Photo caption: Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Daniel Levy from Fourcast (via YouTube)
Sat 2 May 2026
Jewish Voice for Liberation Introduction:
Channel 4’s The Four Cast took a deep dive on 30 April into the implications of the Golders Green stabbings and the calls for restricting Palestinian protest which have followed. Channel 4 lead presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed British Israeli negotiator, analyst and author Daniel Levy, who fully acknowledged the fear and hurt British Jews are feeling, while warning against creating “a false binary”. There is “not an incompatibility between Jewish safety and civil liberties,” Levy said.
Below is an edited transcript of Levy’s conversation with Guru-Murthy.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy (KGM): What do you make of the reaction that we’ve seen since yesterday from those people like the independent reviewer of terrorism calling for the pro Palestine marches to be banned … for this to become the number one priority of the government. What do you make of the call for action now?
Daniel Levy (DL) So first of all, one has to understand that there is an incredibly palpable sense of being under attack. One cannot be dismissive about that. When it comes to how a significant number of Jewish people in this country feel after yesterday, after Golders Green, after the attacks on synagogues, the arson attempts, after what happened in Manchester, one should not in any way be dismissive of that.
This is absolutely a time for care and compassion and to really address how one provides safety and security. And if you are a Jew on the streets, you must be able to be safe if you’re a visible Jew. But when these things happen, the tendency is to run to the extremes and to create false dichotomies. And there is not an incompatibility between Jewish safety and civil liberties. We can’t create that false binary.
We, as a country, our leaders, as a government, people who hold titles like national terrorism prevention have to step up to the moment. They mustn’t fall into these easy false dichotomies. You can have and provide for and maximise what you’re doing to guarantee Jewish safety, and guarantee what holds us together as a democratic society, the right for legitimate peaceful political protest.
That’s what those marches are. The appalling suggestion that there should be a moratorium on freedom of expression on one issue, sounds to me like something that would encourage more antisemitism. You can’t have a false dichotomy between Jewish safety and Palestinian rights if we think about what’s going on over there. So that is absolutely the wrong way to go about addressing this.
KGM I was just talking to Hadley Freeman [pro-Israel journalist] who was sort of saying there’s so much equivocation, you know people basically say well what did you expect after the Gaza war? Do you feel that that is a reaction in Britain, you know that that is a mindset?
DL Well I think the more one runs to say if there’s an attack on Golders Green you shouldn’t be allowed to protest against Israel, against Israeli policies against what it’s doing, I think that encourages the mindset, because I think it genuinely suggests that people aren’t taking anti-semitism seriously. If you’re taking anti-semitism seriously, you speak to providing for the well-being of the Jewish community. And this is a community in Britain…. Just to say that, you know, I don’t think people should equivocate in taking seriously these attacks and that they need to be addressed.
I don’t think people should equivocate about taking seriously that Israel is in violation of international law, has been committing war crimes and there should be actions on them and that we can do these things at the same time. We can, you know, Krishnan, we should be able to hold, as sentient beings, three thoughts simultaneously:
That the Jewish community is being targeted in ways that are, of course, terrible for the community, but also undermines communal and national well-being and security in this country AND the Government needs to do whatever it can, including in consultation with the diverse community that is the Jewish community in this country, to stop that.
Secondly, that civil liberties, the right to protest, the right to express oneself freely within the boundaries of the law –that law shouldn’t be changed to undermine that right. That is something that you change, you create carve-out clauses, at great risk, and you should not. Because first we’ll be told you can’t protest on this and then you won’t be able to protest on anything and then we’re living in a fundamentally different society.
And thirdly, you should be able to hold the thought that Israel is not the arbiter of the well-being of Jewish communities here or elsewhere. We should not conflate those things. And it saddens me when people in the Jewish community lean into that conflation.
I understand, by the way, the Israeli position: Israel is a State. It uses statecraft. If weaponising antisemitism and saying, “Oh, look, this happens. Therefore, shut up and leave us alone to do what we want to do to the Palestinians, Lebanon, anything else,” I understand how that serves the Israeli state interest.
I don’t understand how that conflation serves the well-being of Jewish communities here or elsewhere. Why should you not be able to hold those three things simultaneously?
KGM Could you just explain what weaponising anti-semitism means to you and is it being done?
DL Yeah, I think it means that you take something that is real and affects people’s lives. We’ve seen that it is hatred of Jewish people in attacks against Jewish targets. We don’t fully know where these things are coming from. That, you know, maybe there’s intel that suggests foreign involvement in operations, maybe there isn’t, we’re not privy to that. But there is such a thing as antisemitism.
And then there is such a thing as saying, you know what, let’s play fast and loose with what is and what isn’t antisemitism. Let’s create these catch-all definitions where criticism of a political ideology, which I believe has led to great harm not only to Palestinians but to Jews, political criticism, political speech, standing up for international law, for human rights, are suddenly caught up in these attempts to redefine antisemitism in such a way that lots of people start saying, “Well, you’re not serious, that if that’s antisemitism, then I’m not interested in the whole debate.” And I think that actually contributes to the phenomenon and that’s the weaponisation.
Now, right now, those of us who think and speak in those terms have to be more cognizant of the fact that people are hurting. And so we have to have that argument and win that argument while really genuinely showing that we take antisemitism when it is real, when Jewish communities are being targeted, seriously, so that people aren’t allowed to to sweep all these things together and to ignore a phenomenon when it is real.
KGM And do you think that weaponisation of antisemitism, as you’ve described it, is something the Israeli Government is doing in its approach, in its language? I mean I’m looking at some of the reaction of its PR people, the sort of the people who sort of freelance with the Israeli state like Elon Levy whose tweeting “Jews are being hunted” in Britain. You know do you think their messaging is what’s feeding that?
