London Is Burning and They’re Talking About Israel?

I am sitting in London, and I cannot turn on the radio or television without hearing about Israel. A little about Ukraine. Not the NHS’s never-ending waiting lists.

Not the cost of heating a flat through a British winter, which I am told has become a genuine crisis for pensioners choosing between food and warmth. Not the Channel crossings, not the slow economic hangover from Brexit, not the crumbling infrastructure. A little about refugees. But mostly Israel. Again. Still.

I bring this up because it makes no sense to me. I come from a country that is actually at war, and even we don’t get the same type of news coverage. Okay, the upcoming election gets much of the news.

But I land in London and discover that the British media is more consumed with what Israel is doing than with what is happening to British people in Britain. Just today they announced they are letting prisoners go free, because they have no space for the new prisoners. But in the next breath, Israel again.

What exactly is the theory here? If Britain’s politicians and commentators succeed in pressuring Israel (good luck with that), or sanctioning Israel (you scare us, HA), or condemning Israel in successive parliamentary motions, will gas prices drop? Will the NHS hire more GPs? Will the people sleeping rough outside Victoria Station have a better night?

The answer, obviously, is no.
None of those things will happen.

Britain’s genuine domestic problems have nothing to do with Israel, and every hour of airtime devoted to relitigating the history of Zionism is an hour not spent on any of them. Which raises the uncomfortable question of who this actually serves.

It gives politicians a moral performance that costs them nothing and fixes nothing. It gives commentators an enemy that is conveniently far away and small enough to seem manageable. It is, in the oldest and most recognizable tradition, a distraction, anti-semitic doublespeak the UK has been doing since the early 1900s.

Standing in London watching the news loop, I felt the weight of the world in a way I do not normally feel it in Rehovot. In Israel you are busy living, and just getting on with your day. In the UK you are a subject,  a topic. And the TV commentators don’t write their own prompts.

For readers who live in Britain or anywhere in the Diaspora and who have started to absorb this background noise as normal: It is not analysis. It is not journalism in any meaningful sense. When a country with the problems Britain currently has makes a foreign conflict its central cultural obsession, you are watching something older than politics at work.

Britain is not reaching for anything real right now. It is performing. And maybe just mirroring what is going on in many other places.

All of you in the Diaspora, the ones who have convinced themselves that engagement, that being good visible citizens, that participating loudly in civic life, or backing some candidate, will eventually make them safe and accepted. That didn’t work against Greece, Rome, or Hitler, did it?

I watched British television for a few days. I heard the tone. I heard what is underneath the political language, the casual assumptions, the framing. Your neighbors are not talking about Israeli government policy. They have decided, at some level they may not even fully articulate to themselves, that the Jews are the problem. Policy is just the current vocabulary for it.

Brexit did not fix what it promised to fix.
The economy did not respond as advertised.
The refugees kept coming because the conditions that produce refugees did not change.
The NHS did not improve.

All of that is hard and structural and requires actual sacrifice and actual hard choices from actual politicians.

Whereas Israel, Jews, Zionism, all of that is frictionless. You can have very strong feelings about it at no personal cost whatsoever. You can march. You can sign. You can feel righteous before dinner.

I fly home to Rehovot in a few days, back to the noise of jets, and the particular quality of Israeli morning light and the absolute absence of anyone on television spending significant airtime worrying about what Britain thinks of us.

We have other things to worry about.
Real things, with real consequences, that land on real people.

London is a great city. I understand why people love it.

But something is wrong in a place when its public conversation is more animated about a country the size of New Jersey than about its own people going cold in winter.

That is not concern for justice.

It is something else, and I suspect many people in that country, if they sat quietly with themselves for a moment, would already know what it is.