When is it, and When is it Not About the Jews?
The Beeb, Farage, Asylum and Us
The Beeb, Farage, Asylum and Us
Three people are asked to write an essay about elephants. The English person writes ‘Hunting Elephants’, the French person pens ‘The Love Lives of Elephants,” and the Jew produces “Elephants and the Jewish Question.
It’s a neat self-deprecating gag about the Jewish tendency to imagine Jews at the centre of things. For most of our history it wasn’t unreasonable; plenty of people were obsessed with us, often hating us, occasionally loving us, rarely treating us as normal humans. But there’s an interesting development today in which some issues which are not obviously about Jews, are claimed to be such, while other issues, which appear to echo Jewish experience rather closely, are deemed to have nothing to do with us. I want to examine this by looking at some recent British political stories.
Trouble at the Beeb
The first is the recent crisis at the BBC, which led to the resignations of the Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness. The story goes something like this. Sir Robbie Gibb, a former 10 Downing Street Director of Communications for Theresa May, was appointed to the BBC Board in 2021. While there he is reported to have consistently pursued a hard right agenda, more Trumpist than Tory. He helped appoint both Michael Prescott and his former Newsnight colleague David Grossman as advisors to the BBCs Editorial Guidance and Standards Board. Essentially, he brought in his friends to write reports that would help him move the BBC’s coverage in the direction he wanted it to go. Michael Prescott composed a memo, ostensibly for the consideration of the committee but clearly designed to be leaked to the press, as it duly was. It is this memo (to call it a report is pushing it) which stimulated the recent scandals and the resignations of Davie and Turness.
The Telegraph published the memo in full, un-paywalled version here. It is a total mess, a hodgepodge of right-wing hobbyhorses, as if a LLM had been trained on Telegraph op-eds. Prescott begins with his complaints about the documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’, in which, he alleges, ‘critics of the Republican presidential candidate vastly outnumbered those who argued for him…contributors to the documentary were heavily weighted against Trump, with just one supporter against ten who questioned his fitness for office’. Prescott demands a very strange kind of neutrality here, that even if most political commentators thought Trump was unfit for office, the BBC should seek to equally balance those who did and those who did not. Other laughable complaints about coverage of the US election include ‘BBC focused too heavily on campaign issues promoted by the Harris campaign, such as abortion and women’s rights, at the expense of giving greater weight to jobs, the economy and immigration’, that ‘there was an over-emphasis on certain events, such as Trump’s comments about people eating pets in Springfield, and finally that ‘The BBC sometimes fell into using, without attribution, contested language such as “reproductive rights”.’ God forbid the BBC should fall into the partisan trap of suggesting people have rights. Next, Prescott is concerned about occasions when the BBC ‘suggested issues of racism when there were none’. He complains of a report that said ‘Ethnic minority workers in insecure jobs up 132% since 2011’ and argued that since it came from a report commissioned by the TUC it can’t possibly be trusted. He also moans that not enough BBC News app notifications have been about ‘illegal migrants and asylum seekers’, and that the BBC hasn’t made enough use of the arch-conservative History Reclaimed group, and as result usually produced ‘an overly simplistic and distorted narrative about British colonial racism, slave-trading and its legacy.’ In short, Prescott wants more imperial apologetics, more immigration hysteria and more racism in the BBC’s coverage.
None of this is about Jews. It’s standard right wing culture war stuff, the favourite topics of the Telegraph, the Mail and the Spectator. Prescott’s memo does go on to discuss coverage of the ‘Israel-Hamas war’, which amongst other things, complains about differences between the BBC’s main news websites and BBC Arabic, assuming in every case that the Arabic version was biased against Israel, rather than considering the possibility that it was simply more accurate. After a wholly tendentious series of points Prescott has the temerity to conclude ‘Looking at the evidence set out above, it seems very hard for any pro-Palestinian observers to make a compelling case the BBC has a pro-Israel bias.’ Once one has selected only the evidence that supports your case it is difficult for any alternative case to be put. As Bernstein’s Candide puts it: ‘once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds / one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds’.
It was from this, and only this section of the memo, that Jewish organisations sought to make the affair all about us. ‘Press release Phil’ Rosenberg jumped in quickly, claiming that ‘the Jewish community’ had long been bothered about its Middle East coverage, and that the BBC had been ‘hit by scandal after scandal, whether in terms of a Gaza documentary involving the son of a Hamas official, its Glastonbury coverage, the open sore of BBC Arabic, or by refusing to call Hamas what they are – a terrorist organisation.’ Adding, ominously, that ‘Jewish staff and contractors have also repeatedly complained about their treatment at the Corporation’ Rosenberg concluded that the resignations ‘must be seen as the beginning, rather than the end, of a process of renewal’.
