Tommy Robinson Just Got Too Big for His Boots
Wading into an internal Jewish quarrel has just made him some very powerful enemies
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Tommy Robinson is cruising for a bruising. Not content with trying to set off (or, more likely, merely hasten) Britain’s coming civil war, he’s just jumped head-first into someone else’s.
All serious British nationalists have for years regarded Robinson as a “Zionist shill”. His support for multiculturalism and mass immigration, provided only that it is not by Muslims, is correctly understood as an agenda designed not to “save Britain” but to encourage hostility towards Islam on behalf of the state of Israel.
There are, however, various groups with a vested interest in playing down the idea of Zionism as a force subversive of the British national interest, Ever quick to seize any opportunity to write off criticism of Zionism as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”, they went wild on social media when the Board of Deputies of British Jews slammed Tommy and told him to stay away from a pro-Israel protest march after October 7th.
“How can Tommy be taking Zionist money and orders, when the main Jewish organisation in Britain then slags him off?” is the question they ask. Its impact is rather diminished when Tommy himself affirms that he is a committed Zionist, but the hostility of the Board of Deputies does still cause some confusion.
So what’s going on? Well, the key point to grasp is that, just as not all Zionists are Jews, so not all Jews are Zionists. Furthermore, there are many different sorts of Zionist. The far-left’s slogan that “Zionism = Nazism” isn’t far wide of the mark in regard to some of them. There are Zionists whose ideological and organisational forebears collaborated happily with Mussolini and with Nazi Germany before WW2, and even in the early years of the conflict, until it became clear that Hitler was going to lose.
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They also share mirror the radical racism of the Nazis, while their Greater Israel expansionism has echoes of Hitler’s demand for Lebensraum – living space – in lands stolen from the Poles and Russians. Both these ideas emerged in the early 20th century as extreme, genocidal versions of the older colonial expansionism indulged in by other European-based nationalisms in the 19th century.
But the “Zionism = Nazism” equation is ridiculous when applied to various other sorts of Zionism. Various key figures in the early development of Zionist ideas, and then the state of Israel, linked their versions of Zionism to 19th century liberal ideals.
Others, particularly those which grew from the Marxist Poale Zion movement, which fought alongside the Bolshevik Red Army during the Russian Revolution, have Communist and socialist views. Some of these liberal and left Zionists even advocate for a Two-State Solution in the Holy Land, maintaining that it is somehow possible to share the territory between Jewish and Arab states.
The different factions often loathe each other. The left still remembers with great bitterness the 1995 murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by far-right Jewish extremist Yigal Amir.
This multiplicity of ways in which to be a Zionist was one of the factors which meant that, before the Hamas attack on October 7th, Israel was widely regarded as being on the brink of actual civil war. The shock of the brutal incursion came at a very convenient time for the embattled Israeli Prime Minister.
Large sections of the army and air force were close to open revolt, Netanyahu faced impeachment and prison for fraud, and his supporters and opposition activists were daggers drawn. This is what was behind Charlie Kirk’s claim that Netanyahu and Co. knew the Hamas attack was coming but allowed it to happen in order to save his own skin.
Returning to Tommy Robinson, he has very clearly been on the extreme-right side of this internal Jewish quarrel for many years.
The assassin of Yizhak Rabin was linked to the Kahanist-influenced Eyal group. Tommy Robinson’s infamous EDL-supporting rabbi, Nachum Shifren, started his career as a driver and bodyguard for Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born extremist rabbi who was one of those Zionists whose aims and methods would undoubtedly be described as ‘racist and fascist’ if advocated by Europeans.
Meir Kahane advocated Jewish supremacy, theocratic governance, and the expulsion of non-Jews, particularly Arabs, from Israel and the occupied territories. He founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the United States and the Kach party in Israel, both designated as terrorist organisations by multiple countries – including Israel - due to their violence.
Inspired by the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Kahane advocated physical force nationalism and extending a purely Jewish Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.
The JDL used bombings, assaults, and harassment to target Soviet diplomats, Arab-American groups, and perceived antisemites. The FBI linked Kahane’s organisation to 50 terrorist acts by 1986, leading to its designation as a terrorist group by the US.
Moving to Israel in 1971, founding Kach (“Thus”), a political party to implement his vision of a theocratic, mono-ethnic Jewish state. governed by Halakha (Jewish law) rather than democracy.
Elected to the Knesset in 1984 with 1.2% of the vote, leveraging anti-Arab sentiment amid rising tensions. His inflammatory rhetoric (e.g., calling Arabs “dogs”) and provocative stunts, like attempting to settle in Arab villages, led to his 1988 ban from the Knesset under Israel’s anti-racism laws. Kach was later outlawed in 1994 after the Baruch Goldstein massacre, when one of his followers murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron.
