And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to... President Donald Trump! Words I could barely have imagined myself provisionally predicting on air but found myself uttering at the weekend. OK, it came during a clash with a presenter who was arguing that the far-right racist thug ‘Tommy Robinson’ should be hailed as a British ‘national hero’. It coincided with the Netanyahu government extending ‘hero’ status to Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) with an invitation to visit Israel and be feted there for campaigning against pro-Palestinian protesters on the streets of Britain.
The big if
But if — and it’s still a precarious if — Donald Trump’s peace plan, devised with more than a little help from Tony Blair and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, really does halt the civilian carnage in Gaza currently heading close to 70,000, then the Nobel Prize his narcissism craves will eventually be worth the controversial, even unedifying, price.
Regular readers of this column will recall I am no cheerleader for the 47th POTUS (a man I once knew well personally) but he has undoubtedly and suddenly brought the Gaza conflict closer to a peaceful resolution than the world could have anticipated even a couple of weeks or so ago. Partly by piling pressure on Netanyahu in a way that no previous US president had done.
The headline in an October 5 Mail on Sunday guest column by Mark Almond, director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford, arguably captured the shifting zeitgeist, ‘Critics may dismiss Trump as vain but they miss how he manages to bend foes — and allies alike to his will’.
Trumping Netanyahu
Wrote Almond: “Trump’s antennae had picked up shifts in American public opinion which the wider Establishment had missed. Support for Israel had suddenly slumped at home. As Trump well knows, moreover, he won over Muslim voters in key swing state such as Michigan by promising to end the war in Gaza. So he took the initiative. Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose US education taught him how to appeal directly to the American public, has long been able to swerve the demands of diplomats and even presidents. Trump, though, is the most media-savvy US president ever — and, in this way at least, more than a match for Netanyahu. Trump is most authentically himself as a showman. He loves the drama of power. His critics focus on his vain demands that he be centre-stage. They see it as a weakness.
“Yet while his opponents look the other way, they miss how the president manages to bend foes — and allies alike — to his will. Trump is a seething mass of contradictions. He is unafraid to use force yet he has refused to get bogged down in the forever wars of his predecessors.”
Inevitably, Trumpian hyperbole has played into the delicately balanced peace negotiations. Netanyahu hasn’t immediately obeyed his demand for the bombing and missile strikes to end and Gazan civilians are still dying but the tempo has eased. Apart from the fanatical far right members of the Israeli cabinet, few doubt that provided Hamas free the surviving hostages and the remains of those who have died, and broadly accept the majority of the 20-point peace plan (the tricky bit, admittedly) the door has opened to serious discussions on Gaza’s future and even the longer-term prospect of some form of Palestinian state.
It was highly significant, too, that Trump has gone out of his way to publicly thank a long list of Muslim states for their help. The great egotist for once sharing the potential glory, albeit with his commercial brain valuing his relationship with the likes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as much as his diplomatic one.
All this evolving in the week of the second anniversary of the barbaric October 7th massacre of 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, the biggest atrocity Jews have faced since the Holocaust itself and the trigger to the scale of the Netanyahu regime’s retaliatory bloodbath in Gaza. An anniversary when, the US president is only too aware, the world’s political and media focus is guaranteed to be ultra-intense.
A focus particularly intense here in the UK in the wake of last week’s horrific Manchester synagogue outrage which has inevitably ignited a political and media firestorm around antisemitism and the right to protest. To a considerable extent a debate that has overshadowed the normal political party conference season.
Walking my tightrope
On a personal note, I have found myself walking a tightrope between supporting the political calls from the prime minister, the home secretary and most rival party leaders for pro-Palestinian protests to be postponed out of decency and sensitivity and the emerging evidence that a Labour government is being propelled toward a dangerously draconian policy around the traditional right to protest. Too many in politics and the media have opportunistically opted to blur the line between legitimately opposing Israel’s Gaza policy and being guilty of antisemitism; a line that the Netanyahu himself has ceaselessly sought to blur.
