Israeli minister’s Labour warning

Britain’s general election campaign is being watched around the world, especially in countries that have relied on our support. One of those countries is Israel, where I spent a few days earlier this week as part of a Europe Israel Press Association delegation. I write about it in next week’s magazine, but there was one exchange that stands out.

I met Amichai Chikli. He’s Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, is a member of Benjamin Netenyahu’s cabinet, and also of his Likud party. His job is to look after ties between the State of Israel and Jewish people. It’s a big task: the ministry’s website says the ‘Israeli government sees itself as being responsible for all Jews worldwide’. So he has firm views on how safe (or otherwise) countries are for Jewish people. 

Keir Starmer has been famous for rooting out Corbynism from the Labour party and kicking out candidates who have so much as liked anti-Semitic tweets – but Chikli is still nervous about the UK under Labour. Speaking at Israel’s Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on Wednesday, he was talking about levels of anti-Semitism across Europe. He then had this to say:

The worst is England. In England, my prediction? We’re seeing that Labour is going to win the election. It would be a miracle if the Conservatives win… Now their [Labour’s] policy is pro-Islamist. Because they are in what we call a red-green alliance. Green? Islam. Red? Communism.

This is not a charge that Starmer has faced in Britain. On the contrary, the pro-Gaza movement have often been opposed to the Labour leadership. My colleague James Heale has reported that party supporters in Bristol Central were using the Palestinian flag in a campaign to try to unseat Labour’s Thangham Debonnaire.

So had Chikli appreciated the pretty big difference between Starmer and the Corbynism that he has spent the last few years trying to vanquish? 

Chikli conceded that Starmer:

is not like Jeremy Corbyn, he is far more moderate. We don’t see them [Labour] as bad, but I see them as naive. They do not understand that they are playing a movement which is very, very dangerous.

And he did not elaborate as to how Labour is playing with any movements. He said:

We saw the demonstrations in the streets. We saw the statements made by many of those leaders who were elected with the messages of Hamas. We saw Big Ben with ‘from the river to the sea’ slogans. So we are seeing what’s happening on the streets, we are seeing what’s happening in the lections, we are seeing what’s happening to people who wear the Magen David, and were beaten. We are seeing what’s happening with students on the campuses. With all this information, we can see that political power is possessed with the Muslim community which is being radicalised, also with a lot of money from Qatar. This is a major threat to the future of the UK.

He then praised Tommy Robinson, who arranged a counter-protest for the pro-Palestinian march on Remembrance Sunday. ‘That was something nice to see – that people care and they go out,’ he said. ‘We’re seeing Nigel Farage and his efforts against radical Islam’. 

How seriously should we take all this? Is this the view of the Netanyahu government, or Likud? As far as we know, it’s just the opinion of one of the Israeli government’s prominent ministers – and a loose-mouthed one at that. Chakli has previously had plenty to say about George Soros and Tel Aviv’s pride parades. Earlier this year, he claimed that London is the anti-Semitic capital of the West. The far right, he said, did not pose as much of an anti-Semitic threat in Europe as Islamism. ‘The Nazis are in the pubs. You don’t see hundreds of thousands of them in the street. They’re not a real threat. They’re on the fringes of society.’

Israeli matters may fill much of Starmer’s first few weeks in No. 10. A full-out war with Israel and Lebanon this summer could give him his first foreign policy crisis. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has threatened to attack Cyprus, chunks of which are still run by the UK for military purposes. Starmer has spent years trying to persuade people in the UK that his party is completely different from the one which was defeated so resoundingly in 2019. But listening to Mr Chikli, it seems that old perceptions die pretty hard.