Scotland, Populism and The Jews

Last night, the final night of Passover, a subscriber update from The National, Scotlands pro-independence newspaper, landed in my inbox. Of the five top stories it promoted, three were dedicated to attacking Israel, each dripping with blood libel, Holocaust inversion, and demonizing language calculated to inflame emotions and manufacture outrage. But this has nothing to do with Palestinian rights. This is about next year’s Scottish Elections.

In the UK, Newspapers are not governed by the same rules as broadcasters are. Political bias in print is nothing new, in fact it’s expected. The National makes no secret of its pro-independence stance, and that’s well within its rights. But at what point does open bias become sinister? At what point does journalistic integrity step in? Is openly misleading your readers in order to drive their emotions still journalism? And is there any ethical or moral line that should prevent the exploitation of the suffering of Palestinian people for domestic politics? 

Because make no mistake, this isn’t about Palestine. It’s about power.

The pro-Palestinian PR machine has has spent two decades expertly aligning itself with other causes. In Scotland, this has manifested as the painting of the narrative onto Scottish nationalism and the fight for independence. In this analogy, the Palestinians are the Scots, and Israel is the English. The fact that this is entirely backwards, and that actually the establishment of Israel decolonized the land from 1300 years of imperial caliphate rule and struck a decisive blow against the British Empire no longer matters, the idea has sunk in, and the emotions are strong. 

The rage against English rule here is real. Rule from “Westmonster” is considered imperial oppression, and those that subscribe to this view genuinely feel the pain of their ancestors, those dispossessed in the Highland Clearances, starved, slaughtered, transported as indentured slaves to America and Australia, their culture outlawed and their language brutally suppressed. These people believe that their own pain is mirrored in Palestinian suffering, and unable to launch armed attacks against the British army, they exorcise their impotent rage at the British establishment by aiming it at Israel, often via attacks on Scottish Jews.  

Against this backdrop, The SNP government is heading into next years elections more threatened by Labour than it has been in years. Dogged by scandal and catastrophic failures such as the CalMac Ferries debacle, the struggling NHS, and the gender recognition law disaster, in order to maintain their control of the Scottish Parliament and keep the dream of Independence alive, the SNP desperately need to create distance between themselves and the Labour Party in the minds of their voters. This is where mouthpieces like The National come in, and the vehicle they are choosing for this campaign is Palestine. 

The goal is to stir emotion, create subconscious associations between Labour and Imperialism, and scapegoat Jews as the common enemy. It’s a trick as old as time. 

The cynicism with which The National chooses to mislead its readers and drive hate against Scottish Jews is breathtaking, and cannot be claimed to be accidental. In “Use Scots Law to Prosecute IDF soldiers in Scotland for war crimes, SNP urged” they spotlight ex-IDF spokesman Richard Hecht, who lived, as the majority of Scottish Jews do, in the Glasgow area of Newton Mearns until he was nine years old, and speaks English with a slight Scottish accent. 

To use a child’s residence in 1980’s Glasgow to create a tenuous link between the biggest community of Jews in Scotland and the Israeli military is a decision, not an accident. The community in Newton Mearns is under seige, regularly harassed and abused, not least by the founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign Mick Napier, a man under investigation for multiple hate crimes and for his alleged links to Hezbollah, who’s incessant yelling about Jews “raping comely gentile women” is a sound now as familiar to Scottish Jews as rain on windows. 

The National’s legal team surely knows that no court, not even the ICJ, has declared that Israel is committing genocide. They know, as their readers may not, that “plausibility” in this context simply meant that the court would hear the case, not that a genocide was plausibly taking place. That’s why they omit the ICJ entirely and instead use terms like “credibly accused,” leaning on sources like Amnesty International and Francesca Albanese, both widely discredited for antisemitic bias. They also know that for Scots law to apply, war crimes would need to be proven. The whole article is a legal fiction; a hateful house of cards, built on vitriolic quicksand.

Why would they do this?! Why would they use deliberately misleading legal babble to put a vulnerable community further at risk? Look closely. Every single link in that story, bar two about Israeli soldiers, takes the reader to another piece that criticizes the Labour government, and associates Labour with sinister links to Israel. This isn’t a legal argument, its a political weapon.

Thats just one story. Everyday this pattern is repeated, up to three times a day sometimes.

Using blood libel against Jews to manipulate the mob and secure political power is no novel idea. It’s the oldest political playbook there is; irresponsible, unethical, and profoundly dangerous.

The Spanish Inquisition used religious purity as a tool to solidify the Catholic monarchy’s rule over a fractured country. Tens of thousands of Jews were brutally murdered, many more tortured into forced conversions, and around 200,000 expelled. Nazi Germany scapegoated Jews for economic hardship and the loss of the First World War, stoking nationalist fervor to consolidate power and justify expansionism. Six million Jews were killed. In Soviet Russia, Stalin accused Jews of being “rootless cosmopolitans” to distract from the failures of communism and unite the population against an imaginary internal enemy. Tens of thousands of Jews were executed, imprisoned, or disappeared, likely far more.

It is not hyperbolic to say that the SNP, if it continues to consent to this, is following in this dark tradition, and Scotland only has 5000 Jews to start with. 

This is exactly what has played out in Ireland, where hostile populism has led to the Israeli embassy closing, and an Irish Jewish woman being dragged screaming out of a Holocaust memorial event. Irish band Kneecap even got their fans to chant “Ooh Ah up Hezbollah” in a revamp of the old IRA slogan “Up the Ra”, proving in one moment that this is less about Palestinian rights and more about misinformed ideologues projecting their romanticized dreams of past violence onto an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Ireland is now widely considered the most antisemitic country in Europe, and Scotland is not far behind.

The SNP has a moral obligation to course correct, and fast. It must risk the votes of its own extremists in order to protect it’s 5000 Jewish citizens. It must remember Scotlands proud distinction as the only European country that, up until October 7th, had never persecuted it’s Jews. 

That would be leadership. That would be strength. That would be Scottish. 

photo credit Leah Benoz