Exclusive guest Maureen Lipman: One Voice, One People, One Jewish State

Maureen Lipman on Jewish pride, rising antisemitism, and why now is the time to stand united.

I have always felt my Jewish heritage was something which just made me feel extra special. I was proud of my double identity and quite unaware that anyone might dislike me for my ethnicity. Only in retrospect did I realise that my non -Jewish friends always congregated at our house. I was never invited into theirs.

I sat on sofas with chat show hosts and talked freely about keeping my name and my nose and my "Yiddishkeit". It never occurred to me to hide what was fun and made me different. It didn’t affect my being cast as a cockney factory worker or an upper class vampire or a Liverpudlian car mechanic.

These days, with so much open Zionist-related Jewish prejudice in schools, on campuses, and in the entertainment industry, the medical profession and politics, the threat of antisemitism is in our face. The question is, how do we deal with it?

We need one voice. One calm robust, intelligent, moderate voice backed up by the law and by history.

The obsessive Israel haters are victims of a long grooming period. It is no accident that the world turns on the Jewish state every time they respond to deadly pogroms. We have to make it very clear that in a world with fifty one Muslim countries, it is not too much to ask that one Jewish state for a people at home in their ancestral land, one small state, has the right to exist and to exist in peace.

October 7th is the genocide, not the response in Gaza. Israel is criticised when it responds "disproportionately". Yet war has never been "proportionate". Was Dresden proportionate (when the Allies bombed the German city in WWII)?

Yet when Israel exchanges 1,000 terrorists for 10 hostages, there is no talk of disproportion. It is taken for granted.

Terrorism is not justified by a supposed "occupation" when the land was legally given in 1948. So no humble backing away, no schisms in our response. We are fighting an existential battle. Good luck and may G-d be with us.