The truth about Jews for Palestine
by Daniel Sugarman, UnHerd:
Neturei Karta are Hamas’s useful idiots.
At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: Godly and Compassionate. Zionism: Godless and Merciless”, or “Authentic Jewry Worldwide Never Recognised the State of Israel or Jerusalem as its Capital”. At the bottom of the placards, there is inevitably a mention of either “NKEurope” or “NKUSA”. “NK” stands for “Neturei Karta”, Aramaic for “Guardians of the City”, the name of the group the men belong to.
The Neturei Karta are around 5,000-strong, at most 0.03% of the world’s Jewish population, although only a fraction of the group attend such rallies. They are not the only anti-Zionist Jews to join these protests, but it is their presence which seems to attract the most support in anti-Israel circles. The reason is obvious. People who are not part of a specific minority often seek to paint an easy picture of what that minority “looks like” — and, to the non-Jewish eye, the Neturei Karta look like stereotypical Jews. Male members will wear a shtreimel, the round fur hat worn on the Sabbath and Festival days, and a bekishe, the black frock coat. They will grow beards and peyos — long sidelocks. The message they propagate also chimes closely with what many extreme anti-Israel ideologues believe: that they are against Zionism, not Judaism, and that the two things are not simply unconnected, but antithetical.
For these reasons, pictures of the Neturei Karta are widely shared, with the suggestion — openly encouraged by the signs they carry — that they are “real” Jews, and the majority of the world’s Jews who support Zionism are in fact fake. When, for instance, someone shared a picture on X of the Neturei Karta at a London protest, William Dalrymple, historian, podcaster and co-founder of the Jaipur Festival, responded saying “They are heroes” (a statement he later deleted). Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, the lawyer and academic, shared a video of a Muslim man thanking this group at a New York protest “for condemning Israel [sic] genocide of the Palestinians”.
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