Quote of the day 23rd September 2025

"Don’t punch us in the face on Sunday and wish us better on Monday"

Headline on an article by Daniel Sugarman, in the Jewish News on Monday.

You can read the full article at

 OPINION: Don't punch us in the face on Sunday and wish us better on Monday - Jewish News

Here are some extracts.

"The government's recognition of a Palestinian state at this juncture has rightly been seen by many in the UK Jewish community as a grotesque betrayal."

“Happy Rosh Hashanah from all of us at the Labour Party,” the Jewish community was informed today.

"I get it, I really do. Acknowledging the primary festivals of a range of the UK’s religions is a tick-box exercise for any government. Now this particular box can be ticked off. But I hope you’ll forgive me for observing that this particular Rosh Hashanah greeting was akin to being punched in the face on Sunday and receiving a ‘get well soon’ card on Monday."

"I don’t really need to go into why yesterday’s announcement by the British government has been condemned as a severe betrayal by a wide range of voices within the Jewish community – anyone reading this will already be well-aware. Even many of us who strongly support the idea of a two-state solution as part of a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians saw yesterday’s announcement as obscene."

"The family members of some of the hostages still held by Hamas, almost two years on from the mass murder of 7 October, implored the British government to at least wait until their loved ones were returned. The Labour administration couldn’t even bring itself to do that, it appears.

But on the plus side for the government, their decision to throw away tens of billions of pounds of taxpayer money on leasing an airbase which they already owned is now only the second most stupid foreign policy decision they’ve made in the last 14 months."

"There were things the British government could – and should – have done to alleviate at least some of condemnation they are now rightfully receiving. The Foreign Office was asked – by this paper as well as by Jewish communal leaders – to clarify its position on the status of the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as the Western Wall and the Temple Mount itself, Judaism’s holiest sites.

The British government signed a memorandum of understanding earlier this year with the Palestinian Authority, setting out that recognition of a Palestinian state would be along the 1949 armistice lines. As any Jewish person could have told the government – and a number of us did – this suggests that the British government, at a stroke, has just announced that it considers all the aforementioned sites to now be Palestinian territory."

"It’s a major diplomatic blunder – a completely unforced error, which could have been simply addressed in a matter of sentences along the lines of:

“The British government understands the acute religious sensitivities around the Old City of Jerusalem, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, and believes that the final status of such sites can only be settled at a later date in the peace process.” Either it couldn’t be bothered to do that or it didn’t want to do that – incompetence or malevolence. Never mind, though, Jews – we sent you a shana tova message, didn’t we?

"Predictably, Israel – not just the Israeli government, but almost the entire range of political opinion in the country – has not responded well to the spectacle of Western countries trying to force it into a corner. Show me any country that responds well to other countries trying to strong-arm it."

"As has been pointed out by many people, the British government cannot answer how this announcement will help either ordinary Palestinians on the ground or the hostages still being kept in Hamas dungeons – because it emphatically won’t. What Keir Starmer – and Mark Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese in Australia – have done in recognising a Palestinian state is to follow the ultimate political lodestar of soft-left governments – the vague sense that ‘it’s the right thing to do’.

Anyway, I also want to wish the British Jewish community a shana tovah. Given the extent of the political obtuseness we’re facing, we’re going to need it."