This is absolutely incredible.

The partner of Britain’s National Security Adviser has publicly backed Palestine Action.

That’s an organisation which has been - outrageously - proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the government.

We’re discussing here a post by Sarah Helm, who is the partner of Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and the government’s National Security Advisor since 2024.

Of course, partners have their own minds and are entitled to their own opinions.

But it is beyond astonishing that the partner of the National Security Adviser has offered support for an organisation proscribed as terrorists - by the government of that National Security Adviser.

The National Security Adviser’s purview, if it doesn’t need spelling out, includes anti-terrorism. And of course Palestine Action - ludicrously! - falls under his purview.

Indeed, his government’s legislation means that his own wife now faces the potential prospect of being arrested, charged, tried - and even imprisoned.

It has now been reported that the Metropolitan Police are assessing her post as potential support for a banned group.

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Thousands have been arrested for holding placards supporting Palestine Action and opposing genocide - and the legislation sets out a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

This episode underlines just how outrageous and absurd the government’s legislation is.

Here’s what happened. I posted about the former Sky News presenter Adam Boulton defaming the Irish author Sally Rooney - and the Irish people as a whole.

Rooney has been forced to withdraw her books from sale in the UK over her support for Palestine Action. She is already unable to visit the country because of the threat of arrest.

Adam Boulton suggested Rooney had an “anti-Jewish stance” - and suggested this was representative of the Irish people more widely. He seems not to understand that Ireland’s own history of suffering murderous colonial rule at the hands of the British has helped drive a natural sense of solidarity with Palestinians.

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Sarah Helm then shared my post, adding:

“God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy.”

Again, expressing support for Palestine Action is a criminal offence under British law.

At least 3,630 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 for suspected support of Palestine Action. 632 have been charged.

Those arrested include Margaret Owen OBE, a 94-year-old Jewish human rights barrister; Ursula ‘La’ Pethick, an 89 year old retired psychotherapist, Reverend Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired Anglican priest, and Deborah Hinton OBE, an 81-year-old former magistrate.

Real menaces to society, I think we can all agree.

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The real outrage is that Israel has committed the crime of crimes - genocide - armed and facilitated by Western states, including our own government.

It is those who oppose this abomination who have faced being threatened, deplatformed, sacked, arrested, imprisoned and deported - rather than the politicians who facilitated it.

Solidarity, of course, with Sarah Helm. Obviously I don’t want her to be arrested, just as I don’t want anyone to be persecuted by the state for opposing genocide.

But honestly, if the wife of the government’s National Security Adviser is arrested for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action - it could not better illustrate the outrageous absurdity of the law.

And indeed let’s quote Defend Our Juries, who have led the struggle against the proscription of Palestine Action.

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Their spokesperson says:

“Thank you to Sarah Helm for defying this absurdly authoritarian ban on Palestine Action. The ban has led to more than 3,700 arrests of priests, pensioners and peaceful protesters for holding cardboard signs, and is now driving the books of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time off the shelves of British bookshops.

“How can Andy Burnham’s government possibly defend this ban in the Supreme Court next month when his own national security adviser’s wife has openly defied it? This unprecedented attack on free speech in our country is plainly unsustainable.

“We know of 36 people who have been arrested and had their homes raided for similarly expressing support for Palestine Action on social media. We hope Sarah will not face the same treatment for standing up for free speech and Palestinian lives. But her defiance further exposes the absurdity of a ban that cannot be enforced against everyone who challenges it. There are simply too many of us who will continue to defy this unjust law until the Government is forced to see sense and abandon it.”

We all know how this ends. The judgement of history will be savage.

The question has always been - will that be too late for the Palestinian people.

When Zack Polanski announced he was standing in the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election, I called it “hugely courageous”.

“It’s the Burnham honeymoon,” I wrote, “so obviously it’s a challenge.”

Cut out all the noise, and that is why Zack Polanski lost his by-election challenge to Labour.

Under his leadership, the Green Party adopted an uncompromisingly left-populist platform.

That was in the context of Keir Starmer’s Labour government defining itself against the left. It abolished the universal winter fuel payment, attacked disability benefits, cracked down on migrants, and slashed overseas aid. Starmer had backed Israel’s right to commit war crimes, failed to take proper action against a genocide, and proscribed Palestine Action, leading to thousands of arrests of people for holding placards, many of them elderly.

Repulsed voters flocked to the Greens. In February’s Gorton and Denton by-election, the party won a huge victory, leaving Labour in the third place. Labour MPs briefed that defeat was “existential”. The Greens’ polling breached 20%, and exceeded that of Labour in some polls. In the local elections, Labour lost four times as many votes to the Greens as Reform.

Labour MPs felt the same sort of panic Tory MPs did back in 2019: in their case, because of the Nigel Farage threat. That’s why they made Boris Johnson prime minister, despite their misgivings.

The result: Starmer was driven out of office and replaced by Andy Burnham. Now we had a prime minister who spoke of ending four decades of neoliberalism, declaring that the wrong turns Britain had taken were: “Deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, Brexit.” Other than Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour’s rhetoric is more left-wing than any point since the 1980s.

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Burnham apologised over Gaza. The government imposed sanctions against Israel’s illegal settlements and the new Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, told those who had protested against Israel: “You were right”.

This isn’t anywhere near enough action on Israel. And as I’ve written, the overall rhetoric is one thing - but what about the substance? What will happen when the government does its Budget? But the fact is Burnham has thrown everything at trying to woo back progressive voters - because his team understood that Labour taking its progressive base for granted was no longer tenable.

Despite everything, the fact the Greens were even in contention for Holborn and St. Pancras speaks to the transformation of the party’s fortunes, even if they have declined from this year’s peak. The Greens won 32.8%, up from 10.8% at the general election. Yes, there was the candidacy of left-wing independent Andrew Feinstein last time, who chalked up 18.9% - but you can’t actually just neatly shift all voters from an independent column to another political party. In any case, that’s still a 5 point increase if you did just crudely combine the two votes.

As I noted when he stood, Holborn and St. Pancras is not actually as fertile as other inner London seats. Yes, like most urban seats, it has larger numbers of younger and minority voters. But as pollster Steve Akehurst notes, it’s a seat with lots of voters who are both financially secure and socially progressive. The Greens’ main targets are financially insecure and socially progressive. If this was, say, Hackney, then I think Polanski would have won.

Yes, this all means that the Greens are not on course to “replace Labour”, as Polanski suggested in the party’s headier days. It does mean they could win a couple of dozen seats under first past the post, permanently establishing them as a political force and giving them the foundation to grow much further. In a hung Parliament, that could give them huge influence.

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And that’s without considering two factors. What happens when the Burnham honeymoon ends? What happens when neoliberalism is not in fact ended, and a reluctance to hike taxes on the booming rich means there isn’t the public investment the country desperately needs? What happens when Israel’s genocidal rampage continues - and the government is not imposing sweeping sanctions and ending its alliance with the state?

And what if Burnham delivers on his promise to introduce electoral reform, allowing those who would vote Green but fear letting in the Tories or Reform can now act on their conscience? The Greens really would become a permanent electoral force.

Yes, Labour will be crowing. Let them! I mean it. Their hubris is what drove the Green surge in the first place.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t warnings for the Greens. The party needs an outward-facing brand of sunny left-populism, of the sort of Zohran Mamdani exemplifies. Some activists believe in an ultra-revolutionary posture, believing the electorate will be radicalised by a revealed truth. This approach played a key role in wrecking Your Party. There are no shortages of sects which adopt such a posture, and they never get anywhere.

Polanski should also consider embracing Mamdani’s approach to social media. That means a focus on slick, optimistic, funny videos communicating his message - tackling the cost of living crisis by confronting the elites. Bombarding users with lots of reposts drowns out his message on a crucial medium - and offers the media ammunition, as we’ve seen.

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But Polanski has transformed the Greens’ fortunes. For most of its existence, the party was a nice genteel middle-class party - which was utterly irrelevant. Commentators who profess nostalgia for this period simply want to return to the days when the Greens did not exert left-wing influence in politics, ensuring that pressure only came from the right.

It is now a party of well over 200,000 members which has a shot at winning a significant number of seats, and which is breathing down the neck of Labour MPs in many of them.

