The article below was composed several weeks ago. It was originally written as a speculative article for a non-Orthodox Jewish magazine. The article was rejected on the grounds that it was ‘too political’. Whilst I can understand the desire not to have religious movements that are riven by political rancour, on the other hand maybe this is not the time to be non-political and that politics in all its messy awfulness needs to be grasped and grasped because it is a matter of safety and survival.

I do think that non-Orthodox Judaism, which has had leadership that sometimes set great store on things like ‘social action’ such as helping those who are seen as disadvantaged, interfaith work and getting up close with and working towards similar aims as various liberal/left causes, is going through a shock right now. Those non-Orthodox Jews who thought the Left were on their side or that doing interfaith work with mosques would quell the passions of extremists or who had faith in a two state solution to conflict in the Middle East, have in my opinion been proven to be wrong. I believe that there will be some political realignment in non-Orthodox Judaism over the next few years or so as members of these communities realise and come to terms with the facts that the Left hate us as much as the neo-Nazis do and that interfaith work with nice Muslim Imams doesn’t do diddly squat to control the sort of Islamic extremist nutcases that have for weeks and weeks polluted the streets of London and other British cities with their calls for a genocide of Israeli Jews.

Here’s the piece. Some of it still stands up but some of it might now be out of date but I’ll put it up anyway.

Reality bites and bites hard. Or the need for a new ‘Iron Wall’

On October 7th I watched my social media feeds go wild with the news from Israel and of the bestial behaviour of the Hamas Islamic terrorists. I knew even from the first reports that this would turn out to be a monstrous pogrom of Israeli Jews and sadly I was correct.

Israel and its citizens, because of the October 7th pogrom, have been bitten by reality. This reality is that there can be no coexistence with those who wish to kill you, no coexistence with those who vote for monsters like Hamas and no coexistence with the supporters of this and similar groups or with Islamism in general.

Israelis have tried to coexist with the Arabs and have, with the assistance of other nations, done their best to live in peace with people who live and breathe the Islamic Qu’ranic and Hadithian commands to ‘hate the Jews’. You cannot live in peace or even in close proximity to that. You can isolate it, you can be watchful of it, you can be aware of it but you can’t make peace with it or by debate or challenge make it go away. The great Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky was in many ways correct when he said in his 1923 essay ‘The Iron Wall’ that there needs to be an ‘Iron Wall’ surrounding the pre-State Zionist projects that the Arabs with their zealous hostility to Jews, cannot breach.

Now that reality has bitten not just the Israelis but those of us in the lands of exile as well. Maybe its time to accept a few more realities than we may have been comfortable accepting in the past. It may be time, after seeing so many Muslims and Leftists marching for Hamas on the streets of London, to consider if we need our own Iron Wall, at present not a physical one guarded by bodily and mentally strong Jews ready to fight, but of cynicism.

The world has changed. We’ve seen too many of the high profile clerics of the religion of Islam fail to properly condemn Hamas and their crimes and we should take that reluctance and quietude to show us whose side they are on. Hint, it’s not us. We’ve also seen the Left and Far Left, a political faction that too many Progressive Jews have been deluded and beguiled by, joining forces with those who call for a genocide of the Jews of Israel. We were less than cynical when sitting in interfaith groups with those whose religion has a worrying number of admonitions to ‘kill the Jews’. We were also less than cynical of the Far Left when we should have remembered just how bad things continued to be for Jews in those places such as Russia following the Revolution there.

Too many Jews have also broken the Biblical admonition to ‘not put too much trust in princes’ and have assumed that the UK Government and the policing establishment would protect us when the need arose. After all our collective loyalty to the Crown and the Nation over centuries should have meant something surely? The reality is that we’ve not been protected, the result of such foolish trust in princes has been major police forces, such as London’s Metropolitan Police, pandering to demonstrators calling for genocide of the Jews.

It’s my belief that too many of the Progressive Jews I have encountered in the UK have become locked in a fantasy world where reality takes an extended holiday. It’s a world where people believe that Israel and the Muslim Arabs of ‘Palestine’ can live together in harmony in two neighbouring states. It’s a world where Progressive Jews nod in agreement when Islamic clerics tell them lies in interfaith groups such as ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. Where Progressive Jews treat on trust the words of ‘refugee’ campaigners who claim that adult men, often from cultures where Jew hatred is not just normal but socially expected, are the modern equivalent of the Kindertransport children. It’s also a world where a desire to be ‘nice’ and to be seen to be doing the ‘correct’ thing for the planet has seen some Progressive Jews sign up to support the horrifically misanthropic Malthusianism which are the extremes of the ‘Green Movement’.

Less of these bad decisions by Progressive Jews would have occurred had we been, as a community, more cynical about what is in front of us. We would not have joined with Islamic groups who were dishonest about the existence and extent of Islamic Jew hatred; we would not have exposed our fellow citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish to harm, in the form of rapists, religious extremists and otherwise criminal ‘refugees’, that have been brought to the UK, by joining campaigns to let into the UK these fake ‘refugees’. We would not have put ourselves at odds with the British working classes by backing ‘green’ policies and campaigns that will do little for the world, but will impoverish millions of ordinary working people with extreme rises in the costs of energy and the strong possibility of power outages and rationing, because of the over-reliance on unreliable and excessively costly ‘renewables’. Finally, if we’d been a bit more cynical then we would not have backed a Two State Solution in the Middle East that would mostly benefit those who want Jews dead. Being more cynical about the world around us, especially in the world of the Galut, would not stop us doing morally and religiously righteous things such as doing acts of Tzedaka or Chesed or helping the sick, the widow or the orphan, but it might make us a bit more physically and spiritually safer.

Although my own politics are of the Centre-Right, they also have within them a large dollop of Classical Liberalism and that applies to both the right of individuals to engage in the pursuit of their own happiness and in religious matters. I truly believe that we should interpret the Torah afresh but with reference to the past because in every generation the political, social and cultural aspects of life are different from that which went before. That reinterpretation has given Progressive Jews stuff that I believe is a communal and moral good which should be praised and celebrated, for example having a culture that does not distinguish between men and women in the life of the synagogue and which doesn’t put LGB people at the back of the communal bus.

But we must be careful that we are not so open minded that our brains fall out. We have to be a bit more cynical about what people tell us. I cannot recall who said it but someone once said ‘paranoid Jews live longer’ and that is something that I have reluctantly come to accept. We cannot go back to the old ways, the world changed on October 7th. We need to be more cynical and indeed a bit more paranoid about the Left and the Green cult and also more cynical and suspicious of the Wormtongues that we may encounter in interfaith work. We have to ask ourselves, as previous generations have done, ‘is it good for the Jews?’ whenever a political party or an interfaith campaign or a cult like the environmental movement wishes to use the words of the Torah to get Jews on board with their projects and give that project both a diversity tick box result and the imprimatur of Jewish support.

Cynicism, although it might be hard for some, needs to be seen as a defensive weapon both for the individual and the community. We need to build that Iron Wall of cynicism between us and those who wish to exploit us or do us harm.

I’d like to end this piece with a prayer, one that has been going through my head for the last few weeks and which is being said in varied forms by many of my online Israeli friends and it is this: May Hashem, the Israeli Defence Forces and the Israeli people avenge the blood of the martyrs and crush this latest manifestation of Amalek into dust.