Are you wondering where the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal ‘s ridiculous Report came from? (I am not going to argue whether or not the Report is ridiculous. Read Louise Chappell, Richard Flanagan, Ronni Salt, Denis Muller, Nick Feik, Nasser Mashni, the staff of the Canberra Times, and Michael West.  Why is one of the most privileged minorities in Australia now claiming to be the most vilified? (I wouldn’t dare claim that Australian Jews are a privileged minority – I will leave that up to Jewish Australian Robert Manne.)

A recent book by renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (London: Oneworld, 2024) provides clues. But this excellent book is more than 500 pages long – here is what he says about the way the Israel lobby weaponises anti-Semitism. 

Preface

p. ix In 2024, Israel will not allow any show of solidarity with the Palestinians in Britain and the US, even by one person, to escape its radar, and will do all it can to push for the dismissal of every person who condemns its ethical violations and the proscription of every organisation calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions,

Lobbying for Israel in Postwar Britain

p. 160 [In 1948] those who saw themselves Zionism’s champions in the UK instrumentalised allegations of anti-Semitism in a manner they still do today, in order to demonise their opponents.

p. 208 The campaign [against the Venice Declaration by the European Economic Community in 1980 that called for the acknowledgment of Palestinians’ right to self-government and the PLO’s right to be connected to peace initiatives] was orchestrated by the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, who began a new chapter in the activity of the lobby – a joint assault by the embassy and the pro-Israel Jewish outfits on any senior British politicians who were depicted as entertaining ‘pro-Palestinian’ views.

p. 209 This was another milestone in the process that transformed Anglo-Jewish institutions into advocacy groups for Israel, justifying this transformation by equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism – a ploy that would be used to devastating effect later on.

p. 214 Under the energetic leadership of Eric Moonman, the Zionist Federation singled out sections of the British press as the first target in the attempt to arrest the swelling of pro-Palestinian sentiment in British civil society … Moonman made three complaints about the report in the Sunday Times [on the torture of Palestinian detainees in 1977] to the Press Council – the start of a pernicious trend in which Britain’s media watchdogs would be swamped by endless complaints from Israel’s would-be defenders, even when the British media was indubitably pro-Israel. In his complaints, Moonman demanded that the press seek a response from Israel before publishing articles about its policies … Moonman went on to institutionalise a body that would target the British media and police its attitude towards Israel, and this was BIPAC: the British-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Lobbying for Israel in Twentieth-Century America

p. 257 After six days of fighting [in 1967], Israel became a regional mini-empire. It ruled over the Syrian Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the whole of the Sinai Peninsula, all the way west to the banks of the Suez Canal … [Founder of AZEC, Isaiah] Kenen’s task was to ensure that the dissenting voices on Capitol Hill regarding Israel’s need to withdraw unilaterally from the territories it occupied would remain in the corridors and would not reach the assemblies. For that purpose, he enlisted a new actor, the Anti-Defamation League, originally founded in 1913 by B’nai Brith to fight against anti-Semitic smears in the media. Now the body followed the age-old trajectory of becoming a front for Israel. It betrayed its original charter and mission.

p. 258 After 1967, combating anti-Semitism against American Jews ceased to be its main task – now, cheered on by AIPAC, it sought to portray certain ‘anti-Israel’ actions as anti-Semitic.

p. 280 From the very beginning of lobbying for Zionism until today, there remains no option for reserved, conditional support. As Congressman Paul Findley would opine some years later, one’s support had to be 100 per cent; give ninety per cent support and they’d allege you were an anti-Semite.

p. 290 In general, [Congressman Paul Findley] noted that in the 1980s, AIPAC weaponised anti-Semitism, even before the state of Israel did so, to silence critics of Israel on Capitol Hill. He called it ‘the reckless use of the charge of anti-Semitism’.

p. 291 [Findley said] AIPAC and other groups such as the Anti-Defamation League published lists of enemies’ of Israel, intended to ‘intimidate journalists, professors, news media people, people in public life, and retired diplomats from speaking out on the Middle East.’ He further noted that AIPAC had a network on the campuses throughout the United States and trains college students in methods to keep critics of Israel off campus and instructs students in how to harass speakers who do come on campus’.