Nigel Farage stood for parliament seven times before he was finally elected. The Greens surged quicker and with more immediate political consequence than UKIP did. Yes, different standards are applied to the Greens, because the media is largely right-wing and does not regard the left as legitimate political actors. That doesn’t change the actual reality!

This will be a tough period, because of Burnham’s honeymoon, the internal acrimony, the shadow of this defeat, and the media pile-on. But the fundamentals will reassert themselves if Burnham cannot deliver on his rhetoric. The Greens should have discipline, suck it up, zone in on an effective populist message - and be patient.

You can order my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost it here!

Opposing the mass slaughter of children by Israel is not hateful extremism.

Yet that is what this moral disgrace of an article by Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust argues.

This is a charity supposedly committed to protecting the security of Jewish people in the UK, and it works closely with the British police - including influencing decisions on pro-Palestine protests.

Let’s go through what it argues – and the reality of the crimes committed by the Israeli army against Palestinian kids.

He says:

“We think of democratic protest and terrorism as two opposing categories of behaviour, but the world is not so neat. Political violence always draws sustenance from a hinterland of ideas and rhetoric shared by many more people who would never pick up a knife or a gun, but who articulate the same grievances.

The belief that Israel is engaged in a “war on children” is common across the pro-Palestine movement, promoted by major NGOs and found in a thousand Instagram reels about genocidal Zionist baby-killers. Without doubt, it is deeply upsetting that thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, and many feel that Israel could have done more to minimise civilian casualties. But to describe this not as the result of a tragic and unbearable conflict, but as a “war on children”, is to imply that killing children is the whole point: a charge that echoes the medieval blood libel. From that assumption to Jihad al-Shamie yelling: “This is what you get for killing our children” as he tried to batter down the doors of Heaton Park synagogue last Yom Kippur is not as big a leap as some might wish.”

The piece suggests that those who use terms like a “war on children” are inciting antisemitic violence. That anything beyond regarding Israel’s slaughter of at least 21,700 Palestinian children as “the result of a tragic and unbearable conflict” is a dangerous blood libel.

Consider the scale of the slaughter.

In Gaza, children represent about 30% of those killed, at a rate of 27.6 a day. In Bosnia, 3.5% of those killed were children, at a rate of 2.5 a day. In Iraq, 8.54% of civilian victims whose ages were recorded were children, at a rate of 1.2 a day. In Syria, it was 13.1%, at a rate of 6.4 a day.

This year, a UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israel was deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza.

In one case, an Israeli quadcopter shot a 10-day-old baby in the head while it was breastfeeding.

This was in broad daylight.

“The quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assess that the target was a mother and a baby,” the Commission concluded.

Consider another case. A 15-year-old Palestinian boy stepped outside holding a white flag. An Israeli sniper shot him.

As he tried to stand, he was shot twice more. His brother rushed to help – and was killed too.

Their mother was shot. Their father was fired on as he tried to retrieve their bodies.

In another case, Israeli soldiers threw four grenades into a home sheltering 30 relatives, then entered and opened fire.

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A 5-year-old boy was left with his intestines exposed; his pregnant mum and dad were killed.

A doctor used diapers and tape to hold his abdomen together. He survived, but was left with a permanent disability and now uses a wheelchair.

The Commission also details the use of “explosive weapons with wide-area effects” in civilian areas and how this causes the mass killing of children.

And consider Israel’s grotesquely named “Where’s Daddy?” programme. According to Israeli intelligence officers, it tracked suspected militants and alerted the army when they returned to their family homes – so they could be bombed there, often with their wives and children inside.

The film NAZA features an Israeli intelligence officer who explains how attacks on targets in their homes were intended to maximise death and destruction.

Another Israeli intelligence official also says:

“I hack into the phone of a 12 year old girl. If a girl calls her mom, ‘Mummy,’ she says, ‘when are you returning home? Daddy just came back.’ That’s a message that would alert the system bc it contains the words ‘return’ and ‘daddy.’”

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Nor is the Commission alone in documenting these crimes.

The New York Times featured interviews with dozens of US-based medics. They testified that Palestinian children were being shot in the head and chest by snipers.

Prof. Nick Maynard is a British surgeon who served three times in Gaza. He testified that young boys were being shot in different parts of the body each day.

One day, the head or neck.

Another day, the abdomen.

Another day, the testicles.

It was a game, he suggested.

Mark Perlmutter is a Jewish American surgeon who served in Gaza. He testified that Israeli snipers were deliberately targeting children in Gaza.

“No child gets shot twice by mistake,” he said.

We could go on.

There is only one other conflict in the 21st century I can find in which more than 30% of people killed were children.

It was Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006. In that war, around 400 children were killed.

To repeat, today, we’re talking about at least 21,700 children.

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How would Dave Rich respond to these examples?

He cannot publicly wave them away as “war is ugly” without exposing himself.

This is a Western ally, and the Israeli army is not taking action against these crimes.

I doubt he reads these reports. He won’t answer in any case.

Here’s another question for Rich and the like.

You suggest that accusing Israel of something so obscene is a blood libel.

How do you wave this away?

A poll in August 2025 found that 76% of Jewish Israelis believe “there are no innocents in Gaza”.

If an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis believe “there are no innocents in Gaza”, that includes children, by definition.

So what happens when those are the soldiers directing missiles, bombs and quadcopters, or clutching guns?

I cannot peer into Dave Rich’s mind or soul.

I do not know whether he has simply avoided reading the overwhelming evidence, fearful that it might let a crack of doubt appear.

After all, who, we might ask, knowingly demonises those opposed to heinous crimes against children?

But Rich is demonising those who oppose the mass slaughter of children, whatever his inner motives may be.

That is worse than atrocity denial, which is depraved enough.

And it matters, because demonising opponents of these crimes prevents action being taken to stop these crimes.

This conflation of Israel’s crimes and Jewish people must stop.

Jewish people in the Middle Ages did not sacrifice children in religious rituals.

Israel, a state, has engaged in the mass slaughter of children. That is a simple fact.

Growing numbers of Jewish people oppose Israel’s heinous crimes. In the US, nearly four in ten believe Israel has committed genocide - and more than six in ten believe it has committed war crimes.

Promoting the conflation of Israel – and what it has done to the Palestinian people – with Jewish people is, self-evidently, driving antisemitism.

Deep down, Israel’s cheerleaders know they have lost.

They have lost Western public opinion.

The smears, distortions, lies – and the manufactured climate of fear – have failed.

They will keep doubling down and turning the world upside down.

It will not work.

Just how catastrophically wrong can one man be?

Enter Douglas Murray, the hard-right author and perennial cheerleader for war.

Being wrong is one thing. Everyone, after all, makes predictions which brutally collide with reality, or take judgement calls which history later treats as profoundly unwise.

But what we are discussing here is not being just wrong, but consistently and completely wrong about the most important issue there is: whether people live or die on a mass scale.

As we will explore: just how many times can you use your platform to cheer on wars which lead to calamity - and still be taken seriously?

Now, it’s fair to say that I don’t have much in common with this hard-right scribe, who was honoured by Israel’s president and diaspora affairs minister for his advocacy on behalf of the state.

But we both believe the West is in decline. He blames immigration, Islam, multiculturalism, what he sees as the West’s self-flagellation, a lack of self-belief, identity politics, and so on.

I believe it is an economic model based on extraction rather than investment, on Big Finance rather than making things, on sucking wealth ever upwards – fused with military adventurism abroad which has brought shattering strategic defeats for the West while driving bloody turmoil.

The disillusionment and fury all that has spawned has helped drive the rise of an authoritarian far right which threatens the very future of democracy.

I discuss all that in my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, which is out now.

And there have been few more committed cheerleaders of that military adventurism than Douglas Murray.

His utter wrongness is one thing. But consider, too, the relish with which he treated the supposed humiliation of people who opposed those wars.

We’ll start with Iran. But then there is Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

And this isn’t really just about Douglas Murray, who is a case study. It’s about the West’s warmongers – those who have cheered on and justified wars which have brought death, ruin and chaos on an enormous scale.

If people like Douglas Murray want to ponder the question of Western decline, they should begin by examining themselves in a mirror.

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Iran: a ‘short and limited war’

On 15 January 2026, Murray wrote a column for the New York Post headlined ‘Trump has a chance to end Khamenei’s reign of terror in Iran’.

