By Rabbi Charley Baginsky
Co-Lead of Progressive Judaism

Read the published version of this article, in Hebrew, written for Telem (the Israeli platform for a different political conversation) by clicking here.

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In recent months, a new phenomenon has unsettled British Jewish life: the growing warmth between parts of Israel’s political right and figures from the English-speaking far right, most recently, the invitation extended to Tommy Robinson, founder of the violently Islamophobic English Defence League. For Israelis, this may appear like another small theatre in a global culture war. For many British Jews, it is a moment of deep unease, and of painful recognition.

I write as co-Lead of the newly created Movement for Progressive Judaism, the body uniting what were previously Britain’s Liberal and Reform Jewish denominations. Together, we now represent almost thirty percent of synagogue-affiliated Jews, a newly visible and cohesive centre of Jewish life that is proudly liberal, democratic and open to dialogue. Our emergence coincides with one of the most difficult years in Jewish memory. After the atrocities of October 7th, and in Britain’s case, after the local shocks that followed in its wake, our community faced not only grief but paralysis.

Unlike Israelis, who took to the streets in their tens of thousands through 2023 and again after the war began, waving Israeli flags beside pro-democracy banners, many British Jews had no equivalent outlet. The synagogue and the street are not contiguous spaces here. Our fears, both of rising antisemitism and of public hostility to Israel, turned quickly inward. The impulse to gather in civic protest was replaced by a communal instinct toward quiet. For many, it simply did not feel like a time to speak of democracy or dissent; grief and fear demanded silence. But that silence created a vacuum. In the absence of a shared moral language, public expressions of solidarity too easily became tests of loyalty, signals of who could be trusted to love Israel loudly enough, and who could not.

That silence, I believe, forms part of the same emotional ecology that now produces these uneasy alliances between the Israeli right and the far right abroad. Both are responses to fear and isolation. Across Western democracies, liberal communities are experiencing a profound loneliness, a loss of moral confidence and social trust. Populist politics, amplified by digital culture, thrive on offering belonging through antagonism. Fear of the other becomes a substitute for civic connection.

In Israel, this manifests in the fusion of religious nationalism with authoritarian populism. In Britain, it appears as the re-legitimisation of far-right discourse in mainstream politics and the rebranding of xenophobia as patriotism. The two trends meet in figures like Robinson, who now declares himself a defender of Israel and an ally of the Jewish people. To an Israeli audience weary of global hostility, such flattery can sound appealing. But to those of us who know the British far right’s history, it sounds like the rehearsal of a familiar danger.

The movement Robinson founded, the English Defence League, emerged in 2009 as a street protest organisation targeting Muslims. Its demonstrations were marked by violence, racism and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Robinson himself remains one of Britain’s most divisive public figures. Born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, he built his following through social media, street demonstrations and incendiary videos that cast Muslims as an existential threat to Britain. He has served prison sentences for assault, immigration offences and contempt of court, and has been banned from most major online platforms for hate speech. Yet he continues to draw hundreds of thousands of supporters online and in the streets, many of whom now carry Israeli flags as symbols of defiance. For many British Jews, the sight of those flags at far-right rallies is profoundly disorienting. What was once a gesture of solidarity has been weaponised into a symbol of exclusion.

The invitation extended to Robinson by Israeli figures is part of a broader political realignment in which far-right movements across Europe and North America have sought moral validation through affinity with Israel. It is an embrace born of shared enemies rather than shared values. In this new geometry of identity politics, Israel becomes a totem of nationalist strength, while Jews abroad become the collateral of its misappropriation.

What is striking is how this narrative has begun to seep into the British mainstream. In the wake of rising antisemitism and deep communal fear, figures who trade in grievance politics and anti-migrant rhetoric have found willing partners among some who claim to speak for the Jewish community. At public rallies and in media appearances, voices once dismissed as populist outsiders now stand beside those invoking Jewish safety and solidarity with Israel. The symbolism is deliberate. It signals that British populism has learned to cloak itself in the language of protection, recasting Jews and Israel as proof of its moral seriousness — not out of empathy, but as a new front in the culture war.