p. 337 [As it approached the 21^st century] AIPAC did become more aggressive, but the challenge facing it became more formidable. Israel couldn’t shield its reputation, and the image of its lobbies abroad, from the consequences of its brutal actions: a daily tale of demolitions, political arrests, closures (seger in Hebrew) of villages and towns, abuse of civil and human rights and the killing of Palestinians, including women and children. Up until the cataclysm of 9/11, Israel’s moral standing was on the decline. But when the planes flew into the World Trade Center, everything changed.

The War Against American Civil Society

p. 405 The strategy was twofold. The first strategy was to rebrand Israel as the only progressive democracy in the twenty-first-century Middle East. The second was to respond to more assertive criticism of Israel in civil society with the traditional methods of intimidation: smearing and character assassination. Any strong words of criticism would be decried as ‘delegitimisation of the Jewish state’. Of course, the second prong of the strategy made it harder for keen-eyed observers to believe in the narrative of the first one. But Israeli policy makers embraced this rebranding exercise in spectacular fashion.
p. 409 But the US was not the sole target; academics would try and convince Israeli politicians that the plague of ‘delegitimisation’ was rampant in the United Kingdom as well, as we shall see later.

p. 417 [From a policy paper from the Harold Hartog School of Governance and Policy at Tel Aviv University]

Market the nation: To do this, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would function as the international marketing arm of the State of Israel.

p. 419 StandWithUs (SWU), also known as Israel Emergency Alliance. Roz Rothstein, a family therapist from Los Angeles, founded it in 2001. It gained visibility around the time of Trump’s election in 2016, with eighteen full-time officers in the US and branches elsewhere. According to recent research on the group, SWU regards the West Bank as part of Israel and supports the legitimisation of the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

p. 420 SWU works in various areas. They are active on American campuses, where they imitate the work of an NGO in Israel called Im Tirtzu, a government-backed outfit whose main role is to monitor lecturers in Israeli universities in case they are conveying anti-Zionist messages in their lectures and classes. SWU has a similar army of foot soldiers carrying out similar missions … SWU is also highly litigious: it has a legal section employing eighty lawyers, who weaponise legal procedures against [Boycott Divest Sanction] resolutions and pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

p. 423 Another outfit investigated by [Al Jazeera documentary] The Lobby was the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law … But the untrained eye would not see the difference between human rights under law, i.e. domestic Israeli law, and international human rights law. The purpose of this centre, established in 2012, was to portray Israel as a victim of human rights abuses. The trick was to frame any action against Israel as one against the Jewish people as whole, and hence anti-Semitic. In practice, their brief was to recruit Jewish law students to do more or less what the StandWithUs students were asked to do.

p. 426 And on the Hill, the Brandeis Center joined other organisations in trying to promote legislation that aimed to equate anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel, as the best means of arresting changes in American civil society’s attitude towards Israel.
p. 427 The internet is now a critical battlefield. Leading the way is the website Canary Mission, established in 2014, and several others like Campus Monitor are spearheading the Lobby’s campaigns in that domain. Canary Mission works like a secret service organisation, compiling files on student activists in universities, threatening to send their names to prospective employers. The Israeli government uses these lists to prevent pro-BDS American citizens from entering Israel.

Lobbying for Israel in Twenty-First Century Britain

p. 443 As an Israeli Jew, I probably cannot fully understand, or empathise with, the fear of anti-Semitism embedded in a community that has suffered from sporadic outbursts of anti-Semitism, while facing little systematic prejudice, in this century; although I acknowledge that the threat felt is real. Yet I think, knowingly or not, the Israeli and Zionist aspects of scandals such as the ‘cash for honours’ one are not addressed as distinct issues, but are lumped together with anti-Semitism. It is much easier to cry out ‘anti-Semitism’, where Jews have the moral high ground, rather than dig deeper and see that a scandal that involves support for Israel in the twenty-first century is not just about Jews, but rather about the suffering of the Palestinians from Israel’s brutal policies.