For Keir Starmer personally the stakes are high. At the Labour party conference, a union-proposed motion to accept the UN’s verdict that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was overwhelmingly accepted against the wishes of the leadership. It has been eagerly seized on by Reform and the Tories along with renewed attacks on the prime minister over the UK recognising a Palestinian state against the wishes of President Trump and to a vitriolic reaction from the Netanyahu regime accusing Britain of “rewarding” Hamas terrorism.
Plenty of vitriol on display, too, from the right-wing papers in the fallout from the Manchester synagogue outrage. Saturday’s Daily Mail splashing with, ‘LAMMY TOLD: YOU HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS... Minister heckled at synagogue vigil amid fury over new ‘hate march’.’ Inside a double page essay by former Tory cabinet minister turned Spectator editor Michael Gove was headlined: ‘It is an iron law of history that when Jews feel unsafe, the candle of freedom is going out. Do we want it to be extinguished in our time?’.
The opening paragraph struck a chord for many: “Exactly a month ago, I joined thousands from Britain’s Jewish community to march through London to draw attention to the rising tide of antisemitism — online, on our airwaves, and on our streets. For all of us on that march, the terrorist attack on Heaton Park synagogue will have been shocking, horrific, heart-wrenching. But not surprising.”
The Jewish divide?
Undoubtedly the omnipresent cancer of antisemitism in Britain has grown far more malignant since the Gaza conflict. For people like me who are fiercely opposed to antisemitism while also outraged by the scale of the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted in Gaza those aren’t incompatible positions to hold. Although I’m not Jewish, I have many Jewish friends and relatives (via marriage) and, interestingly, they are evenly split between those who support Netanyahu’s action in Gaza and those who are horrified by the scale of the civilian carnage, with some among British Jews taking part in the pro-Palestine protest marches.
They are keen to flag up that, although there have been some violent incidents during those Pro-Palestinian protests, they are far outnumbered by violence on anti-migrant demonstrations, including the huge ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protest organised by the aforementioned ‘Tommy Robinson’ and aggressively promoted by a certain Elon Musk.
For them, the Mail leader that ran alongside Gove’s thoughtful essay jarred with its headline: ‘These toxic marches are fuelling the rise of bigotry and hatred’. It began with: “Even as the families of those killed at the Heaton Park synagogue were preparing their funeral services, Palestinian activities were gearing up for yet another march on London. Officially, it is a protest against the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. But we know from experience that it will be used as a front for rank antisemitism and the glorification of Hamas. Marchers on these demonstrations routinely call for the death of Jews, the destruction of Israel and ‘globalisation of the intifada’.”
The Mail’s front page the morning after Manchester trailed a particularly OTT column by its provocateur-in-chief, Richard Littlejohn, headlined ‘From woke police chiefs to left-wing politicians, the list of the killer’s enablers is legion. They should have blood on their consciences.’ One line read: “The prime minister expressed horror yesterday but he, too, has given succour to the antisemites, rewarding Hamas’s mass murder with a promise to recognise a Palestinian state, purely for internal party expediency.” But Littlejohn’s column at least acknowledged, “Yes, he eventually, kicked out that ‘friend of Hamas’ Jeremy Corbyn” — much of this week’s targeting of Starmer, whose wife is Jewish, has ignored his role in Opposition in cracking down on the antisemitism tolerated under Corbyn’s leadership.
So, who’s a ‘useful idiot’?
Well, the notion of glorifying Hamas or welcoming the murder of Jews certainly wasn’t the motivation of my Jewish friends opposed to the Gaza killing fields, even though those who have joined pro-Palestinian protests but didn’t turn out last Saturday out of respect for the Manchester families. But they won’t be deterred from doing so in future if the Trump peace initiative falters and they certainly don’t accept the Mail’s depiction of them as ‘useful idiots’ for Hamas.
While there are undoubtedly some antisemitic fanatics among the marchers, the majority, they argue, are driven by humanitarian concern.
