Britain’s dangerous Arab-Israeli asylum precedent

In “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” a little girl tumbles through a mirror into a fantasy land.

We are all living in that fantasyland right now.

What other metaphor would fit the news that an Arab-Israeli man has been granted asylum in Britain after claiming he would face “persecution” in Israel — by far the most liberal, tolerant and democratic country in the Middle East?

The case is shrouded in anonymity, but here is what we know. Hasan, 24, (not his real name) holds an Israeli passport but has spent most of his life in Britain.

From this distance — mainly, one assumes, via the looking glass of the Internet – he has become convinced that Israel is an “apartheid regime” practicing “systematic and pervasive discrimination”.

Since Oct. 7, Hasan has become a regular at weekly marches where bloodcurdling slogans like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” have been chanted, where police have been attacked and where antisemitic placards have become commonplace.

Understandably, Hasan wishes to remain free to pursue his activism in Britain.

After all, the place has fish and chips. (The food in the Palestinian territories is pretty good, but that would mean living under an authoritarian regime.)

So Hasan launches an asylum case, which he wins by persuading judges of something they may have always, in their hearts of hearts, suspected: forget the dictatorships of the Middle East, it is the Jews who are truly evil.

Hypocrisy piles upon hypocrisy. Let’s consider some of Hasan’s claims from the sane side of the looking-glass.

Is Israel really an “apartheid state”?

The history of the slur alone is enough to debunk it. Invented by anti-Zionist Soviet Union propagandists during the Cold War, “apartheid state” first appeared in the Arab League’s London magazine Arab Outlook in 1963 and in a PLO pamphlet, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” two years later.

Students of history will recall that this was several years before anything that could be described as an Israeli “occupation”, which resulted from the Six Day War in 1967.

This was a real-life “Minority Report,” only it relied on propagandists fabricating future crimes rather than psychics correctly predicting them.

In the decades that followed, the haters desperately collected evidence to justify the smear in retrospect.

What they found were checkpoints and security measures; what they ignored were awkward realities, like Israel’s national soccer team including more Arabs than Jews in lead positions, or an Arab Muslim judge imprisoning a Jewish former prime minister for corruption, or an Arab financier, Samer Haj-Yehia, becoming chairman of Bank Leumi, the country’s biggest bank.

They also overlooked the actual apartheid in much of the Arab world, where the merest kvetch or kvell would get you lynched.

As Jean-Paul Sartre put it: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”

It is bizarre that the British judges did not consider Arab Israeli celebrities like news anchor Lucy Aharish, trailblazing female Muslim IDF major Captain Ella (she goes by one name for security reasons), or social media influencer Nuseir Yassin (aka Nas Daily), all of whom have stood squarely behind the Jewish state since Oct. 7.

Indeed, three days after the massacre, Yassin — who has millions of followers online — wrote a column headlined: “I identified as Palestinian Israeli, now I’m Israeli first.” How can Britain’s legal system take itself seriously when it fails to consider the basic facts?

The sad part is that the unity between Israeli Arabs and Jews has been one of the few positive news stories to have emerged since Oct. 7. Arabs risked their lives, and in some cases sacrificed them, to protect their Jewish compatriots during the Hamas massacre.

Arab soldiers are fighting bravely for the IDF in Gaza. Arabs have donated food and bicycles to displaced Jewish children. Israel’s foremost Arab politician, Mansour Abbas, sacked one of his representatives immediately when she suggested that Hamas footage might have been fabricated.

This solidarity is a shining example to the west, which struggles to contain its own extremism. Yet the British asylum courts were unable to see past the hate.

In demonstrating that judges can end up making decisions based on propaganda, the Hasan case has opened the door to the weaponization of the British legal system for further nefarious purposes.

Hasan’s lawyer claimed that the ruling highlighted “a staggering contradiction in the heart of British foreign policy”, since His Majesty has granted asylum to a refugee from one of Britain’s democratic allies.

How must this “contradiction” be remedied? Will it end with Britain, and other western powers, cutting ties with Israel and going soft on the jihadis of Hamas?

Given recent remarks by Chuck Schumer and the President himself, this may be where we are heading.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense,” said Alice. “Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” Since Oct. 7, this topsy-turvy world has become all too familiar. It is no coincidence that it is reached by way of a mirror, which makes people so besotted with their own political reflection that the reality in Israel is eclipsed. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice. We are all going through the looking-glass now.

Jake Wallis Simons is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle and the author of “Israelophobia.”