He wrote:

“Trump has a historic opportunity. He could help end Iran’s half-century nightmare and make up for 46 years of foreign policy failure. In doing so, he will prove that — unlike his predecessors — he is the president who stood for freedom in the face of terror.”

On 29 January, he wrote another column, headlined ‘Stop thinking like it’s 2003 — toppling Iran’s mullahs does not risk mistakes of Iraq War’.

In this article he describes the Iraq war – which he cheered on – as a “debacle”, and argues that one reason for the disaster was Iran:

“The Iranian regime which moved into the vacuum that was created after the fall of Saddam Hussein — effectively turning Iraq into a vassal state of Iran.”

It is quite something to watch Murray concede that the Iraq war he supported became a strategic disaster for the West partly because it strengthened Iran – before immediately urging another war, this time against Iran itself.

Murray claimed Iran’s rulers “might have found the wrong adversary in this White House”, stated that the regime “is now teetering”, and concluded that it was now “over to Trump”.

Then came the war.

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On 5 March, days after the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran, Murray wrote another column, headlined ‘Unlike past presidents, Trump delivered on his promise to eliminate our enemies’.

“Perhaps we forgot what it’s like when politicians act on their promises,” he declared triumphantly. “Perhaps our enemies forgot as well.”

While previous administrations had been strung along by Tehran, he claimed, “the revolutionary government in Iran got closer to the bomb. Well, not this time.”

He mocked the Iranians for perhaps becoming “used to weak and ineffectual foreign governments”, declaring:

“Now the regime in Iran has finally learned a lesson.”

It went on in that vein. “The ayatollahs decided to learn their lesson the hard way,” Murray wrote.

And then:

“To say that the radical terrorist regime in Iran is now weak and isolated is to vastly understate things.”

Amid talk of Kurdish fighters being armed – which also fed fears inside Iran that outside powers might seek to fragment the country – Murray declared:

“The remaining regime in Iran would be right to be panicking.”

And then how about this:

“Of course, there are many legitimate concerns that some Americans will have.

“They might fear that America is going to be dragged into some long-term conflict.

“But Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — among others — have made it very clear that this is going to be a short and limited war.”

What a revealing attitude to journalistic scepticism. Murray challenged fears about the duration of the conflict - based on the say-so of Donald Trump and his administration.

Then, on 12 March, came another article, headlined ‘Trump’s decision to fight Iran is historic — but he needs to finish the job’.

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“People should be under no illusion,” he wrote. “The success of this American-led campaign has been extraordinary.”

He declared that Iran had “responded by doing one of the stupidest things imaginable”, claiming that its attacks were “a demonstration of weakness by the Iranian regime”.

He continued:

“Most of its missiles and drones have been shot down before they could hit their intended targets. Meaning that for no gain, this war is now pretty much the mullahs against everybody else.”

The hubris is extraordinary.

Iran inflicted devastating damage on US military facilities. Its attacks also inflicted huge economic costs on Gulf states allied to the West. The protracted war depleted US and allied interceptor stockpiles and other munitions, and Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz gave Tehran powerful economic leverage. The Gulf states have increasingly been forced to ask whether hosting US military bases protects their security – or instead leaves them exposed to attack.

Murray had concluded his 12 March piece:

“Trump rightly started this historic mission. And he’s the only person who will also be able to finish it — on America’s terms.”

Seven months later, the supposedly “short and limited war” is still going. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has inflicted huge costs on the global economy, while Iranian missile and drone attacks have exposed the vulnerability of American forces and allies across the Gulf.

Yet where is Murray’s humility after being proved so devastatingly wrong?

‘We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror’ was the headline of a column on 9 April, in which he conceded that the objective of overthrowing the regime “has not been achieved”.

By 17 June, with Washington moving towards an agreement widely considered a capitulation to Iranian terms, Murray wrote a piece for The Free Press headlined ‘How Trump Fell Into the Iranian Trap’.

He now found “little reason for optimism”, bemoaning a proposed agreement that would give Iran billions of dollars in exchange for promises about its future conduct.

Nothing. Zero. Zilch about how he personally had been so wrong about a war - as one Foreign Policy article put it - was “a bigger defeat than Vietnam”.

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Iraq: ‘the rightness of this conflict remains’

But here is a man who has been devastatingly wrong about war over and over and over again.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he described the anti-war movement - who would be horrifically vindicated – like this:

“They are gripers, whingers, riddled with the middle class’s imaginary guilt and in love with any culture not their own. They’ll go to their graves with their consciences intact and their world in tatters. They are shoddy thinkers, political children. They are, less sympathetically, the leaders of a horrible mob.”

In 2004, a year after the invasion, Murray insisted that “the rightness of this conflict remains”.

He also mocked one of the warnings made by opponents of the war: “the hundreds of thousands who would be killed”.

A peer-reviewed PLOS Medicine study in 2013 put the toll between 2003 and 2011 at an estimated 405,000 Iraqis dead who would otherwise have lived - nearer 461,000 once you count the families who had fled and so weren't there to be surveyed. Over 60% died violently. The rest died because the hospitals, water and sanitation that keep a country functioning had stopped working.

Then came 2005.

Asked whether he had changed his mind or learned any lessons, Murray said:

“The situation in Iraq as a whole is not perfect. We know that. But things are getting better and they will continue to get better because this is not bin-Laden-ish death-cultism, but freedom that is at work.”

“Not perfect.”

Iraq was already consumed by violence. And Murray’s confident insistence that “things are getting better and they will continue to get better” came shortly before Iraq descended into a full-scale sectarian bloodbath.

The occupation had institutionalised sectarian divisions from the very start - with catastrophic consequences.

And this was before the rise of ISIS, which seized huge areas of Iraq and spread into neighbouring Syria.

Far from “getting better”, the worst was to come.

Murray even wrote in the same piece:

“A sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians is getting bigger backing, and looks more promising, than any attempt for the best part of a decade.”

Well. I don’t have anything to add to that.

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He concluded:

“I believe that Iraq will be seen in years to come as a justifiable deed which was done in 2003 – and not before – ‘because we could’.”

That is not, to put it mildly, how history remembers the Iraq war - or, as we’ll see, even Murray himself.

In his book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, Murray wrote of the British government’s conduct before the invasion:

“The government’s fault was not in ‘lying’ to the people, but in telling the people too much, revealing information that no previous government would have revealed, and, through this process, seriously compromising and embarrassing the security services.”

This was after Britain’s Butler Review had already identified major problems in how qualified intelligence assessments were presented in a far more confident public case for war. That included the loss of warnings about just how limited parts of the intelligence base actually were.

The later Chilcot Inquiry found that government statements repeatedly conveyed greater certainty than the underlying intelligence justified and failed to make its limitations sufficiently clear.

Murray’s book also discussed the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his network. He claimed of Iraq:

“By 2002 it was the only country in the world to assure them a warm and supportive welcome.”

That claim would be directly discredited by the conclusions of the US intelligence community. The 2006 US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Saddam Hussein’s regime regarded him as an “outlaw” and “attempted unsuccessfully to locate him and capture him”, and that it “did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi and his associates.”

In the same book, Murray suggested that the Iraq war had triggered a democratic domino effect. “It is a Berlin Wall that has fallen,” he declared, adding:

“Those who deny that change is happening are looking more and more desperate.”

Yes, well. Who can forget the wave of democratisation that swept the Middle East!

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Afghanistan: the ‘inevitable tragedy’

Let’s turn to Afghanistan.

In Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, Murray mocked people “who had to find out fast about a regime and a country of which they knew little”.

He wrote:

“Many waited for colleagues to say something that they could then repeat, which is why so many atrociously bad predictions about the Afghan conflict were echoed in such a short space of time – the ‘Afghan graveyard’, for instance, or the lethal ‘Afghan winter’ line. All foretold the hubristic undoing of the American army.”

So Murray mocked those warnings.

Then, in 2021, he wrote an article for UnHerd with the headline:

“America’s empires always fail: The withdrawal from Afghanistan was an inevitable tragedy.”

An inevitable tragedy!

Was it now?

Murray wrote:

“In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict.”

But it wasn’t simply “in hindsight”, was it?

Murray himself had ridiculed people who “foretold the hubristic undoing of the American army”. The broader warning – that Western hubris in Afghanistan could end in strategic failure – hardly needed hindsight after all.