DL Well, undoubtedly. I don’t think anyone who is looking at this objectively could reach any other conclusion than the State of Israel sees advantage in intervening and depicting this in certain ways. And sadly, the State of Israel also sees advantage in trying to pull the Jewish community into an untenable position.
Don’t ask the Jewish community to defend the indefensible in terms of what you’re doing. The Rabbis of Progressive Judaism came out just in the last days to say that it is necessary for the Jewish future to criticise what Israel is doing, and Israel wants to shut all those things down, which is nothing new. And in its essence – and this is a hard, but it’s an important one; in its essence, the actual existing Zionism in the State of Israel takes a position that the answer to antisemitism is not to fight to defeat antisemitism, but it is to up sticks and move to Israel. Zionism’s essence is that’s the only place Jews could be. I don’t think that’s the answer to antisemitism. I think we have to stay and fight antisemitism.
But if Israel can deploy this, can intervene in ways that muddy the waters, that say don’t talk about what we’re doing, don’t talk about our apartheid system, cuz if you do, you’re being antisemitic, that obviously helps Israeli state PR, but it’s not a trap we should fall into. And we should understand that there is real diversity of opinion amongst Jews.
In a recent poll conducted by a very mainstream establishment Jewish Institute, it found that the Jewish community in the under 35 category in this country is basically split 50/50 between those who define themselves as non or anti-Zionist and those who define themselves as Zionist. There are many streams and variations of thinking in the community. We shouldn’t be collapsed into Israel, which doesn’t mean that anyone who supports Israel deserves to be targeted on the streets of Golders Green, Manchester or anywhere else. There are lots of Jews now talking about how they they are fearful. They’re living in fear.
KGM Are you your family and friends living in fear?
DL Yes, I speak to people who I am close to; you know Golders Green is an epicentre of Jewish life, not just of one variation. It’s an epicentre of different religious streams of people who probably would define themselves as more secular than part of any of those religious streams as well.
We’re a quite small community and there is nothing more emblematic of being an epicentre of Jewish life than Golders Green. But as a Jewish people, we are in an incredibly challenging period because I can’t remember in my lifetime a time where there has been such existential division amongst Jews, within families, within communities. Has Israel been a great way forward or has Israel been a dramatic wrong turn? One of the most globally famous Jewish thinkers, Yuval Noah Hariri, spoke in this country just a year ago and said, “This may be the end of Judaism as we know it.” Because if Israel becomes this militant extreme fundamentalist place that it is becoming and if that defines Judaism, then where does that leave us?
So as we as we struggle with these questions of how do you protect the Jewish Israeli community, how do you protect communities on the outside, how Israel contributes to endangering Jews, is there a way forward where Israel is fundamentally transformed from the actual existing Zionism to a state that’s not predicated on disenfranchising Palestinians? Or does one double down on Israeli fundamentalism and maximalism as all those questions are worked out.
I think it’s a correct and fair thing to say – let us work those out while our communities are safe and secure in this and any other country.
KGM I mean you’re talking on a very big scale about existential threat to Judaism but you know, on a very local level do you feel under threat at the moment you personally?
DL I do not. But I think there are many, and you know I don’t have the polling, I don’t think it’s possible to do it and I take my co-religionists and the siege they feel they are under seriously, not as an act of attempting to get political special treatment. I think this is very real. You know I don’t tend to think in those terms. There are people who do think in those terms and who don’t.
KGM And what would you say to those people who were shouting at the Prime Minister and the police and the local MP and shouting shame and Jew harmer at Starmer?
DL There’s a few things going on. First, I can understand where that comes from in the immediate moment of pain. Secondly, you do have part of a Jewish establishment which has aligned itself ever more with the right. Tommy Robinson was on a visit to Israel recently. He met with people who had moved to Israel from the UK. You have had the Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community, a minority of the community in this country, weigh in politically on several occasions against Labour under anyone’s leadership.
Keir Starmer is about as pro-Israel – and by that therefore I don’t think it necessarily means pro-Jewish by the way—but he has tried to work with a Jewish establishment that doesn’t want to fall in love with him as much or any more than any Labour leader could or should at the moment. But I think that is also an attempt to play politics in those chants and so it’s coming from different directions. As one would probably expect, look, the Jewish community as any community is not a monolith.
There are all kinds of positions. One tends to hear the more raucous, vocal, extreme positions, especially at a time like this, and those tend to coalesce around a politics that I don’t think is good for Jewish well-being. It certainly doesn’t place Jewish well-being as part of a continuum of anti-racist politics of fighting for freedoms in this country, of fighting against prejudice, intolerance and extremism. And I think that precisely we should be in that place where you know if you “first they came for the Jews…” that kind of thinking that we have to be working for a more broadly tolerant society not a society that gives us a special dispensation to one group or another.
KGM I mean just finally I mean I’m sort of nervous to ask this question in this way and I don’t know what the right way to ask it is. Do you think the Israeli Government and Netanyahu bear some responsibility for the threats to British Jews right now?
DL I think the Israeli Government are reckless when it comes to how they view Jewish wellbeing. It is a tool for them to deploy in advancing their own, let’s be frank, criminal intentions in the region against Palestinians. And I say that because Netanyahu tries to say, “I’m the Jew on the international stage”, to wrap himself in Jewish symbolism, to wrap himself in Jewish history. He has in the past and he may well do so again, said “your place isn’t there it’s here”. He tries to create the impression that we are all responsible for his actions that we should somehow all stand before his actions, that the world should judge us as an extension an appendage to Israel. He has no mandate to do so.
I would argue that is criminally negligent at a time like this in terms of how you view Jewish well-being and Jewish security, but I have no other expectation from them to be to be blunt.