‘This platform for anti-Israel bias and extremists is now beyond salvation’ thundered a JC editorial, claiming that ‘the entire BBC’s coverage of the Middle East so often buys into an unthinking agenda that accepts every smear against Israel without challenge or due scrutiny.’ It even accused the BBC of feeding ‘the “demonisation of Israel” identified last week by Rabbi Daniel Walker as fuelling the antisemitism which led to the deadly Yom Kippur terror attack on his synagogue in Manchester.’ The suggestion that BBC coverage was responsible for the Manchester attack was quite the claim.
Putting aside the bogus arguments, the Board of Deputies and the JC went out of their way to frame this as a Jewish issue. As we have seen, the report covers a range of complaints; coverage of the Gaza war is only one, yet these statements make it the only focus. They have their predefined agenda, their decades long gripes, and they will shoehorn them in while ignoring all other components, turning a general right-wing memo into a purely pro-Israel one. This is a dangerous game – it risks positioning the resignations as something Jewish groups sought and won. Normally the Board of Deputies is very concerned about tropes of Jews controlling the media; here it seems to have stopped worrying about them altogether.
But the shoehorning in of Jews to this story goes back several years further. Gibb, who is not Jewish, led a consortium bid to buy the Jewish Chronicle in 2020, with the identity of the funder still unknown. Gibb eventually resigned as a JC director in August 2024 but apparently remains director of the mysterious ‘JC Media and Culture Preservation Initiative’. Other non-Jews involved in the consortium were William Shawcross, ex Labour MP John Woodcock and the journalist John Ware. What motivated Gibb and co. to lead the consortium in the bizarre deal which scuppered the planned merger with the Jewish News? Was it their deeply felt love for Jewish culture? Their interest in the social and personal announcements? That they enjoyed the cheesecake recipes? It is safe to assume it was none of these things. They sought to use the JC as a vehicle for a right-wing, Trumpist political agenda. Jews were a useful tool in Gibb’s plans, because antisemitism stories have proved an effective tool in attacking the left, since so few people have a clear understanding of the subject. This agenda can be gleaned from the fact that in recent years, the only stories the JC covers are related to Israel and antisemitism – the things that are useful for the goyish right. There are countless important Jewish stories – conflicts within synagogues, organisations going out of business, new ritual trends – but none of these get covered because they don’t serve Gibb and friends’ hard right project. The Jewish Chronicle, and Jews in general have been used. Jews have been shoehorned into projects that aren’t about us.
Farage's Schooldays
But what about a situation when the opposite occurs? When there is a story that would seem to have a great deal to do with Jews but that none of the major Jewish organisations wish to touch? We have had two recently. Most obviously related was the series of revelations that Nigel Farage behaved in deeply racist ways while at school in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the heyday of the National Front). We have heard rumours of this before, but never in such detail, from named sources. This included absolute explicit Nazi behaviour –a Jewish fellow student recalled that ‘He would sidle up to me and growl ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Gas them’, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers.’ This is, it is worth reminding ourselves, the most antisemitic thing a person can say. Public conversation has been so overrun by discussion of tropes (usually accidental echoes of historic conspiracies about Jews), that we have forgotten that people used to say this regularly. Its meaning, to be clear, is that it was right to murder 6 million Jews and that the murder should continue in the present. It is a truly vile sentiment that ought to disqualify someone from public life, even if they were a teenager when they uttered it.
Given the way they behaved towards Jeremy Corbyn, when he said things that were not even 5% as offensive, you’d think that Jewish communal organisations would be all over this. That the Board of Deputies would be issuing statements right, left and centre (well, mostly right), the JC would be running damning front pages, the CST and the Holocaust Educational Trust would be getting involved. They would be demanding Farage be asked about this in every interview, and that his ‘there’s no proof’ excuse be treated as utterly inadequate. Instead, we hear nothing. Gornisht mit gornisht. The JC simply quoted Reform’s blanket denials as if these were adequate and trustworthy, without a single quote from a communal organisation. As if in mitigation, the JC quoted a column he had written for them on the Oct 7 anniversary which ‘lamented the normalisation of antisemitism across the United Kingdom’. In common with most of the far-right he is happy to condemn ‘anti-Israel antisemitism’ since it allows him to ignore his own traditional antisemitism. The Jewish press simply does not care about right-wing antisemitism, especially when it comes from a figure a growing number of communal leaders, philanthropists and congregants appear to support. The discourse in the 1980s used to be that there was an equal threat to Jews from the far left and far right – now only the left is considered worthy of mention.
