Twenty-five years ago this week, I wrote an article for The Times. About terrorism. It appeared on the morning of 9/11, hours before the attacks on the Twin Towers took place.
In my piece, I argued that people in the West were facing an onslaught from totalitarians who were – mind, heart and soul – opposed to our way of life.
They wanted to eradicate the means by which a free society could continue to exist. A campaign was being conducted which had only one aim – annihilation.
Of course, those behind the violence utilised historic grievances and real injustices to rally support for their cause. But this was a cynical appropriation of suffering to advance fanaticism.
And the terrorists wanted to make the West feel a disabling guilt about resisting their claims. They were succeeding, as politicians, including in Britain, tried to appease them. But, I maintained, if we continued to show weakness in the face of terror, the terrorists would only be emboldened to escalate.
Even though my column appeared on that fateful Tuesday in September, it was not a prediction about what might happen to the US.
It was an analysis of what was happening to Israel. That country, I reported, was in the front line of a fight against a terrorist onslaught which was only growing. I had no idea my fears would become horrific reality in such terrible terms so soon.
I thought about that article again this week. And only partly because of the 9/11 anniversary. What really brought it to mind was the welcome for Ed Miliband’s decision to sanction Israel. From Hamas.
Members of the Jewish community comfort each other near the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, where two people died in a terror attack in October 2025
A hijacked plane crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, while the North Tower is burning
Hamas – the same organisation whose members danced in the streets 25 years ago to celebrate the massacre of the innocents in New York. Hamas, whose killers were responsible, on October 7 2023, for the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Hamas, whose whole existence is dedicated to the erasure of the existence of any Jewish homeland.
For those who believe in terror, embrace violence and hate the West, Tuesday was another day of celebration. Another day when the West weakened democracy in its fight against fanaticism, accepted the propaganda of those who wish to weaken us, and lowered our resistance to the extremists who hate our way of life.
And while Hamas and its allies celebrated, others mourned. And warned of more mourning to come.
The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis responded to Ed Miliband’s Hamas-approved sanctions announcement with sadness, saying: ‘The measures announced amount to little more than political flag-bearing for mendacious anti-Israel rhetoric and those who harbour a dangerous obsession with the Jewish state. These measures will succeed only in bolstering the very extremism they seek to target.’
Sir Ephraim knows only too well how the toxic campaign to demonise Israel, to dehumanise Jewish lives, to depict the world’s only Jewish state as an incubator of evil, a home of child-killers and a uniquely wicked renegade entity, has become the driver here in Britain of increasingly ugly and violent anti-Semitism.
Fine minds in the Foreign Office may argue they are drawing a delicate distinction in their sanctions regime against settlers in the West Bank and Israelis elsewhere.
But what the world sees is not a finely tuned and careful tilting of the diplomatic scales but another step along the path I warned of 25 years ago – an acceptance of the extremists’ desire to make Israel a weakened, friendless, pariah and an emboldening of them to extend their campaign against the whole West.
When I was in Government I sought to bring in measures to stop the singling out of Israel for punitive measures. I was concerned that the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign was not a movement for peace but a weapon directed against the world’s only Jewish state.
The founders of that campaign were clear they did not believe in a two-state solution, their principal aim was the delegitimisation of Israel, and if Palestinian prosperity suffered along the way, so be it. Ed Miliband says he doesn’t support the BDS campaign but he is implementing the measures they want against the country they hate in the hope that Israel gives in to external pressure.
For decades now the Foreign Office and like-minded appeasers across the globe have argued that Israel must surrender territory if it is to have security. It must give up land for peace.
But that, I argued 25 years ago, was what we told the Czechs they must do at Munich in 1938.
And that ‘peace process’ brought neither security to the Czechs nor salve to our conscience, but only encouragement to evil.
Again and again, Israel has sought a peace with its neighbours only for extremists to make clear that they are not interested in a viable Palestinian state.
They want the extinction of the Jewish state.
And every time we make concessions, or give encouragement to the extremists by placing pressure on Israel to yield, to retreat, to drop its sword, the extremists’ ardour only grows.
And we experience the tragic consequences here at home. Our Government responded to the massacre on October 7 by granting diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian state which is Hamas’ immediate goal.
Ed Miliband says he doesn’t support the BDS campaign but he is implementing the measures they want against the country they hate, writes Michael Gove
Protestors take part in a demonstration outside Downing Street organised by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, one week after the Manchester synagogue attack
The signal was sent – once more – that killing Jews would lead the West to retreat. So Jews were increasingly targeted worldwide. Including on our streets. Jews killed at a synagogue in Manchester, Jewish ambulances firebombed in London, Jewish citizens assaulted in broad daylight.