p. 446 In December 2006, the Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies joined forces and formed the Fair Play Campaign Group, in reality a pro-Israel advocacy organisation that co-ordinated activity against anti-Israel boycotts and other anti-Zionist campaigns.

p. 448 Another relatively new organisation joined in from overseas: the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media watchdog.

p. 450 From 2000, [groups like Labour Friends of Israel] targeted the Guardian and accused the paper of being anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic. While the lobby in the UK itself was not entirely sure this was a successful campaign – and at times tried to engage in dialogue with the paper rather than attacking it instinctively – Israel’s Government Press Office deemed it very effective and satisfactory. Its director, Danny Seaman, boasted that he had forced the Guardian to transfer correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg, whom Israel disliked, to Washington. ‘We simply boycotted them, claimed Seaman, the editorial boards got the message and replaced their people.’

p. 451 Antony Lerman, one of the leading Jewish historians and journalists, was labelled a nasty anti-Semite on a website designed to expose anti-Semitism on the Guardian’s website, for an incisive critical article on the Lobby and its carte blanche endorsement of Israeli policies. Lerman responded: ‘I think there are people who are deliberately manipulating the use of the term anti-Semitism because they do see that it’s useful in defending Israel’

p. 454 CAMERA produced a new methodology – a line-by-line examination of every piece, highlighting mistakes ranging from straightforward typos to conflicting interpretations, to cast doubt on the professionalism of those who criticise Israel.

p. 455 This was a pattern the lobby now followed time and again, extending its remit to academics whose arguments were insufficiently sympathetic to Israel. The targeted writer or journalist was accused of intentional inaccuracies in the service of Israel’s enemies that had inadvertently led to an increase in anti-Semitism.

p. 461 But it soon transpired that even politicians who were helped by [Conservative Friends of Israel] or supported it found it difficult to toe the line when faced with the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, with the overall systematic abuse of Palestinian rights in the West Bank.

p. 462 And thus, the lobby no longer aimed to galvanise support for Israel – it directed its energies to suppressing critics. The lobby had to work hard to keep everyone in line, regardless of the developments on the ground, even after the Tories were in power.

p. 466 But around 2010, the Netanyahu government reached the conclusion that the charm offensive wasn’t enough to salvage Israel’s reputation … In 2011, at the annual State of the Nation’ conference at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, delegitimisation was chosen as the major theme … The academics working for the Jewish Agency blamed the UN, Western legal systems and Western academia for the ongoing assault.

Whoever is the delegitimiser, including Israeli professors [supporting the BDS campaign], should be fought like in a war. They should be targeted and fought, not engaged intellectually; all the means not used before should be employed – this is the battlefield on the Israeli right to function, defend itself…

p. 467 The debate about Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories was now a ‘war’ about the legitimacy of Israel itself. Israel’s weapon of choice was equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and ‘Islamic terrorism’ … The lobby reacted [to a YouGov poll finding sympathy for the Palestinians had reached in 30%] by launching the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism in 2014 while Operation Protective Edge was going on. From that moment onwards, any rebuke of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip was immediately depicted as anti-Semitic.

p. 469 Before the election of Jeremy Corbyn, quite a few liberal Jews at the time felt uneasy with the way the Campaign [Against Anti-Semitism] worked. Anshel Pfeffer, the Haaretz London correspondent, wrote in 2015:

The fact is too many Jews, both political leaders in public appearances and ordinary Jews on social media, are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. The sad truth is that many Jews have cheapened the memory of the Holocaust by using it in an inappropriate fashion. Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.