He had accused them of knowing little about Afghanistan and the Taliban.

By 2021, however, Murray was pointing to mission creep, the unexpectedly porous borders with Afghanistan’s neighbours, and the West’s failure to build anything resembling a durable civil society.

Indeed, he now suggested that part of the problem was that Westerners did not understand Afghanistan properly – remarkably similar to the charge he had once thrown at opponents of the war.

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Just take a look at this:

“Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.”

After all the disasters he’d cheered on, Murray seemed to finally wash his hands of foreign military adventurism.

That was five years before the next war Murray would enthusiastically cheer on: the war with Iran.

And here Murray does straightforwardly acknowledge that he had been wrong:

“After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions.”

And then:

“Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or ‘operational ease’. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started.”

Except he did not, in fact, get off the train.

Note even in this mea culpa how he immediately frames much of the failure in terms of America lacking the will, knowledge and staying power to see its interventions through.

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Libya: ‘Time’s up, chaps. Game over.’

And then there’s Libya.

After the uprising began in February 2011, Murray wrote:

“With Libya, as with Iran, when a real enemy started looking fragile, America and her European allies decided not to push too much.”

He declared that “the leaders of the free world should have only one message”:

“Any people anywhere who desire to overthrow a dictatorship to have genuine representative governance will find us on their side.”

And he concluded:

“The days of Gadhafi and the mullahs are over. Time’s up, chaps. Game over.”

Yet later that year, after the intervention, doubts were creeping in. Murray worried that:

“It will be far harder to justify the Libyan intervention should it transpire that Nato merely facilitated an Islamist takeover.”

A little late.

In 2012, Murray signed a letter urging then prime minister David Cameron to support military measures in Syria, invoking Libya as a positive precedent.

The following year, he suggested that the war in Libya had done “more good than harm”.

What actually happened to Libya?

It became a failed state. Rival governments and militias fought for territory and power. Civil war followed. Jihadist organisations including ISIS exploited the collapse. Human trafficking flourished, migrants were subjected to horrific abuse, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and the country became a major route for migration across the Mediterranean.

This isn’t some partisan interpretation invented after the event. Britain’s own parliamentary inquiry into the intervention concluded that the policy had drifted from a “limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.”

The result, they declared, was “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”

Libya, in other words, became part of the very migration crisis which Murray would go on to denounce so passionately.

And yet in 2025 he told Joe Rogan:

“The Libyan intervention, I was pretty iffy about at the time.”

Really?

That is not how he sounded when he was declaring:

“The days of Gadhafi and the mullahs are over. Time’s up, chaps. Game over.”

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So where are the apologies?

Where are the Douglas Murray apologies?

In The Strange Death of Europe, he casually writes:

“Yet whenever our governments and armies got involved in anything in the name of these ‘human rights’ – Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 – we seemed to make things worse and ended up in the wrong.”

Really?

That is quite a throwaway admission after being so extraordinarily confident – and so contemptuous of those who warned what could happen.

In a 2023 interview with Lawrence Krauss, Murray called Iraq “such a disaster in the end”, said he did not think much had been achieved and spoke of “terrible hubris”, including the feeling among “many of us” that Afghanistan had not been sufficient revenge for 9/11.

And so let me quote Douglas Murray one final time.

Back in 2005 – not long after the Iraq invasion – he denounced those who “blame what goes wrong on the US, and deny it credit for anything going right”.

There were “careers to be made in this school of politics”, he wrote, adding:

“Unlike governments, you never get held responsible when you’re wrong.”

Well.

That is certainly true of Murray, isn’t it?

Despite being so wrong – so unbelievably, catastrophically wrong – he has not been held responsible.

Everyone gets things wrong. Of course they do.

But there is being wrong, and then there is being repeatedly, spectacularly wrong about the most consequential question imaginable: war and peace, and the decision to unleash violence on other societies.

If you are wrong about one war, that should provoke some profound soul searching.

But if over more than two decades you repeatedly champion wars and ridicule those who warn about the consequences while you confidently predict success? What if then, when each catastrophe arrives, you quietly reposition yourself as someone who recognised the folly all along?

These wars unleashed hideous suffering, chaos, displacement and death.

So here is the question.

If you can be this wrong, this often, about something this important – why should anyone listen to you on war ever again?

I almost can’t believe it.

My book has finally been published today.

It took over two years and frankly nearly killed me.

It’s The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, and you can get a copy here.

It’s how Western elites unleashed catastrophe by fusing a rigged economic model with militarism - and how this has boomeranged back on the West in the form of fascism.

If you’re round today at 6pm UK time, I’m do a ‘Ask Me Anything’ live on YouTube:

Otherwise, if you get a copy, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

best,

Owen ❤️

My new book is out this week! Order The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It here

We were right.

That was the message Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, delivered today to the millions of people who marched, agitated and organised against Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people.

He didn’t call it a genocide, of course. We’ll come to that.

He said this at Labour Party conference, which I’ve just returned from – and oh boy, do we have video from there. If you saw our video last year, in which Labour Lord John Mann aggressively seized my microphone, and thought that was shocking, wait until you see this year’s footage.

I want to try and give a thoughtful, nuanced take on what Ed Miliband has said and what the government is doing. The balance I want to strike is this: we should recognise that campaigning, organising and building pressure can achieve results – and take encouragement from that to do even more – without sowing illusions in a government that is still doing nowhere near enough.

We should welcome this shift - while demanding so much more.

We are, after all, discussing the crime of crimes: genocide.

I watched with my own eyes as elderly people opposed to genocide were dragged away by police officers outside the conference centre, including a 94-year-old Jewish human rights lawyer I interviewed. That’s because Labour proscribed the direct-action group Palestine Action – placing it under the same statutory proscription regime as organisations such as ISIS/Daesh.

Here is a passage from Miliband’s speech:

“But this cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank. This suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world.

And I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right. And under Andy’s leadership, we have reset our approach.

We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions.

We will ban the import of goods from illegal settlements. We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction and British services for illegal settlements.

And when it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government, says we will not let you succeed.”

It’s worth dwelling on the rapturous applause he received in the hall. That comes after years in which the Labour left has been driven to the political margins under Keir Starmer – who notoriously told LBC in October 2023 that Israel “does have that right” when asked about cutting off power and water to Gaza.

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But opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza is hardly marginal. According to a poll earlier this year, 50% of Britons think Israel is committing genocide, with just 17% disagreeing. Among those who voted Labour in 2024, the figure think Israel is committing genocide increases to more than two-thirds.

Those three words from Miliband therefore matter:

“I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you.

You were right.”

This is an important vindication.

They spent years demonising us

The assault on those who have opposed Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide amounts to the most extreme assault on political free expression across the post-war West – and yes, I include the McCarthy era in that comparison.

People have been threatened, deplatformed, blacklisted, sacked, arrested – sometimes brutally – imprisoned and deported for opposing the crime of crimes committed by a key Western ally.

And Starmer’s Labour repeatedly helped to demonise those protesting against what was happening in Gaza.

When, for example, the then-shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy was heckled by pro-Palestinian activists, he called them “shameful and antisemitic”.

Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves accused protesters of crossing the line into “intimidation”, while Labour politicians repeatedly presented protests targeting MPs as a threat to democratic politics.

And then there was Labour Party conference in 2024, when Starmer was heckled by an 18-year-old who shouted about the children of Gaza.

Starmer responded with a joyous smile: “This guy’s obviously got a pass from the 2019 conference.”

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It was depraved, frankly. The implication of the joke was that concern about Palestinian children being slaughtered was associated with the politics Starmer boasted he had purged from the Labour Party. And the delegates cheered and whooped.

What Labour still won’t say

When Miliband says:

“We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank.”

This is clearly movement from Labour’s previous position. But settler violence does not exist in some parallel universe detached from the Israeli state. The settlement project depends on the legal, political, military and infrastructural power of that state, while the Israeli military itself demolishes Palestinian homes and has forcibly displaced Palestinian communities.

That points to a continuing weakness in the government’s position: its tendency to isolate the crimes of settlers from the state structures that enable, protect and sustain the settlement project.

That is consistent with an overall refusal to hold the Israeli state responsible for crimes - up to and including genocide.

Notably, Miliband also said:

“We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza.”

Again, this is movement. It is an advance on the formulation the government has used since Andy Burnham became prime minister – which was itself an advance on what came before. The bar really is on the floor here.

In his apology over Gaza, for example, Burnham said: “There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.”

That language is very obviously lawyered: stating directly that Israel has committed war crimes carries much greater political and legal implications.

Now we have: “We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza.”

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On one level, this is an excruciating example of just how low the bar has become. The evidence concerning alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza is vast. Yet the government continues to choose language that stops short of directly saying that those crimes have been committed.

But the government clearly privately know that Israel has not simply committed war crimes - but perpetrated a genocide.

The second most powerful figure in the new government is Louise Haigh, the First Secretary of State. In June 2025, she said:

“It is impossible to conclude that what is happening in Gaza is anything short of genocide.

“On that basis, will the Minister reflect the clear will of the House and immediately impose sanctions on Netanyahu and members of his genocidal regime.”

So this isn’t simply a question of wondering what senior Labour politicians privately think. A woman who is now First Secretary of State has already publicly called what is happening in Gaza genocide and described Netanyahu’s government as a “genocidal regime”.

The government’s official language nonetheless remains far more cautious.

Why Labour has shifted

What has changed is the political context. There has been a mass protest movement, sustained organising and mounting electoral pressure from the Greens and other candidates and parties campaigning on Gaza – phenomena which are, of course, intertwined. The government has shifted significantly amid that pressure.

But it still fails to go further because of defying the pro-Israel lobby backed by Donald Trump. That’s why they need more countervailing pressure.

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Miliband also called out what he described as “Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine”.

Again, that is a significant sharpening of the British government’s language.

And he set out sanctions which will not simply target goods produced in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but British finance, construction and other services which facilitate those settlements.

Then he said, to cheers:

“And when it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government, says:

We will not let you succeed.”

The two-state solution: but how, exactly?

My own view is that the final political settlement is not something people here should dictate. Britain, after all, played a pivotal role in creating this nightmare in the first place. Personally, I favour a single state with equal rights for everyone between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean sea.

But for those advocating a two-state solution, there are huge questions which Western politicians almost never answer.

There are around three-quarters of a million Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. What sort of pressure would Israel have to come under to evacuate them - which itself would plausibly trigger an Israeli civil war?

It’s not just the Israeli government which support the illegal occupation and colonisation of the West Bank - and the genocide in Gaza. The opposition do, too.

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That is why, to me, the ritual invocation of the “two-state solution” by Western politicians so often functions as a can-kicking exercise – a means of avoiding the vastly more difficult conversation about what would actually have to happen to create one.

The danger of conflating Israel with Jewish people

Miliband also condemned antisemitism in his speech, and of course antisemitism is a great evil which must always be fought.

But one thing politicians desperately need to do is insist on the clearest possible demarcation between the Israeli state and its crimes on the one hand, and Jewish people as a whole on the other.

Israel’s cheerleaders and antisemites alike collapse that distinction, albeit for completely different reasons. That conflation is profoundly dangerous and fuels antisemitism.

Pressure works. So increase the pressure.

Because of pressure, the position of the British government has moved. Miliband’s speech is an acknowledgment of that reality, and the movement should take encouragement from it.

But no, of course it isn’t enough.

Britain should impose sweeping sanctions on Israel, introduce a full arms embargo, end intelligence sharing and military cooperation, and pursue prosecutions wherever there is evidence that British citizens serving in the IDF have committed war crimes, among other measures.

They should immediately end the proscription of Palestine Action, too.

The lesson is not that the job is done. It is that pressure works – and therefore that the pressure has to intensify.

After all, what’s at stake here is the very future existence of the Palestinian people.

As citizens of the West, we have a responsibility. These crimes were only possible because of Western political, diplomatic and military support. It has been done in our name.

My new book is out this week! Order The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It here

A few years ago, I interviewed a group of bisexual men and women. It was an eye opening experience.

As a gay man, I’d never previously properly considered prejudice against bi people, and even considered them to be relatively privileged. But as they explained to me, they suffered prejudice from straight and gay people alike.

Bi people of both genders faced being deemed problematically promiscuous, “greedy”, and unable to strike lasting romantic relationships.

But bi men and women also had different specific experiences. Bi women suffer a particular type of sexually objectification from straight men turned on by women having sex with each other. Bi men, on the other hand, face being treated by both straight men and women as gay men in denial.

Indeed, if a woman kisses another woman, many men consider that erotic and would not automatically assume either are gay, and might even sexually harass them. But if a man kisses another man - and doesn’t even engage in any further sexual activity - a substantial number of people of both genders would conclude they must simply be gay, full stop.

Which brings us to a new poll published by YouGov. It finds that just 19% of straight women are willing to date a bisexual man, compared to two thirds who say otherwise.

82% of bisexual women, on the other hand, say they would date a bisexual man, with just 10% saying they would not. Likewise, almost the same proportion of gay men say they would date a bisexual man.

Straight men are more divided: 53% say they would date a bisexual woman, with 35% saying otherwise.

There is a major age gap at play. 40% of straight women aged under 35 say they’d date a bisexual man, compared to 9% among the over-55s. That obviously has a real-world impact, because a much higher proportion of the former are dating compared to the latter.

When I shared the survey on social media with the comment “This is why most bisexual men don’t come out,” it provoked outrage.

This largely came from so-called ‘gender critical’ activists: that is, those who have become obsessively opposed to trans rights. The general claim was that I was shaming women and violating the principle of consent: somehow dictating that women should sleep with bisexual men.

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Among those claiming that this was evidence of misogyny was former Labour MP Rosie Duffield.

Duffield has form. A few years ago, she claimed “many of her gay friends” are offended by “men… who are married to women, who call themselves the ‘q’ word, and appropriate gay culture in a way that is deeply offensive to a lot in the gay rights movement”.

Duffield is a straight woman. Promoting division in a community she’s not part of is obviously obnoxious behaviour. What she said erased bisexual people. Some men are queer and are married to women. It’s not for her - or indeed anyone else, regardless of their sexual orientation - to strip their identity away from them.

The general response to what I tweeted was frankly insane and defined by the usual bad faith you expect from this particular faction. Obviously I think it is entirely up to any woman or indeed man who they have sex with. Nobody is demanding anyone has sex with anyone.

What I said was self-evidently true. Bi men tend not to come out because they are considered gay - by both men and women. One fear is that coming out will then dictate their dating and sexual lives, meaning in practise they will only be able to partner up with men.

Anybody with any sense who thinks about the subject for more than a few seconds knows this to be true.

According to the 2021 census in England and Wales, there are more than twice as many self-identifying bisexual women as men. (That said, men were about 70% more likely than women to identify as gay).

Believing that you have the sacred right to sleep with anyone you like doesn’t mean, of course, we can’t ask why someone would write off an entire category of people based on their innate characteristics.

By definition, this is prejudice. It is to prejudge someone based on an immutable characteristic. The argument here, in practise, is “this form of prejudice happens to be justified”.

If two people fall in love with each other and make each other happy, and that relationship falls apart simply because that person’s dating history includes men and women, is it wrong to consider that to be sad?

Most of those who angrily responded to my tweet didn’t set out why a woman (or indeed man) would not date someone who is bisexual. Those who did graphically described same-sex sexual acts.

If someone was to state that they did not want to date Black people, nobody would argue that they are compelled to do so. They would, however, conclude that this is prejudice - to say the least.

The irony of the whole debate is that biphobia is rooted in homophobia which is itself a manifestation of misogyny. In the case of men, it is driven by a sense of being a gender traitor - of violating what it is to be a man.

This phenomenon manifests itself in different settings. You see it in how straight men themselves can be victims of homophobia, as I’ve written about before. Straight men can receive homophobic abuse - and even sustained bullying - if they’re seen as not “manly” enough, not aggressive enough, not willing to speak about women in degrading ways, and so on.

Equally, gay men can subject camp or femme gay men with appalling prejudice.

The truth is biphobia is just not taking seriously and is rarely discussed, and that’s left a large number of people with fixed prejudiced views. That’s a shame, and we should be able to discuss it without absurd claims that doing so is misogyny.

What have I got wrong?

That was in a really enjoyable hour-long conversation with the New Statesman’s Oli Dugmore.

It ranges pretty wildly! Obviously a big part of it was discussing my book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It.