If nothing else, the Mail has nailed its flag to a particular mast. Witness the headline on Boris Johnson’s column in last Saturday’s edition, ‘Time for the knee-jerk Israel bashers to take off their ridiculous black and white Arafat dishcloths, cease their revolting demos and call on Hamas to sign the White House peace deal...’
The paper’s main leader headline on October 7th itself was ‘PM is failing to lead over October 7 hate’. It argued, “Sir Keir Starmer is very quick to denounce the extremism of the ‘far right’, even though this remains a pathetic and marginal force in British life. Yet when Jews are murdered as a result of terrorism, he is curiously silent about the Islamist ideology of the killer. Is that because he’s too cowardly to call out radical Islam — or because he calculates it might turn Muslim voters away from Labour?’
Starmer’s sign of the times
For his part, on October 7th, Sir Keir chose to pen an op-ed for The Times headlined ‘We must unite to face antisemitism’ in which he branded plans by some university students to use the date to stage pro-Palestinian rallies as ‘unBritish’.
Contrary to the Mail’s leader’s hostile tone, the PM’s comment piece acknowledged: “The truth is this: for too long, our country has been indifferent to antisemitism. This is a hatred that has been rising, especially since the atrocities of October 7. Today in Britain, many Jewish feel compelled to hide their school uniforms. Jewish students have been targeted on our campuses. Jewish patients often conceal their identity when accessing our NHS. On our streets, as some have exercised their freedom to protest against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, others have used this as a despicable excuse to attack British Jews for something over which they have absolutely no responsibility.
“Let me just spell that out for a moment: people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people they have never even met, for something they are not responsible for. A total loss of empathy and humanity not in some faraway land but right here in the heart of our own country.”
Referring to last week’s Manchester atrocity, he wrote: “The holocaust is unique in history but that indifference to hatred is not. Neither is the dehumanisation of others and the journey from poisonous words to appalling acts. It’s how a terrorist with a warped ideology can decide to kill Jewish people simply because they are Jewish.”
It won’t have surprised Starmer that several student rallies went ahead on October 7th despite his appeal but there was a modest measure of satisfaction in that the estimated 1,000 turnout figure wasn’t as high as organisers had predicted.
Truly inspirational
But the truly inspired newspaper piece on October 7th came in the Guardian from Sharone Lifschitz, the London-based film maker and academic whose peace activist parents were taken hostage on that terrible day two years ago.
But here are just a few samples of its power.
“I will see the brutal execution of my childhood carer Bracha Levinson, now almost 80 years old, as it was livestreamed on her Facebook page by the terrorists who seized her house...
“For days and weeks afterward, as members of the community I grew up in, I helped forensic teams collect and identify the bodies, we scoured the internet for trace of our loved ones. We saw torture and mutilation...
“My elderly parents, Yocheved and Oded Lifschitz, were taken hostage from their home... My father was 83, my mother 85. Seventeen days later my mother emerged from Hamas captivity. Before being taken away by the Red Cross, she turned back and shook the hand of her captor. “Shalom”, she said. The image was broadcast around the world: a simple, human gesture in the midst of unimaginable horror. Five hundred and two days later, my father’s remains were returned.”
“Not one word of this is written as justification for the war between the Israel Defence Force and Hamas. I have been consistently against it from the beginning. The people of Gaza have suffered beyond imagination. I am horrified by the decisions of the Israeli government, but I am also insistent that Hamas is not some benign agent of resistance. Hamas betrayed its own people — they ensured the suffering of them along with the suffering of us, who lost so much because of its murderous ideology... My UK community is facing unprecedented antisemitism, and my community in Israel has fought its government for two years and has been betrayed again and again.
“Yet, I am humbled and encouraged by the faith in humanity I still see in freed hostages like my mum, I cherish new and old friendships across the divide with Palestinians who, like me, want a long-term agreement. They are able to show empathy towards me in a way many British self-proclaimed friends of Palestine cannot. For too many of the latter, it seems a zero-sum game in which one side should win and the other must lose. For us, the wish is for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians.”
