice.