Nablus on the West Bank used to be associated with the Biblical city of Shechem. It was re-named after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the seventh century, and today it is one of the hotbeds of Palestinian terror.
Again and again, Israeli forces have had to enter the town to do battle with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and smaller armed groups like Lion’s Den. If you visit, cast your eyes across the ancient walls; you will see them plastered with martyrdom posters and factional graffiti.
Yet since January, Nablus has formally been twinned with Brent Council. Out of all the cities in the world, why this one? I think we know the answer. Forgive me if I am a little sick.
It is no surprise, therefore, that it was in Brent-Nablus that the attempted firebombing of the Kenton synagogue took place.
There could be no better illustration of the connection between the indulgence of antisemitism since October 7 and physical violence against Jews. This is a foreign bigotry imported into Britain - and our oldest minority is paying the price.
The Prime Minister called the arson “appalling”. Hamish Falconer MP, the Middle East minister, described it as “completely unacceptable”.
Not just unacceptable, mark you, but completely unacceptable. Clearly, these people mean business.
Oh, now I’ve done another little sick. It was only in January – just as the twinning was confirmed, as it happened – that a picture of Falconer gurning for all he was worth outside the new “Palestinian embassy” in London circulated, as he marked its official inauguration.
That was the result of British recognition of a Palestinian state back in September. Don’t get me wrong, in a world of clouds and coconuts and bears, it would be lovely for the Palestinians to live peacefully in their own modern democracy alongside Israel.
Certainly, that option has long been open to them. The people of Gaza could have built that reality when Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005; instead, they destroyed the infrastructure the Jews had left behind and turned the place into an enclave of jihad that led to October 7.
This is what happens when a British council twins with a hotbed of Palestinian terror - Jake Wallis Simons
|Getty Images
They could have done it in 2000, when they turned down an offer of a state. “You walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities, and you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open,” Bill Clinton, who brokered the talks, recently lamented.
Hell, they could have done it in 2008, when the Ehud Olmert government offered Ramallah 100 per cent of its demands, including a state on 94 per cent of the West Bank with six per cent of Israeli territory to make up the difference, together with East Jerusalem, an internationally administered Old City, a tunnel connecting the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel accepting a thousand Palestinian refugees annually for five years, with financial compensation for the rest. Yet once again, they turned it down, and the terrorism of Nablus was the result.
Which, shamefully enough, brings us back to Britain. When the government recognised Palestine, Israeli hostages still languished in the catacombs of Gaza.
Downing Street did not demand their freedom as a price for recognition. Neither did it demand that they renounce terrorism, or remove antisemitic material from their school curricula, or express full, peaceful recognition of Israel.
Which was why the sight of ministers gurning on the steps of Palestine’s London embassy turned the stomach, and why David Lammy was humiliatingly heckled in Manchester when he visited in the aftermath of the murder of two Jews at a synagogue in October.
That is to say, this feeble Government fans the flames with one hand and reaches for the water pistol with the other. Our leadership class seems constitutionally unable to carry out one simple task: deciding which side it is on.
Let me make it clear for them. In the struggle between Israel and jihadism, only one of the sides has blown up the London Underground, stabbed Britons on our streets and killed 22 little girls and their families at an Ariana Grande concert.
Only one of the sides, by contrast, is a liberal democracy that respects the rights of women and minorities and helps keep Britons safe via intelligence sharing. It really shouldn’t be this hard.
The first Gaza rally was allowed to disfigure London on October 8 2023, less than 24 hours after the atrocities, before the blood was even dry in southern Israel. How could that have been about Israeli brutality? All the Jews had done was get massacred.
No, this was a celebration of savagery, and if “hate marches” wasn’t the right term for that, I don’t know what was. Yet when Suella Braverman called a spade a spade, she ended up out of office.
When the Jewish Chronicle, of which I was editor at the time, revealed the Hamas connections of the organisers of the marches, it made zero difference.
So began a disgraceful three years of indulgence of these people. Yes, there were erratic attempts to clamp down; the three people wearing stickers of a Hamas paraglider were arrested, a handful of others for chanting their desire to “globalise the Intifada” were detained, and Palestine Action was ham-fistedly proscribed. But the overall permissiveness was unmistakable.
It was driven home last week when we saw photographs of the police confronting people in Epsom, who had taken to the streets in anger after a woman was gang-raped outside a church. The coppers were all tooled up in riot gear, including helmets, truncheons and shields.
So they did still have the kit! Not once had that approach been taken towards the Gaza racists, but once there’s a sniff of the “far-Right”, it comes straight out of storage.
One thing is certain: if the police had taken the same attitude towards the Palestine encampments, the hate preachers and the Israelophobic fanatics, who continue to march long after the ceasefire and are now turning their hand to arson, the problem would have been solved long ago.
It is becoming a trend. The Kenton attack was just the latest of four such incidents, as well as a botched drone assault and knife attack against the Israeli embassy in Kensington.
Obviously, you can’t eradicate antisemitism simply by the police clamping down. But it would sure as hell be a good start. Right now, these Jew-haters are taking Britain for fools.
They are operating freely in our universities, preaching bigotry in mosques, marching in our streets and holding vigils for the late Ayatollah. If these people were all white nationalists, they’d have been dealt with long ago. But when it comes to the Jews, it’s a different story.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out now