He further accused the Campaign of an eagerness to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more widespread than it really is.

p. 471 The campaign against Corbyn peaked when the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, defined several instances in Corbyn’s political career as indicative of a chronicle of anti-Semitism. The most ridiculous among them was pointing to an event Corbyn hosted featuring the late Hajo Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz, who volunteered as an ambulance driver in the occupied West Bank after retiring from a very successful business career in the Netherlands. Hajo Meyer considered Israeli abuse of Palestinians as abuse of the memory of the Holocaust – and said so at a Holocaust Memorial Day event, which Corbyn was hosting in 2010. This hit the headlines in 2018, and several Labour MPs were quick to condemn the entire event as totally unacceptable. Alarmed by the outcry, Corbyn apologised, saying he had appeared on platforms with people whose views he rejected completely. In my view this was a tactical error and exposed his vulnerability to these kinds of attacks by the Lobby, who persisted with guilt by association tactics in relation to many more incidents in Corbyn’s political career.
You wouldn’t have guessed it from the media coverage, but Corbyn’s views on Palestine were virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians ever since 1967: like them he supported a two-state solution and recognised the Palestinian Authority.

At the time of his election, this position made him an outlier among the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the wider anti-Zionist movement, who endorsed a one-state solution. So why did the Lobby see him as such a threat, especially as a potential future prime minister? Because they suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it. In other words, he followed the lead of previous British statesmen who had the courage to stand up to the Lobby’s pressure.

p. 472 In an interview in August 2018, [President of the Board of Deputies, Marie Sarah] Van der Zyl claimed repeatedly that Jeremy Corbyn had been ‘spending more and more time with terrorists and extremists’ and ‘with people who threaten the security of Britain’. She seconded one of the presenter’s outbursts that supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are ‘a cult’ and said that ‘Jeremy Corbyn had declared war on the Jews at home’. According to Van der Zyl, Jeremy Corbyn’s hatred of Israel and Zionism runs so deep’ and ‘he cannot separate that from anti-Semitism’. Van der Zyl praised the Tory party, claiming that ‘The Tories have always shown themselves to be friends to the Jewish community’. This homage to the Conservatives was wildly incongruous with their actual record on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, which was far worse than Labour’s.

p. 473 When we grasp the gulf between Van der Zy’s hysterical reaction to Corbyn and his real position, we are getting very close to solving the conundrum posed at the beginning of this book. Defenders of Israel are constantly beset by self-doubt about the states legitimacy, and this fuels the campaign to justify a project and later a state that could only be founded and sustained by the constant oppression of another nation. They react strongly to Israel’s critics because they know they have a point – and they can’t deny it.

Van der Zyl was not alone in her extreme diatribe against Corbyn. In the same year, Britain’s three main Jewish newspapers jointly called a Corbyn-led government an existential threat to Jewish life in Britain, which actually meant an existential threat to the pro-Israel Lobby in Britain. It was – and not because Corbyn didn’t affirm the existence of Israel; he did so repeatedly. It was because he believed in a just peace and stood with Palestinians to enable it… The Lobby scraped the very bottom of the barrel in order to damn Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

p. 475 The principle on which the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism operated was: throw enough mud and something will stick. One of their officers, Joe Glasman, boasted in a video that they had ‘slaughtered’ Corbyn.

Corbyn articulated the concerns of many progressive people in Britain when he expressed anxiety about the way the new European initiative to confront Holocaust denial in Europe conflated it with criticism of Israel in the famous International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that the British government tried to push every university to adopt.

p. 476 The (IHRA) project was hijacked by Israel around 2013, to be used as a new means of defining anti-Semitism to include anti-Zionism and even moderate anti-Israel stances. The Israeli government lobbied both in the EU and in the UN for a detailed list of examples that would exemplify what anti-Semitism means, so that any criticism against Israel could be silenced through the weaponisation of these examples. The method was simple: a new interpretation of what Holocaust denial constituted was given through a list of examples that featured criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel. This definition, with its list of examples, was formally adopted by the IHRA in May 2016, and adopted by the UK government in December 2016. Importantly, it was not legally binding and was not intended to be used in legal cases or to enforce breaches of organisational rules. Corbyn, like many other human rights activists in Britain, had been happy to endorse a campaign against Holocaust denial, and the Labour National Executive Committee did, prior to the ensuing scandal, adopt the definition, excluding the examples relating to criticism of Israel.