But we specifically also talked about Andy Burnham and the future of Labour, whether the left has learned anything from the defeats of the 2010s, and how the ‘war on terror’ boomeranged back into Western politics’.

We also discussed the role of my colleagues in the Western media in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

And yes, I discussed how Theresa May saved my politics.

Oli doesn’t simply tee me up - he pushes back and that makes it a much more interesting interview.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Owen x

Get a copy of my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost it here.

What words to describe Ed Sheeran’s so-called “apology” on stage in Philadelphia?

The word “travesty” doesn’t do it justice. A disasterclass, perhaps?

It comes after US rapper Macklemore was booted off his tour after saying “Free Palestine” and showing his solidarity with a Palestinian people suffering genocide and every war crime imaginable at the hands of an Israeli state which is armed and backed by the West.

This happened at the behest of billionaire stadium owners, not least Robert Kraft, a friend of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu who has donated vast sums to Israeli causes and has even been awarded a $1 million award for services to Israel.

As a result, Sheeran’s other support acts and even his backing band withdrew.

The disastrous speeches Ed Sheeran gave on stage in Philadelphia brought to mind the words of another bland pop artist, Ronan Keating: you say it best when you say nothing at all.

Sorry for what?

Sheeran began the concert by addressing the controversy directly.

“I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions,” he told the audience, saying that he was “making mistakes” and was “so, so sorry”.

But that immediately raises the most basic question: sorry for what?

He acknowledges making mistakes and apologises for them, but he doesn’t specify which decision was mistaken, whom he had wronged, or what he would do to repair it. There is no mention of Macklemore, his other support acts and backing band, or indeed Robert Kraft.

And there seems a rather striking contradiction with Sheeran’s previous written statement. Last week, he had insisted that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine”. Now he says that he has “had to take and make difficult decisions” and that he is “making mistakes”.

Which decisions?

If removing Macklemore was not one of his mistakes, what precisely is he apologising for? And if he does now believe Macklemore’s removal was wrong, why can’t he simply say so?

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Is he apologising for failing to defend the humanity and rights of the Palestinian people? For his terrible first statement? Or is he simply sorry for disappointing people – which is the equivalent of saying “I am sorry that you are upset”, without actually apologising for the deeds themselves?

Does he think it was wrong to remove his longstanding friend and colleague Macklemore for speaking out about Palestine – which he knew in advance Macklemore would do – and does he think that should be reversed?

None of that is made clear.

To be fair, Sheeran does say he is “deeply worried” by the idea of venues pre-approving performers’ content, adding that this “should never happen in the free world”.

But this is weak, weak stuff in response to his support artist and friend being removed at the behest of a pro-Israel billionaire. He cannot manage a straightforward direct condemnation. What does “deeply worried mean in a practical sense? There is no call for Macklemore to be reinstated.

He does not say that what happened to him was wrong. He does not name Kraft. He carries on with the tour.

When does the story begin?

Then he makes another fundamental error: he treats 7th October as the beginning of the story.

This is exactly what the Israeli narrative wants: to erase decades of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, colonisation, torture, mass incarceration and slaughter inflicted on the Palestinian people.

He links October 7th to “centuries of Jewish pain” – but he offers no equivalent context or historical account for the Palestinian people.

Palestinian suffering appears as a terrible humanitarian crisis of the here and now, rather than in the context of generations of murderous oppression.

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He said that he was speaking to people “across the spectrum” about helping victims, and was “listening and learning because I do not know enough”. You may think to yourself: there is nothing wrong with showing humility and acknowledging limits to your knowledge.

But there has been three years of a live streamed genocide. No genocide in history has been so evidenced as it happened, nor as confessed to by the perpetrators as it happened. There is more than enough information available for the most moderately engaged individual to conclude a heinous crime is being committed.

Why is he confident enough in his knowledge to place October 7th in the context of “centuries of Jewish pain”, but not when it comes to Palestinian suffering?

He says “what is happening in Gaza” is “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate”, but he fails to name who is responsible for the “what is happening in Gaza” he describes.

The role of Israel is completely erased.

Imagine someone saying “what is happening in Ukraine is catastrophic, unjustifiable and disproportionate”, without mentioning Russia.

Indeed, what does “disproportionate” mean exactly? How many Palestinian children would it have been acceptable to kill?

This reflects the widespread Western media narrative that has existed ever since Israel began to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth and butcher tens of thousands of people, including at least 20,000 children.

It has been portrayed as Israel exercising its “right to self-defence”, with a side debate about whether this “response” is “proportionate”, where we can all agree to disagree.

Israel has committed genocide, as per the consensus of genocide scholars, not least Israeli scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, a UN commission, and NGOs ranging from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch.

A genocide is not “disproportionate”. It is the crime of crimes. There is no worse crime than genocide.

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You don’t get to opt out of politics

Sheeran says he never wanted to be an activist.

But that doesn’t answer the criticism.

Nobody is demanding that every popstar has to become a political campaigner – though it is not unreasonable to want everyone with a platform to speak out about a genocide, the crime of crimes, which is being directly facilitated by Western nations.

The specific question here is different: would he defend a fellow performer’s ability to advocate freely for a Palestinian people suffering genocide at the hands of a Western ally, rather than allowing that performer to be silenced by billionaires?

This is someone Sheeran brought on tour knowing full well that Macklemore is a profoundly political artist, knowing full well that he was going to advocate for Palestinian freedom, and knowing that he has a signature song – Hind’s Hall – literally about this issue.

There is an obvious and important distinction between choosing not to turn your concerts into political rallies – which Macklemore did not do by making a few comments, not least while introducing his song about Palestine – and accepting political conditions imposed by billionaires who own the venues.

Doing the latter isn’t opting out of politics. It is allowing a particular form of political power to prevail.

And imagine exactly the same situation with Ukraine. Imagine a performer said “Free Ukraine” before introducing a song inspired by a Ukrainian child killed by the Russian army. Would anybody seriously claim they had turned the concert into a “political rally”? Of course not. If a venue tried to ban them from performing because of those remarks, the outrage would be immediate – and entirely justified.

There’s a straightforward explanation here. An expression of solidarity with a people suffering at the hands of an official enemy is treated as basic humanity.

Solidarity with Palestinians suffering at the hands of a Western ally, on the other hands, is treated as divisive, “political” and impossibly complicated.

Sheeran says he has tried not to be “a political commentator of any kind”. But his previous, entirely justified solidarity with Ukraine cuts across that claim, as does his expressed support for the Labour Party and opposition to Brexit, for example.

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“The most complex political issue on the planet”

Then he calls the question of Israel and Palestine “the most complex political issue on the planet”.

This is a political crutch, and it is deeply infuriating, because it is always used to muddy the waters when it comes to horrific crimes.

Indeed, actual apologists for horrific crimes – and I’m not accusing Sheeran here of being one – always invoke this argument.

Take the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, classified by the UN as genocide.

Of course you can make the argument that the history surrounding it was complicated, and apologists for the Bosnian Serb army did exactly that.

Was this not rooted in centuries of complicated ethnic conflict? Did Serbs not suffer genocide at the hands of the Nazis’ Croatian collaborators during the Second World War? Were thousands of Bosnian Serb civilians not killed during the Bosnian war? Were Serbs not killed in villages around Srebrenica in the years before the massacre, as the Bosnian Serb nationalist argument went?

This is oh so complicated, it is not for outsiders to impose some simplistic black-and-white view – that was the claim.

But here’s the thing.

Injustices can often have deeply complicated histories. That doesn’t make the crimes themselves morally complicated.

International law is either abided by, or it is not.

And while the history leading up to a genocide may indeed be very complicated – as it was in Rwanda, or other genocides – whether a genocide is right or wrong is not complicated.

It is not complicated to say that Israel is subjecting the Palestinian people to an occupation which is illegal under international law, as per the International Court of Justice.

It is not complicated to say that wiping Gaza from the face of the earth is wrong.

Slaughtering innocent people is wrong.

Bombing hospitals is wrong.

Bombing schools is wrong.

Deliberately starving people is wrong.

We could go on.

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A place where “everyone is welcome”

Sheeran talks of his concerts “still” being a place where “everyone is welcome” and where people can stand beside those with “opposing views”, while everyone enjoys songs of “love, hope and unity”.