Across these spaces, the tone has hardened. Appeals to vigilance have shaded into suspicion; words of grief have become cries of national decline. Many attend such gatherings out of genuine fear and longing for safety, but the rhetoric too often blurs into something darker; a story that divides the righteous from the traitorous, the loud from the loyal. What troubles many is not only the ease with which far-right tropes enter our communal spaces, but the quiet complicity that follows, the people who whisper discomfort in private yet applaud the same rhetoric in public. That gap between private conscience and public speech is where moral bankruptcy begins: when fear persuades good people to speak as if they no longer know what they believe

The Israeli right’s engagement with figures like Robinson fits within this broader pattern. Across Europe, Latin America and the United States, populist and nationalist movements are increasingly aligning around a shared civilisational narrative, the defence of so-called Judeo-Christian values against Islam, migrants and liberal elites. Israel, through its self-presentation as a beleaguered Western outpost, becomes both symbol and participant. For Israel’s governing right, such alliances appear pragmatic. They provide new diplomatic channels, friendly media and rhetorical support in international arenas increasingly critical of Israeli policy. But the cost is steep.

I believe that for British Jewry, these alliances undermine the credibility of our struggle against antisemitism. The very figures who claim to champion Jews are those whose politics have normalised conspiratorial thinking, anti-minority rhetoric and social division. Their embrace does not protect us, it isolates us further from the coalitions on which minority safety depends, Muslims, Black Britons, LGBTQ+ activists, civic democrats. For Israel, the cost is moral and strategic. By courting those who oppose pluralism at home, it risks eroding its own claim to democratic legitimacy abroad. By presenting itself as the West’s embattled frontier, it alienates liberal allies and deepens the gulf with Diaspora communities who still locate their Jewish identity in ethical universalism.

The tension became visible this August, when my co-lead Rabbi Josh Levy and I were invited to offer a prayer for the hostages outside Downing Street. The crowd, gathered in anguish and solidarity, turned on us as we began to speak. The booing was angry and it was frightening. It was not hatred, but it was fury, directed at us for speaking words of compassion that did not conform to a single, unquestioning narrative of loyalty. Their fear was understandable, antisemitic incidents in Britain have reached record levels. But it revealed a tragic irony, in the name of defending Israel, we were silencing Jews. That same fear drives some Israelis into the arms of the far right abroad. It is the belief that safety lies in strength alone, that moral complexity is weakness, and that those who share your enemies must therefore be your friends. But fear cannot be a political strategy. It breeds dependency, cynicism and finally betrayal.

Political theorists have long noted how populism transforms legitimate insecurity into polarisation. It offers a politics of belonging through exclusion, we the people, against them. In Israel, that them has shifted over time, from Palestinians to secular liberals, from the judiciary to protesters. In Britain, the populist them includes Muslims, migrants and elites, categories that antisemitic discourse easily re-enters when the mood turns. The same currents that normalise Islamophobia inevitably revive antisemitism. They share the same grammar, suspicion of dual loyalty, fear of demographic change, contempt for liberal institutions. That is why Jewish safety cannot be built on someone else’s fear. The moral insight that once grounded Jewish political thought, that our security is bound to that of our neighbours, must be recovered, not discarded.

The newly unified Movement for Progressive Judaism was created in this atmosphere of fragmentation. Its purpose is not only organisational but ethical, to reclaim a Jewish voice that is confident enough to be critical, compassionate enough to be brave. In the months after October 7th, many of our rabbis and members felt paralysed. They grieved deeply for Israel, but also for the loss of the moral clarity that had once shaped their relationship to it. Unlike in Israel, where the pro-democracy movement could continue its protest in the streets even amid war, here there was only the quiet of uncertainty. Yet silence, too, is a form of speech. It tells us that a community can lose its moral vocabulary when fear becomes its only language. The work ahead, in Britain, in Israel and across the Jewish world, is to rebuild that vocabulary, to show that security and justice are not opposites, that solidarity across boundaries is not naïve and that critique, in Jewish tradition, is an act of faith.

When Israeli leaders welcome figures like Robinson, they not only betray liberal Jews abroad, they betray their own citizens who believe in a democratic, pluralist Israel. And when British Jews, out of fear, stay silent in the face of such alliances, we too betray something, the prophetic courage that has always been our strength. Loneliness is the shared condition of liberalism today, Israelis who feel abandoned by Diaspora caution and Diaspora Jews who feel estranged from an Israel they once admired. But loneliness need not end in retreat. It can be the beginning of renewed solidarity, if we recognise that what isolates us is the same fear that tempts us to the wrong allies.

In the end, this is not about Robinson or any single alliance. It is about the struggle over the Jewish moral imagination, whether we will let fear define our friends, or whether we will once again have the courage to define ourselves.