Kahane was assassinated in 1990 by an Egyptian-American, but his influence persists in extreme-right disciples now helping to prop up Netanyahu’s coalition.
Mainstream Jewish organisations like the Chief Rabbinate reject Kahanism as a distortion of Judaism, but its ideas continue to motivate violent Jewish settlers to attack Arabs, including Christian villages.
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Prominent among Kahane’s disciples in the West is Rabbi Nachum Shifren. He was a prominent early supporter and frequent speaker at English Defence League rallies (above), including a notable address outside the Israeli embassy in London in October 2010. He appeared at EDL events alongside Roberta Moore, head of the EDL’s Jewish Division, who had links to other Kahanist outfits like the Jewish Task Force.
This partnership was part of a wider network of Zionist funding and influence on Robinson’s rise, including support from pro-Israel donors like Robert J. Shillman (co-founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center). Critics, including Jewish groups in the UK, have condemned Shifren’s EDL appearances as toxic, arguing they fuelled anti-Muslim violence while exploiting Jewish identity.
While Robinson’s close links with one side of Israel’s rumbling political civil war go back to the very start of his career, his involvement in this quarrel got a whole lot more serious in the wake of last week’s Manchester Synagogue attack.
The organisation Betar was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the theorist of ultra-expansionist Revisionist Zionism whose career I recounted on this Substack back on 3rd September:
Now more than a hundred years old, Betar is not a political party but a radical youth organisation. It specialises in encouraging young Jews in the West to strengthen their identification with their heritage and the Zionist state, and encouraging them to emigrate to Israel. It has close links to Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Also operating abroad, Betar has contempt for Jewish organisations and communities who are content to remain minority citizens in gentile states such as the UK and USA. They view assimilation with abhorrence. With a growing number of Jews emigrating from Israel, Betar militants are particularly anxious that Jews have a duty to move to the Zionist state.
While the Jews of Britain were in shock and mourning over the Manchester attack, Betar chose the moment to put the boot into its rivals in the UK. The movement launched a full-on attack on X against Jews who had spoken out against Tommy Robinson.
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The post slammed “The Board of Deputies of British Jews – a liberal; left-wing body hostile to the State of Israel” accusing them of sharing responsibility for the Islamist attack on account of their refusal to back Robinson or the Netanyahu regime.
The provocative post ended with a demand which confirms what I have long said is a key reason for Likud/Betar spokesmen and allies being so keen to promote conflict – up to and including civil war – in the West: “The Jews of Britain must come home to Israel”.
This Betar tweet triggered an immediate onslaught on the Board not just from Tommy Robinson but from the entire Likudnik-funded ‘Counter-Jihad’ network. The speed and vehemence of the propaganda attack shows that it wasn’t just a matter of like-minded people coming to the same conclusion. Rather, it was co-ordinated, a declaration of political war.
What impact will this have? Despite the occasional assassination and pipe-bombing by the ultras over the years, this is extremely unlikely to come to physical violence on UK (as opposed to Israeli) soil.
But there are likely to be political casualties, and Tommy Robinson is odds-on to be among them. To the Revisionist Zionist extremists, he is a sort of super Shabbos goy. Useful not for turning the lights on and off on Sabbath days, but for trying to spark the Europe-wide civil war with which the artificially created Counter-Jihad movement is now obsessed.
A civil war which would plunge the West into bloody no-win catastrophe, but which would surely leave huge numbers of largely assimilated Jews deciding that they would be safer in Israel.
To the pro-Israel but much less aggressively Zionist Board of Deputies, on the other hand, Tommy Robinson is a dangerous extremist - and now an open and very unwelcome critic.
Robinson’s efforts don’t merely risk dismantling the “vibrant multi-cultural society” which the Board’s various campaigns have done so much to create in Britain (the creation of the first Race Relations Laws and ‘hate-speech; restrictions, to name but one).
His antics also have the potential to bring a very awkward spotlight on the funding of a massive network of ‘Counter-Jihad’ alt media propagandists and campaigners by a small clique of ultra-Zionist U.S. billionaires.
Worst of all, by joining in with Betar’s criticism of the liberal-left Board of Deputies, Robinson brings his huge following within a whisker of noticing the same sort of things to which Charlie Kirk was referring when he said that left-wing ‘secular Jewish’ donors have a lot to answer for when it comes to the cultural Marxist assault on Christendom.
All that potential injury now comes together with the insult of one of the most influential and powerful bodies in Britain being publicly lectured by an upstart oik from a Luton council estate. That is not going to go down well. Not well at all.
Tommy very clearly has friends – or, rather, people who have found him useful – in some very high places. But he has also just made some very powerful enemies. And, believe me, these individuals and organisations never forgive, and they never forget.
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