I’m genuinely interested here: how far does he take that?

Is he saying he wants a concert where neo-Nazis are welcome, for example? I presume he draws some sort of line about what “everyone” means in practice?

Because otherwise this comes across as: look, whether you support slaughtering Palestinian children or oppose slaughtering Palestinian children, let’s agree to disagree, because everyone is welcome here!

But obviously, in any case, his concerts aren’t a place where everyone is welcome – because Macklemore got booted off his tour after pro-Israel billionaires intervened, did he not?

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“I saw 50,000 people who haven’t abandoned me”

And then, later in the concert, Sheeran’s performance became even more grotesque.

Compare what followed with Macklemore’s own response to being kicked off the tour.

Macklemore deliberately centred the Palestinian people:

“I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families. The victims are the Palestinian people.”

Ed Sheeran, alas, went in almost exactly the opposite direction.

Through tears, he told the crowd: “I really didn’t know whether I’d even be getting on stage again”, and questioned “whether I even want to be an artist at all”.

Then: “In these situations you really find out who your friends are.”

He talked about people he had known for years backing away and about feeling that his friends and family had abandoned him.

And then came his extraordinary statement: “I see 50,000 people who haven’t abandoned me.”

To choose such a framing is quite the choice.

Macklemore’s explicit point was: we are not the victims here.

Whatever personal or professional consequences immensely wealthy and famous musicians suffer, they return to lives of extraordinary privilege and security.

The victims are Palestinians being killed, starved and displaced.

Sheeran instead shifts the focus from whether his decisions were defensible to who had remained personally loyal to him.

And withdrawing from a tour on a principled basis – objecting to the censorship of an artist opposing genocide by billionaires – doesn’t mean ending a friendship.

Several of the musical acts emphasised their continued friendship with Ed Sheeran.

Friendship doesn’t mean you are obliged to suspend your conscience.

Indeed, what kind of friendship would that be? “If you want to remain my friend, you have to put your conscience to one side over a genocide”? That’s not friendship.

I’d also suggest Sheeran needs to ask himself some searching questions here, because he has accidentally admitted that he accepted the decision of a pro-Israel billionaire not just over his support acts and backing artists, not just over what is right, but over members of his own family.

Here’s another point.

Sheeran didn’t even say: I condemn what happened to Macklemore. It was wrong that he was excluded against my wishes because he spoke out about the Palestinian people, but I feel obliged to keep the tour going out of loyalty to you.

What does that tell us?

Let’s keep reminding ourselves that Sheeran’s original defence was that the decision was out of his hands. Well, if it really was out of his hands, then what prevents him from saying without any equivocation that the decision was wrong?

He could have stated: “I couldn’t stop this, but I condemn it”. He chose not to.

It probably tells us that even if he had, the likes of Robert Kraft could have cancelled his tour.

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Who is actually unsafe?

Then Sheeran described how frightened he had been about taking the stage.

“This wasn’t the easy option tonight,” he said. He didn’t know whether he would be safe, whether his audience would be safe, whether things might be thrown at him or people might boo.

Yes, Ed, it really is awful when people feel unsafe, isn’t it.

You thought things might be thrown at you. Like what – drink bottles?

If you’re scared of that, maybe try to imagine the terror of Palestinians whose lives are defined by missiles and bombs being relentlessly thrown at them by Israel – armed and backed, of course, by the country in which he was performing, the United States.

And by the end of the concert, having begun with an apology, Sheeran suddenly was saying sorry for having opened the night by talking about it at all.

“The one thing that I would like to apologise for,” he told the audience, was “the first bit of the show where it wasn’t about music and I had to talk”.

He explained that there were children in the audience and families had not bought tickets to hear him talk about this.

So what was the point of the apology in the first place?

And yes, Ed: children.

Like Palestinian children – some of whom will be, or will have been, fans of your music.

Some of those children have been slaughtered.

Others have survived with their limbs blown off. Their grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins and nephews may have been slaughtered. Their homes have been destroyed. They are living in apocalyptic squalor thanks to a state armed and backed by the West.

This is cowardice piled on self-pity piled on amorality.

The truth is that people across the world – including in the West and in the United States – have turned decisively against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

As the author Omar El Akkad put it:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will always have been against this.”

History will remember those who spoke out against this abomination despite the costs involved.

And history will remember those who stayed silent because they feared those costs.

You can order my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It here.

Below is my preface to my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It. you can get a copy here.

I’ve also included a sneak preview of the new book video. Let me know your thoughts!

Who holds power? How do they wield it, why, and to whose benefit? And when they fail, who is made to pay?

These questions have driven my writing from the beginning.

My first book, Chavs, looked at how working-class people suffered the costs of the Thatcherite economic experiment and, amid the wreckage, were mocked and demonized. My second book, The Establishment, turned to the perpetrators: a venal, self-insulating elite that rigged Britain’s political and economic order in its own interests, then escaped the consequences when that order began to fall apart.

This book tells a story of Western greed, power and hubris. It explores how the West has been sent into a tailspin by the elites who, some thirty-five years ago, once proclaimed its final triumph, and how their failure has today produced a global crisis. This crisis now affects us all, from those who live beyond the West’s increasingly militarized borders to its own citizens. Reporting it took me from Baghdad to Pittsburgh, Athens to Ramallah. Everywhere, I found a pattern that I had first encountered at home: elites whose decisions are driven by their own naked self-interest, and who protect themselves from the disastrous consequences of their own actions, presenting the world with the bill.

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We are encouraged to treat domestic and foreign policy as separate worlds. Factory closures, stagnating wages and decaying public services belong to one story; events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, Palestine and the collapse of Western moral authority to another. But in fact, and as this book shows, they are not separate stories. The order that sucked wealth upwards at home imposed itself through brute force abroad. Distant wars came home as squandered resources, shattered legitimacy, repressive powers – and people displaced by violence, then demonized as the source of insecurity.

If we want to truly understand our crisis-ridden present, we need to pay attention to our history. Because while we might think that the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are deviations from the political norm, if we look at the attitudes and actions of Western elites over time – and especially, as I argue here, since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – we’ll see that there is nothing new under the sun. There is, rather, a through line of extreme ideas, normalized by the elites who have imposed them on us. Seen in this light, these figures are not aberrations: they are, to adopt a phrase from another deeply unstable age, morbid symptoms of an order in decline.

Which is why, in this book, I explore a number of flashpoints: from the West’s disastrous hubris of 1991 onward, when it truly believed it could rule the world, through the catastrophes of Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crash of 2008 and the turbulent decades that followed, as the West’s rulers sought to impose the same economic model on their citizens again and again while expecting different results. The answer to every failure was more of what had failed. Throughout, as we’ll see, those same elites have forgotten their own ruinous history – or have deliberately chosen to ignore it, in the hope that we will do the same.

The idea that the West is in decline is fundamental to the political right. It blames the West’s ills on migrants, Muslims, refugees, trans people, and anyone else who can be cast as ‘other’. This narrative, which today infuses the discourse of Western politicians and the media, is a lie. And yet, the West’s decline is real – we feel it in our everyday lives – and there is no reason to expect it to be orderly or painless. We deserve to understand what truly caused it.

I wrote this book, then, to expose the greatest political con of our age. A deliberately inequitable, extractive economic model that stripped millions of security and comfort at home while unleashing blood and chaos abroad, foisted on us as established, unalterable fact, has brought the West and the wider world to crisis. What’s more, it has done this in a remarkably short period of time: a little under half a century. Yet our political and media classes have laboured to make this truth unsayable. Pointing to the wound, they protect those who inflicted it, along with the system that explicitly promises wealth and power to the few at the expense of the many. Having inflicted such extraordinary damage on the world and their own societies, those who rule the West have weaponized the resulting fear and fury to tighten their grip.

Much of what follows is bleak, because we have to confront the world as it is. But despair is not my intended conclusion. Humanity is capable of astonishing invention, creativity, solidarity and love, much of which has been suppressed by a political and economic order that has brought us to the edge. Only by understanding how we arrived here can we begin to imagine another, better future.

Order a copy here!

I’m travelling across Britain - so come and meet me!

It’s the tour of my new book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It’.

You can get a personalised signed copy from here!