p. 477 Among the report [into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party by human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti]’s recommendations was that: ‘Labour members should resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particular’. This was a step backwards from the pioneering work of Israeli scholars in the 1990s, who wrote extensively about how the memory of the Holocaust was being abused to demonise Palestinians and justify oppressive policies towards them … The report chose not to look at racism as a whole as a threat to the legitimacy of the party, and consequently some of its guidance verged on the absurd … Despite all the concessions made to the party’s pro-Israel wing, the report nonetheless concluded that the party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or other forms of racism, i.e. that it was not institutionally anti-Semitic.

p. 478 The next stage was unavoidable, as Chakrabarti’s report was not enough for the Lobby. A cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee initiated its own inquiry and used Watson and Streeting’s criticism to conclude that the Chakrabarti Inquiry was ultimately compromised’ by Chakrabarti’s later acceptance of a peerage and position in the Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn’s protestations against these allegations were disregarded, although he was absolutely right when he accused the Select Committee of ‘political framing’.

And then came the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) inquiry into anti-Semitism in Labour. In a more reasonable world, or maybe years from now, if people were asked about what a leading institution for human rights would investigate in relation to Israel and Palestine, they would give the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights as the answer. These reasonable people would be bewildered to learn that this respectable body saw their main job as analysing emails, Facebook posts and tweets to see if Labour members who were known supporters of Palestinian rights should be expelled from the Party.

Needless to say, there was no serious discussion of what constitutes anti-Semitism, nor did it make any attempt to differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.

p. 479 In my humble view, this is one of the most shameful reports ever produced by a Commission that has practically abandoned representing the interests of the many people in Britain today whose human rights are not respected, including refugees, disabled people and those in poverty … The report suggested that ‘the Party needs to instil a culture that encourages members to challenge inappropriate behaviour and to report anti-Semitism complaints’. This provided carte blanche for a witch-hunt that unfolded after that, and it claimed Corbyn as its main victim – a real coup for his right-wing opponents within the party … What followed was inevitable: a relentless smear campaign against a principled politician who had stood alongside Jews in the 1970s to physically block neo-Nazis from marching into Wood Green. The Conservative John Bercow, a former Speaker for the House of Commons and an Anglo-Jew, categorically rejected any allegation of Corbyn being anti-Semitic.

p. 481 The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 elections and his subsequent resignation were celebrated by the Lobby. ‘The beast is slain, cried Joe Glasman, head of Political and Government Investigations within the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

p. 482 The pro-Israel Lobby has always held this view: a good person is the one who understands that supporting Israel is the best way to tackle anti-Semitism.

p. 483 In their ultimately very successful campaign against Corbyn and Corbynism, the lobby had won a bigger victory: they had forged a seemingly ineradicable connection between anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism in the public consciousness.

p. 484 The IHRA definition with all of its examples was drafted by those with a vested interest in the ‘new anti-Semitism’ that consisted of delegitimising Israel’ An institution originally intending to combat Holocaust denial in Europe now equated criticism of Israel with Holocaust denial.

But most importantly the pledges [of possible Labour leaders after Corbyn resigned] made a clear distinction between Jewish groups that were part of the pro-Israel Lobby, including the Jewish Labour Movement, which were entrusted with educating the party about anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour, which the pledges claimed did not represent Jewish communities.

p. 487 The BDS movement was now officially enemy number one of the lobby in Britain. Now we reach a true historical irony: the birthplace of the modern Zionist Lobby became, a century later, the cradle of a global Palestine solidarity movement.

p. 490 [The debate about Palestine in the UK] was also helped by the early events organised by students in the UK in solidarity with BDS. The students called their actions Israeli Apartheid Week, and the fist unions that supported BDS utilised similar language, referring to the settler-colonial nature of Israel by using concepts such as apartheid, colonialism and later on even colonisation. The mainstream media continued to talk about a ‘conflict,’ implying the existence of two equal sides, and peace, as if all you needed were two ‘peace camps’ on both sides lobbying for a just solution based on the partition of the country into two states (one stretching over more than eighty per cent of historical Palestine with full sovereignty, the other divided into two Bantustans with very restricted sovereignty). The new language described more accurately the situation on the ground: a continued project of settler colonialism that had begun in the late nineteenth century and continues to this very day. Reconciliation is achieved not through empty talk about peace but by demanding decolonisation.