Aslyum Reforms
Almost in parallel came the story of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposed asylum reforms. Following the template laid down by Jewish Home Secretaries Leon Brittan and Michael Howard, Mahmood, the daughter of Pakistani migrants to Britain, is pulling up the drawbridge after her. The government’s proposed reforms are some of the most draconian and anti-migrant we have seen for decades, which is saying something. They start from the premise that 400,000 people have claimed asylum in Britain since 2021, and that this is an unacceptably high number which must be urgently reduced. Measures include: reducing leave to remain from 5 years to 30 months, no settled status until a refugee has been in the country for 25 years, abolishing the right to family reunion, removing financial support to asylum seekers who would otherwise become destitute, confiscating assets from asylum seekers, instituting forced removal of families (i.e. those with children under 18), further limiting asylum appeals and limiting the application of ECHR article 8, which guarantees respect from private and family life.
While these have been widely condemned, the measures do not target Jews, and the government would be horrified at any suggestion that they might, since Starmer views the philosemitic protection of Jews as his personal mission. But in the twentieth century, whether or not Jews could get an immigration visa often meant the difference between life or death. Jews have a longstanding interest in safe passage and open borders. There was also very particular sound of Nazism in the way the proposals were briefed; the media was told that as part of the confiscating of assets ‘to contribute towards their accommodation’, refugees’ jewellery would be taken, a visceral echo of Nazi confiscation of Jewish valuables at the death camps. HIAS+JCORE issued a statement, warning that ‘each of these measures will only make life harder for those who need sanctuary and fray our social fabric.’ But the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, and Holocaust charities said nothing.
The person who did speak out was Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, and most senior Jewish politician in the public arena. Speaking on Newsnight, Polanski said ‘I am a child of Jewish ancestry. I am Jewish, and we have seen this with Nazi Germany. We are seeing it in 2025; this government needs to hang their heads in shame’. Rather than celebrate Polanski’s bold intervention, the Jewish News condemned it, complete with a quote from the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Karen Pollock in which she said ‘There is absolutely no justification for these appalling Holocaust comparisons. They distort the unique horrors of the Holocaust. To invoke any of this for cheap political point-scoring is not only deeply inappropriate but utterly disgraceful.’ To my mind, it was Pollock and the Jewish News’ condemnation which was disgraceful. Rather than condemn the policy itself it attacked those who drew attention to how bad it was, and specifically how much it resonated with Nazi persecution of Jews. This is surely what the Holocaust Educational Trust exists for; to make connections between the Holocaust and the present, to ensure that ‘never again’ really means something. Not to punish a Jewish politician with the temerity to use Jewish history and experience in service of solidarity with others.
In the case of the BBC, both Jewish and non-Jewish actors tried to make the story about Jews when it wasn’t. In the case of Farage, nobody in the organised Jewish community wanted to make the story about Jews even though it clearly was. And in the case of the asylum reforms, those who connected the story to Jews were criticised by some other Jews for doing so. What then is the rule? When may we make connections and when may we not? The prevailing tendency is to make the connection when it would support empire and conservatism and deny it when it would support the rights of other minorities and a progressive, emancipatory politics. We urgently need to invert this paradigm. To refuse to be used by conservatives in their projects of denying rights to migrants, trans people and Muslims, slashing welfare spending and supporting wars and subsidising arms companies. And at the same time to use Jewish history, culture and ritual for the sake of increasing rights, building solidarity amongst racialised minorities, prison and police abolitionism, community safety, the abolition of poverty and collective liberation. Morris Winchevsky gave a powerful vision of such a world in his song Di Tzukunft (The Future):
אָ, די װעלט װעט װערן דרײסטער
און עס װעט ניט זײַן אַ מײַסטער,
ניט די קרױן און ניט דער טײַסטער, –
ניט דעם זעלנערס שװערד,
אַלזאָ מוטיק אין די רײען,
אין די רײען, צו באַפֿרײַען,
צו באַפֿרײַען און באַנײַען
אונדזער אַלטע װעלט!
Oh, the world will become bolder
and there will be no master,
not the crown and not the purse,
nor the soldier’s sword.
Thus, take heart in the ranks,
in the ranks to liberate,
to liberate and renew
our old world!