Here are the dates - and links for tickets:

27th September - Liverpool

29th September - Bristol - with local Green MP Carla Denyer

1st October - London - with author Oisin McKenna

2nd October - Brighton

5th October - Edinburgh

6th October - York

13th October - Nottingham

14th October - Manchester Literature Festival

3rd November - Oxford

It’s exactly a quarter of a century since 2,977 people were killed by al-Qaeda terrorists in New York, Arlington and Pennsylvania.

The US elite – and its allies – responded by launching a series of wars and violent acts.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, up to 4.7 million people were killed in the post-9/11 wars, both through direct violence and the consequences of destabilisation, such as disease and hunger.

Between 37 and 59 million people were displaced from their homes.

Millions of children were driven into hunger.

Over 7,000 US soldiers and more than 8,000 US military contractors were killed. Taken together, that is about five times the number of people killed on 9/11 itself.

Hundreds of thousands of US and allied personnel were wounded. 1.8 million US veterans now have an officially recognised disability because of the wars.

An astonishing 30,177 US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died of suicide.

The estimated financial cost to the US alone was $8 trillion. The bill doesn’t end there. Caring for post-9/11 veterans is projected to cost up to $2.5 trillion by 2050.

That was money diverted from infrastructure, services and the real economy.

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and public policy expert Linda Bilmes, this helped destabilise the US economy in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash. The war was financed through debt rather than taxation, driving up interest costs, while the conflict also contributed to higher oil prices. US consumers, they noted, kept up their levels of consumption by borrowing against surging house prices.

The success of the ‘War on Terror’ can be judged by another key statistic: 3,329 people were killed by terrorism worldwide in 2000. By 2014, that figure had soared to 32,685.

Iraq was plunged into violent chaos, with a sectarian bloodbath detonated by the US-led invasion. All of this helped give rise to ISIS, which seized large swathes of Iraq and Syria, with apocalyptic consequences for its victims.

A two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan – with hideous war crimes committed by the Western occupiers helping to drive an escalating insurgency – ended with the Taliban back in power, stronger than ever.

Torture became Western state policy. A worldwide network of secret prisons and rendition flights was established, with detainees abducted and transferred beyond ordinary legal protections.

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Drone warfare and targeted killing were normalised. This was the dawn, too, of mass surveillance.

Muslims were demonised, setting off a tidal wave of bigotry which helped drive the rise of the far right.

Donald Trump himself was a direct consequence of all this chaos – threatening the very future of an already compromised US democracy.

Indeed, the War on Terror boomeranged home. Trumpism has redirected its rhetoric and institutions against migrants and political dissidents.

Before the attacks, the West seemed to be at the apex of its power. The post-9/11 wars played a pivotal role in the bloody, chaotic death spiral of Western hegemony that came next.

The September 11th attacks were a terrible crime.

What Western elites used those attacks to justify was the crime of the century.

You can order my book The Fall of The West: How They Really Lost It here

As British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced new sanctions targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, I thought back to exactly a year ago.

Back then, I was in the West Bank – Palestinian land that is illegally occupied by Israel.

I had travelled on a delegation organised by the Christian Palestinian charity Sabeel-Kairos, and if I’m honest, I was surprised Israel let me in after keeping me for interrogation at the Jordanian border.

A couple of days later, they sent me an email revoking my visa, which answered that one.

In the village of Beit Ijza, I met Sa’adat Gharib and his family. By the time I visited, their home had been completely boxed in by the neighbouring Israeli settlement. Sa’adat told us the surrounding land had belonged to his family. Around the house stood a 26-foot-high metal fence. They lived under the constant gaze of settlers and surveillance cameras.

To get in or out, the family had to pass through an electronic gate controlled by Israeli forces.

Sa’adat told us that the family had been arrested, intimidated and physically attacked. That included attacks on the children. Sometimes, he said, settlers would deliberately walk around the fence naked when his kids were outside.

I went to Hebron and walked down what was once its main commercial street. Much of it has been shuttered, and Palestinians are barred from walking on sections of the street – while Israeli settlers can move freely.

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This is apartheid.

One evening, a young Palestinian man I’d met in London took us to a hipster bar in Ramallah. He lived on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where we were staying. But while I could walk freely around Jerusalem, he had only entered the city once in his entire life – as a small child. He couldn’t remember it.

Here is a land where some 770,000 illegal Israeli settlers now live. Palestinian life is being gradually asphyxiated. Palestinians live under military occupation and are routinely detained and incarcerated under a military legal system, including children. Jewish Israeli settlers living alongside them are subject to Israeli civil law.

They endure the routine humiliations of the longest belligerent occupation of our time. Travelling around the West Bank is made nightmarish by Israeli checkpoints. Land is routinely seized. Palestinians are being violently driven from their homes.

In the northern West Bank, Israeli forces have emptied the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps of their residents. More than 33,000 Palestinians were displaced, according to the UN, while huge areas of the camps were demolished or damaged and residents were prevented from returning.

With the support of the Israeli state, settlers are waging a campaign of terror.

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Since 7 October 2023, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank, including more than 240 children.

This is what I thought about when Miliband announced the sanctions.

At first, I was extremely cynical. I remember talking to Palestinians in the West Bank about the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state last year. They were entirely dismissive.

They said it was for domestic political consumption, and made no difference to them. If it had been done three decades earlier, they said, then maybe it would amount to something. But the Israeli state was destroying any possibility of a Palestinian state – and the West was doing nothing meaningful about it.

The “two-state solution” has just been a crutch for politicians. When they receive any scrutiny about Israel’s crimes – which is rare – they simply point to their meaningless abstract support for a “two-state solution”.

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Britain’s sanctions are certainly not even close to being enough. Israel is a state committing genocide in Gaza. UN investigators have also found it responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That’s without even mentioning the heinous crimes committed in Lebanon, the illegal occupation of Syrian land, or the disastrous attacks Israel and the US have launched against Iran.

It is a reasonable question to ask why Britain is still conducting any trade with illegal settlements. The direct economic impact of the import ban will be negligible: it will represent only a tiny fraction of the roughly £6 billion in annual trade between Britain and Israel.

But even so, this is a victory won because of those who have ceaselessly campaigned – and because voters, including those who switched to the Green Party, punished Labour at the ballot box.

Those electoral shocks helped bring down Keir Starmer and usher Andy Burnham into Downing Street. Burnham now faces pressure to shore up Labour’s left flank – and that includes taking action on Israel. Recent polling shows support for banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements massively outstripping opposition.

This isn’t enough – but it represents concessions that can be built on.

It doesn’t just mean a ban on imports from illegal settlements. It opens the way to sanctions against companies and individuals whose money or services help settlements expand. That potentially puts Israeli banks and financial companies in scope.

Britain has now officially declared that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land is unlawful, in line with the 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice. That is – alas! – a new development, and provides a legal basis to push for more action.

Arms export restrictions have been tightened – although the existing carve-out for components supplied through the global F-35 programme remains.

The government is using very careful language, declaring that “there is increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed”. Miliband, the prime minister and the rest of the government obviously know that war crimes have been committed on an industrial scale. A definitive finding, however, would impose certain legal obligations on the government.

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But Miliband explicitly backed legal processes to determine responsibility for war crimes, and said Britain supports the International Court of Justice reaching its judgment in South Africa’s genocide case.

The Global Human Rights sanctions regime is being expanded, allowing sanctions to be imposed not just on those involved in illegal settlements, but potentially on those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Miliband also declared that “settler terrorists” are committing ethnic cleansing in parts of the West Bank, and said members of the Israeli government had supported the forced displacement of Palestinians.

All of this can lay the foundations for us to build more pressure – and ensure more far-reaching action.

There were certainly other problems. Miliband denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which consciously draws on the successful boycott movement against South African apartheid.

He denounced anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist as “a homeland for the Jewish people” – as though it is somehow outrageous to support a single state (which de facto exists!) with equal rights for all between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

That won’t age well.

But you can see from the resulting hysteria that Israel and its cheerleaders are rattled.

Outrageously, that has centred on arguing that taking even these limited measures against a foreign state’s illegal conduct endangers Jewish Brits.

This shameless conflation of Jewish people with Israel’s crimes is dangerously irresponsible.

So no, this isn’t enough.

But it does represent welcome movement – and these concessions were only won because people organised, from the streets to the polling booth.

That includes people like you.

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.