p. 500 The Lobby attempted to portray BDS as an expression of anti-Semitism. The Boris Johnson government followed their lead – the 2019 Queen’s speech included a commitment to banning BDS as a form of anti-Semitism. A parallel action was the inclusion of BDS as a security threat in the Prevent programme. This programme was calling upon universities to monitor and refer students deemed at risk of being ‘radicalised’ – in practice it mainly perpetuated Islamophobic assumptions about Muslim students … Prevent never identified clearly what ‘extremism’ means (while at least the police have a clearer definition for hate crimes). And thus, absurd events such as children’s schools supporting the Palestinian struggle were referred under Prevent. Waving the Palestinian flag was considered extreme, and students were cautioned as being extremists under Prevent for displaying the flag or wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh.

p. 501 The Lobby knew it couldn’t quell committed activists, even with these aggressive measures. But it could still build a public consensus against BDS as a threat to Israel and ergo Jews. Established Anglo-Jewish organisations, such as the Board of Deputies, and the community’s main newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, propagandised against BDS as intrinsically anti-Semitic … I doubt whether any of these or similar measures will be able to stop support for the BDS movement and other activism for Palestine. The ongoing Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and the incremental ethnic cleansing that accompanies it, the continued inhuman siege on the Gaza Strip and the daily violations of the rights of the Palestinians in Israel will fuel the campaign for years to come. These realities on the ground serve as a rejoinder to Israel’s relentless endeavour to sanitise its image abroad, through lobbying in the halls of power and through trying to silence grassroots activists.

Conclusion

p. 505 I would say that the lobby wanted to belong to a club that would not accept it. That club consisted of people who had problems with endorsing Zionism as a moral project and who gradually realised the price Palestinians paid for a European project of colonisation that was meant to solve the problem of anti-Semitism and satisfy a neo-crusader evangelical Christian desire to fulfil the prophecy of the Holy Land … These were people from all over the world, whose religion, ethical worldview, life experience and many other factors made them supporters of oppressed and victimised people. Among them were quite a large number of Jews, and they were found in huge numbers in the anti-colonial movements of the Global South, in the minorities of the Global North and among people who refused to be indifferent to injustices, not just close to home but also abroad … The Zionists and later large sections of Israeli Jews wanted this diverse group of people to regard Zionism and Israel as a noble cause; in fact, as the Israeli historian Yosef Gorny put it, they should have recognised that Israel was one of the few successful projects of enlightenment and modernisation.

p. 511 Nowadays, lobbying for Zionism in the UK and the USA sets the Lobbyists against civil society in both countries, which needs to be convinced by moral arguments and cannot be easily cowed or seduced. This explains the shift by the Lobby to weaponising anti-Semitism to procure public support for Israel.

Afterward: 7 October and the Future

p. 519 [After October 7 we saw responses put forward by global Israel and global Palestine.] By ‘global Israel’, I refer to a coalition that includes most governments, mainstream media and some parts of academia in the Global North, with the US and the UK at the forefront, and some governments in the Global South, with the tacit support of large multinational corporations and the military and security industries. Politically, the Right and the neo-Right are the most vocal members of this alliance, but it enjoys the support of most of the established social democratic parties in Europe and many members of the American Democratic Party. ‘Global Israel’ propagated the Israeli narrative of events. According to this narrative, the 7 October attack is yet another chapter in the history of modern anti-Semitism … This narrative does not serve Jewish interests. Comparing the killings, as horrific as they are, of 1,200 people to the industrial genocide of six million people by a modern nation state is the worst abuse of Holocaust memory one can think of, and one that would delight Holocaust deniers around the world.

p. 521 The lobby, as I have shown, successfully brought together separate interest groups to form a shield that could protect Israel from being held accountable for its violations of justice and humanitarian law. Now, however, there are cracks in this international shield, and they might grow in the years to come. At the end of the day, many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonisation project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the rest of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.