To many people, theGolders Green stabbingsalready feel like old news. There was the frenzy of coverage, the spotlight on panicking Jews, the conspiracy theories and mockery. Then the world moved on.
So it was with special gratitude that the community responded toa visit from the King, one of Anglo-Jewry’s closest friends, on Thursday. The relationship has always been warm and personal. Back in 2023, on the eve of His Majesty’s coronation,the Chief Rabbi was invited to a sleepover at St James’ Palaceso he could walk to the ceremony on the Jewish sabbath.
As Moshe Shine, 76, one of the stabbing victims, put it: “[The King] said, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ It was the simplicity of it, in the nicest possible way. His ability to interact with ordinary people.”
Which brings us to Prince Harry. Say what you like about the Windsors’ enfant terrible, at least he hasn’t jumped on thewatermelon bandwagon. Given his liberal Montecito milieu, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to don an alpaca-hair keffiyeh and pose for pictures at the Gaza border. So far, however, the Prince has held out.
Last year, his Archewell Foundationquietly cut tieswith a US-based Muslim organisation after its founder used the slogan “from the river to the sea” and described Israel as an “apartheid state”.
“We have zero tolerance for hateful words, actions or propaganda,” Archewell executives wrote in a scathing email to Janan Najeeb, the Palestinian-American head of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition. “We will be removing MWC from our network.”
To underline this position,Harry has penned an essay for theNew Statesman. Incredibly, it barely mentioned the plight of the Palestinians – even after the gruesomeOctober 7 Civil Commissionreport, it will always be called a plight – and focused instead on the “deeply troubling” rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. For this, our Harry deserves full credit.
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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: lift the bonnet and his essay still chimed with the usual calumnies. While Harry emphasised the obvious, often overlooked, point that “hatred directed at people for who they are” is “not protest” but “prejudice”, and decried the “lethal violence in London andManchester”, he used several of his paragraphs to condemn Israel.
“The scale of human suffering … demands sustained scrutiny and action from the international community,” he wrote, adding that the Jewish state – which he did not mention by name – was acting “without accountability, and in ways that raise serious questions under international humanitarian law”.
Did Harry read the full details ofOctober 7, released this week? The butchery, rape, mutilation, humiliation and necrophilia? The way Palestinian savages sliced off body parts during a rape, played games with them, then sent triumphant videos to their families? Faced with 251 hostages and a strategy of human shields, how was Jerusalem supposed to react? How would we? (OK, don’t answer that one.)
Blind to the truths of our times, that anti-Semitism takes its fullest expression as Israelophobia, wears the cloak of benevolence towards self-hating Jews, takes its strength from disinformation and its outrage from luxury – he appeared to confirm the very demonisation that lies at the root of the problem.
“Nothing, whether criticism of a government or the reality of violence and destruction, can ever justify hostility toward an entire people or faith,” he wrote, contrasting the bad Jews who relish bloodshed with the good Jews who are “openly and publicly critical of certain state actions”.
On top of this, Harry lamented the “devastating loss of life among journalists in Gaza, undermining transparency and accountability at a time when both are essential”. Was he unaware how many “journalists” appeared on lists of martyred terrorists released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad?
But now I’ve fallen into the trap of criticising the Prince. I didn’t mean to. He’s a celebrity, not an intellectual or a working royal, and his wife flogs lifestyle products. It would be too much to expect him to puncture the cataracts of propaganda that cap the eyes of almost everybody.
My point is that in his own feeble and inadequate way, Harry is resisting the herd and doing his best to stand by the Jews. It may be a low bar, but that is largely what qualifies as bravery these days. In the future, once the King’s generation is gone, that may be all we have left.