THE co-founder of a prominent Jewish-led organisation has claimed that pro-Palestinian Jewish voices are being silenced.
Hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated across the UK recently in solidarity with Palestinians and calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
But Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (below), co-founder of Jewish Voice for Labour, has said that the media and politicians “totally ignore the prominent role” that Jewish groups occupy in a lot of these marches, as well as Jews who hold pro-Palestinian views more generally.
“I've been involved with many different protests, many different statements put out and articles written in which the fact that some of the people being interviewed are Jewish is just not noted,” Wimborne-Idrissi said, adding: “It’s a deliberate silence.
“If you have watched any of the very few interviews that some of us have done, the interviewers are downright rude. I expect to be challenged but they just can't believe there are Jews who are not 100% behind Israel.
“They don't get it. And because the media don't get it or choose not to see it, your average Joe or Joanna isn’t even going to know we exist.”
She went on: “Jews like me, we've experienced anti-semitism. Our parents and our grandparents are either refugees or Holocaust survivors.
“And yet our views are taken as being worthless. I was first called a self-hating Jew when I was 19 at university because I had taken part in a public debate on Palestine.”
Wimborne-Idrissi’s comments come after Suella Braverman said those taking to the streets in support of Palestine and calling for a ceasefire were participating in “hate marches”.
The Home Secretary said: “We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,” she said.
“To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.”
Wimborne-Idrissi said she finds Braverman’s views “dangerously wrong”.
“She's generating hate herself by suggesting that people who support justice for Palestine en masse are doing so out of hatred for Jewish people. I can tell you absolute definitively that is not true,"
“The idea that the police should be obliged to treat those marches as an assembly of people committing hate crimes. The implications are horrendous.”
Wimborne-Idrissi was previously a member of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) before being excluded from the party in December 2022 for speaking at an event held by a group that was proscribed for allegedly downplaying accusations of anti-Semitism within the Labour party.
In a statement at the time, she said: “My treatment demonstrates the hostile campaign to which left wing Labour Party members are being subjected, including disproportionate numbers of Jewish members.”
Wimborne-Idrissi took aim at Keir Starmer’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and refusal to call for a ceasefire.
The Labour leader has faced backlash from within his own party for his stance, including the resignation of a number of councillors. A third of all Labour MPs are also now publicly backing calls for a ceasefire, including 15 frontbenchers.
She said: “He deserves to be in a bind. I think he has behaved despicably throughout and we just look at him and think this man has no moral compass whatsoever.
“Our political leaders are really showing complete contempt for the feelings of most British people who just want to see it stop. They want to end the killing. They're not thinking that the answer to 1400 Israelis dying in brutal circumstances is to flatten the place in which 2.2 million Palestinians, mainly refugees, have been penned up since 2007.
“The idea that this is the way to put a stop to a cycle of hate and violence is plainly idiotic.”