This is not just a moral stain on our nation. It is a steadfast refusal to learn from the crimes of the past. It’s an ironclad law of history that countries which are descending into darkness are those which are becoming progressively more unsafe for Jewish individuals and the Jewish community – the Spain of the Inquisition, the Vienna of the 1900s, Germany in the Thirties, Russia in the last decade.
It is a parallel law that those countries in which the Jewish community has felt most safe at any time are the countries where freedom and progress is most secure at any time. The Netherlands of the 17th century. Britain in the first decades of the last century. America in the second half of that century.
So when Jewish people are under threat, all our freedoms are threatened. The safety of the Jewish community is the canary in the mine. Growing anti-Semitism is a fever which weakens the whole body politic. It is a mark of a society turning to darkness and in on itself.
In its heart, the Government knows this. That is why, when Ed Miliband announced his sanctions regime on Tuesday he also stated that there was enhanced spending on security for Jewish schools, community groups and synagogues.
He was acknowledging, without accepting honestly, that singling out Israel for condemnation in this way on the world stage would mean Jews being singled out on our streets for attack.
And history reminds us that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. Anti-Semitism is the dark furious energy behind the worst extremism of Left and Right, the extremism which opposes Western enlightenment values and wants to destroy the democratic freedoms which have underpinned the West’s success.
We have seen anti-Semitism grow in force and wicked attraction on the extreme Left, with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and now Zack Polanski’s Greens promoting anti-Israel rhetoric that soon becomes straightforward Jew hate. And it is growing, too, on the other extreme.
Former British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin has appeared on podcasts hosted by Islamist propagandists to share their anti-Semitic prejudices. Keyboard warriors of the online Right trade increasingly hateful conspiracy theories, with activists supporting Rupert Lowe’s Restore party attacking Reform and the Tories for being in hock to the ‘Jewish lobby’.
What their activities reveal is that so much of the ire directed against Israel is not for what it does – but for what it is. The extremists hate the fact that Israel is an open, democratic, successful society which gives all its people – Arab and Jew; Christian, Muslim and of no faith – a more prosperous and secure existence than any state in the region, from the Atlantic shore of Morocco to the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
For the extreme Left this is a denial of their belief that capitalism is only successful owing to centuries of imperial exploitation. Because Israel is a state itself composed of asylum-seekers and refugees, who have built a hugely successful free market economy without the blessings of any natural resources, it is a standing rebuke to their anti-Western obsessions.
For the extreme Right, Israel’s open, pluralist culture, with massive Gay Pride Marches in Tel Aviv and raucous democratic dissent, is an affront to their anti-liberal ideology.
And, of course, for Islamists, Israel is an obstacle to their desire to see the world governed by a totalitarian interpretation of their faith with sharia governing every human interaction. The fact that Muslim and Christian Arab Israelis enjoy rights and opportunities greater than anywhere in the Arab world is a crime against their bleak and austere world view.
Of course, because Israel is a democracy, governed by fallible men and women, it makes mistakes. Sometimes grave ones. There are politicians in Israel’s current government who have said wicked things and committed wrongful acts. We should not shy away from criticising them. Often in forceful terms.
But the sins of Israel’s politicians, and political system, pall in comparison to the murderous acts of totalitarian regimes like China with whom we continue to trade generously and co-operate happily. The message to the rest of the world is again clear. Antagonists with muscle and the ruthlessness to use it against the West will be appeased. And we will not stand steadfast by the state which has been most consistently in the front line against terror – Israel.
The consequences for us, history indicates, will not be kind.
Weakness is always more provocative than strength. The abandonment of those whom we have said are our allies leaves us not further from our enemies’ reach but more tempting targets than before. That was our experience of appeasement in the Thirties. And also the lesson of our scuttle from Afghanistan five years ago, which encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine and test the West’s solidarity.
In concrete terms, Israel provides us not just with a forward bulwark against extremism but a defence and intelligence partner whose technology and expertise has daily made us safer. We have impaired that relationship, and as defence sources have confirmed, weakened our own protections.
But arguably even worse, in moral and strategic terms we have confirmed what Osama bin Laden believed 25 years ago. People will look to see who is the strong horse and who the weak horse and they will follow the strong horse.
In Russia and in China they apply the same cruel realpolitik logic in different terms.
They live by Lenin’s dictum – push in the bayonet, and if you encounter steel, withdraw, if you encounter mush, push on.
The question for all of us in democracies and across the West is existential. Twenty five years after we were tested as never before, do we still have the steel to resist?
- Baron Gove of Torry is a Conservative peer and editor of The Spectator, spectator.com
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