jenlaitnergerber 🇺🇦🎗️

When I was posted at our embassy in Tel Aviv I met lots of British Jews now living there. Many had long wanted to make Aliyah. But a significant number I met had relocated from the UK in just the past few years - the likes of the pro-Palestine marches, chance hostile encounters and a pervading fear of attacks had led them to conclude British wasn’t a safe or welcoming place for them anymore. I had lots of those conversations because I didn’t quite believe things had got that bad or perhaps didn’t want to believe they had. Yes my experience is only anecdotal but each of those conversations was profoundly depressing. And my worry is that today’s news in Golders Green and the continuing lack of any real substantive action to make Jews feel safe and welcome here will just lead more to leave

Heartwarming. I am especially pleased the West is being forced to stop pretending Israel has no nuclear weapons.

In Margate. My cheeks are red. I am shaking. I popped into an exhibition that turned out to be the insane fever dream of an artist called Matthew Collins: ‘Drawings Against Genocide.’ The exhibition is described as ‘drawings… raising consciousness about hell…. Israel is the pure encapsulation of it. Zionism is this terror state’s ruling ideology.’ Shocked by the use of Nazi imagery - the room is full of the Star of David pasted around figures meant to be Israelis and the Jewish ‘lobby’ spewing blood, to say nothing of blonde yummy mummies wearing ‘globalise the intifada’ shirts, I spoke to the artist to share my reaction as a Jewish person. He was instantly aggressive. As soon as I started to say I was shocked and threatened by what I was seeing because it was Nazi imagery, the artist started yelling at me that I didn’t mean anything I was saying. Anytime I tried to speak (calmly) he said: ‘you don’t mean any of what you said, you’re just repeating ‘hasbarah talking points’ because ‘you’re defending a genocide’. On and on he yelled, in my face. I said: ‘if I was a Black person…’ but couldn’t finish the sentence because: ‘you’re not are you?’ On the Nazi ideology point he said: ‘yeah. Why do you think it’s there. Israel are the Nazis’. His breath was disgusting. The crowd began booing and closing in around me, making to shoe me out. I said: ‘fine, get the Jew out’ and he yelled more across the room at me, ‘repeatedly jeering ‘call the police, go ahead, call the police’. I said I would, and the community security trust, which features as a devil in his exhibition. This was met with even more jeering. ‘Yeah, call the CST’ was the last I heard before leaving. Someone snapped pictures of me while I was being shouted at. Short video shows the artist. The longer video, of our final almost surreally disgusting exchange, didn’t record.

Could Harriet Harman be more patronising and insulting? ‘Didn’t take away’? Seriously?

The IDF says it has dispatched Home Front Command search and rescue soldiers to the sites of reported impacts in central Israel, after Iran fired a ballistic missile carrying a cluster bomb warhead. No injuries have been reported.

Another video shows the moment a fragment from an Iranian missile struck inside the Mughrabi Gate at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.