The most urgent threat to diaspora Jews
by Melanie Phillips:
Assumption that LSE thuggery was about Tzipi Hotovely is wide of the mark.
The violent scenes surrounding this week’s appearance by Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, at the London School of Economics shocked decent people in Britain.
After her talk and subsequent discussion took place uninterrupted, Hotovely had to be bundled out of the building under heavy security against an aggressive mob outside. Police held back protesters as they tried to rush the ambassador’s car, yelling “aren’t you ashamed” and calling Israel a “terrorist state”. Frightened Jewish students concealed their kipahs as they walked past the protesters.
The protests were organised by Palestinian and Islamic societies across London universities. Groups on campus had shared calls for violence while accusing the LSE students’ union of “platforming racism”.
An Instagram group called LSE Class War called on social media for the ambassador’s window to be smashed. “Let’s f****** frighten her,” it ranted. “Let’s make her shake”.
British politicians called this LSE thuggery “deeply disturbing” and “unacceptable”. Needless to say, this treatment would be meted out to no other ambassador from any other country in the world.
Hotovely, a former deputy foreign minister under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was ostensibly being targeted because of her uncompromising views on the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, her opposition to the “two-state solution” and her religious opposition to intermarriage.
The LSE Student Union’s Palestinian Society said Hotovely had “a track record of anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia and war crimes as well as actively facilitating apartheid and settler-colonial occupation”.
Hotovely is demonised in this way simply because she articulates certain unambiguous truths: the legal and historical right of the Jews to the entire land of Israel; the exterminatory, anti-Jewish animus behind the Palestinian cause; and the unparalleled record of Israel and its military in adhering to human rights.
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