Conference postmortems
The Tory party conference in Manchester had its own October 7th trauma with the “racist” row that erupted around the footage leaked to the Guardian of justice secretary and aspiring leader Robert Jenrick complaining of “not seeing another white face” during a visit to the Handsworth area of Birmingham. Former Tory West Midlands mayor Andy Street was quick to reject Jenrick’s ‘lack of integration’ charge, shadow cabinet ministers largely distanced themselves from it, what remains of the One Nation wing of the Conservative party buried their heads in their hands in despair. But the man himself remained defiant in a series of bizarre broadcast interviews denying he meant what he was clearly on record as saying, while his nominal boss Kemi Badenoch made herself look a fool with a semantic contortion act attempt to defend him.
But Jenrick’s confidence is high given Badenoch’s rock bottom poll rating among party members with himself rated the favourite to replace her. It was noticeable that Jenrick’s big, conference speech differed from hers in one significant respect. While she has been simultaneously moving policy closer to that of Reform while repeatedly attacking Farage personally, even a labelling him a ‘socialist’ at one point, Jenrick pointedly omitted any personal criticism of the Reform leader. Jenrick is only too aware that new polling shows a majority of party members now favour either an electoral pact or even full merger with Farage’s Reform. It’s a position the Daily Mail is increasingly moving toward, gifting Farage a rich run of op-ed columns while canvassing the idea of ‘unifying’ the right in British politics. Certainly Jenrick, despite his denials, is known to have privately entertained the idea on several occasions in the last couple of years. Regular readers of this column may even recall when I predicted Reform’s local election surge in May I had this dream / nightmare vision of Farage entering No10 as prime minister with Jenrick at his side.
So what of Labour’s party conference legacy? While Keir Starmer produced a much better speech than some of us forecast, it didn’t manage to cross the “inspirational oratory” threshold. At best, it headed off any immediate leadership challenge and Andy Burnham was made to look like a poker player who had left — at least temporarily — all his aces out of his deck. But as one normally loyal minister put it to me: “The problem now is that Keir keeps coming across more as the leader of the opposition rather than the prime minister, attacking Farage as if he’s already the man in No 10 and that wrong way round scenario won’t delay a real leadership challenge indefinitely. The chinks in Reform’s armour are apparent and they are showing signs of resenting scrutiny, but Keir just isn’t good at grasping how to exploit.”
A similar theme reflected in an October 3rd column by the Labour simpatico Times columnist Patrick Maguire. The headline? ‘Farage is leading Labour round in circles... Starmer displayed multiple personalities at his party conference, an indication Reform is making the political weather’. His column concluded: “Farage will keep leading Labour in circles until Starmer decides which of his speeches his government agrees with.”
The prime minister’s mood won’t have been improved with Wednesday’s opening of the ballot for deputy party leader with sacked cabinet minister Lucy Powell currently favourite to beat No 10’s choice, Bridget Phillipson, telling an East London rally that she “won’t sugar coat” how badly things are going for the government.
Badenoch’s conference closing speech turned out to something of a tour de force, with sharpish jokes and the announcement a future Tory government would abolish stamp duty prompting standing ovations and guaranteed approving headlines in the right-wing papers.
Several times, the TV cameras focused on Robert Jenrick dutifully smiling and applauding vigorously. His mind, you suspected, tactically focused on whether or not the next set of polls would show an upward reversal in her and the party’s dire ratings.
For the last word, I’ve turned to a veteran political odds maker with a strong track record. His early verdict: “Put your money on neither Starmer nor Badenoch surviving long beyond next May’s Scottish, Welsh and English local elections. Successors? Jenrick the firm Tory favourite, but Labour is harder to call. Burnham will definitely want a shot, likewise Wes Streeting but the late runner coming up fast on the rails is Shabana Mahmood. Calamity Lammy’s ability to put his foot in his mouth has almost certainly killed any hope the deputy prime minister had of making it to the winning post.”
