Address by Graham Edwards
As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII
As I have the opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude to you, Brian, both for arranging these colloquia, which I find both fascinating and spiritually nourishing, and for your mentorship over the last twenty years, for which I am deeply grateful.
Turning to the subject at hand, let me begin with two observations about human nature, drawn not from scripture but from a hero of mine, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, who made a fortune from observing the ways that sensible people come to believe foolish things.
The first he called the social-proof tendency: thinking is hard work, so to spare ourselves the effort we take our cue from the crowd – an efficient instinct, but one that transmits error as readily as truth. The second he called the authority-mis-influence tendency: we defer to authority – the figure in the robe, the institution with the seal – even when our own eyes and conscience tell us it is mistaken. Both let other people do our thinking for us.
I start there because antisemitism, in its endurance and its strange respectability, feeds on exactly these two weaknesses – the pull of the crowd, and misplaced trust in authority. And the antidote, in every age, is the same: the willingness to judge a thing by the truth rather than by the number of voices asserting it.
Consider the arithmetic. There are some two and a quarter billion Christians in the world, around two billion Muslims, and roughly fifteen million Jews. Set that beside the social-proof tendency, and you see the structural difficulty of the Jewish position: when a conviction takes hold among very large numbers of people, the dissenting voice of a tiny minority is simply overwhelmed – not refuted, just outnumbered. The crowd does not need to be right to prevail. It only needs to be large.
So what protects a small people, or any unpopular truth, from the weight of the many? Here I turn to Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. In the eighteenth chapter of Exodus, he finds Moses exhausted, single-handedly judging the people, and counsels him to appoint judges – and notice what he says to look for: ‘able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness.’ There, at the founding of the very idea of a judiciary, is the standard: a society must rest on truthful judgement, on judges who cannot be bought and will not be swayed.
I want to hold that standard up against the body our own age treats as a supreme moral authority – the United Nations. Here the authority-mis-influence tendency does its work: we assume that if the UN has passed a resolution, it must reflect some impartial weighing of the facts. Yet look at the record. Over the decade to 2024, the General Assembly passed more than twice as many resolutions condemning Israel as it did condemning every other nation on earth combined; in 2025 alone, fifteen against Israel and eleven against all the rest of the world together. And consider the structure, not merely the numbers: the UN Human Rights Council keeps a permanent, standing item on its agenda dedicated to one country, and one only – Israel. Every other nation is dealt with as the need arises; Israel alone has a fixed place reserved at every session, in perpetuity. There is no reason a fair-minded judge could give for permanently seating a single defendant in the dock while all others come and go. The arrangement does not describe the accused. It describes the court.
Set that against what was happening in the world in that same year, 2025. The war in Gaza was, on any honest account, grievous: by that autumn the Palestinian health authorities reported on the order of 69,000 killed, and some 1.9 million people – nine in ten of the population – driven from their homes. Terrible figures, and I do not diminish them. Yet in Sudan, over the very same period, the toll was larger still: more than 150,000 killed and around 12 million displaced – more than twice the number of dead, six times the number of homeless. And in November of that year, the General Assembly approved six separate resolutions singling out Israel, and not one on Sudan. A judge who scrutinises one defendant with such ferocity while barely glancing at far graver matters elsewhere is not, by Jethro’s standard, a judge at all. He is a man with a grievance wearing a judge’s robe – and the danger is that the crowd mistakes the robe for justice.
Now, why should a small people be singled out so? Part of the answer lies in the long history of conspiracy – of falsehoods believed because they were repeated, not because they were true. Think of the blood libel: the claim that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood. Were it true, it would directly contravene Jewish law, since it is forbidden for Jews to consume any blood at all – and it was condemned as baseless by popes as early as the thirteenth century, yet it drove massacres for eight hundred years, up to 1946. Think of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that notorious forgery purporting to be the minutes of a Jewish plot for world domination – exposed in The Times in 1921 as plagiarised from an 1864 French satire in which no Jew so much as appears, and ruled a forgery by a Swiss court in 1935. And still it circulates today. In each case the truth was available. In each case the crowd preferred the lie.
We tell ourselves that in a modern democracy we have outgrown all this – that a person must answer for what he himself has done, not for his relatives, his tribe, or the conduct of some government in a country he may never even have seen. Picture a black nurse on a British ward made to answer for the massacres of some African dictator before her patients would let her treat them. Imagine a Russian child shunned in the playground until they had denounced Vladimir Putin’s war. We would recognise these at once for what they are – racism, plain and simple. Yet for some reason, the ability to recognise the same characterisation as racist, when it refers to Jews, seems more difficult.
And yet I must put before you the oldest wound of all: the charge that the Jews killed Christ. Jesus was executed by Rome, by crucifixion, under a Roman governor shown in the Gospels washing his hands. But the charge that hardened over the centuries was not against a few men in one place and time. It was against a whole people, for all time – the crowd in Matthew’s Gospel crying, ‘His blood be on us and on our children,’ read as hereditary, collective, everlasting guilt. That single move – from some individuals to an entire people across all generations – is the template for every collective blame that followed.
And here is why I find hope. The Catholic Church did something most institutions never manage: it looked at an injustice it had carried for nineteen centuries, and corrected itself. In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, in Nostra Aetate, it declared that the death of Christ ‘cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.’ That is the search for truth triumphing over the inertia of the crowd and the weight of inherited authority – the very discipline Jethro asked of his judges.
The tragedy is that as that ancient libel was laid to rest, newer ones took its place. Today’s antisemitism arrives by three significant roads that meet at the same destination. There is the residue of the racial hatred of the Nazis. There is the Soviet inheritance, which recast the Jew as the imperialist and the Zionist as the colonial oppressor. And there is the strain carried by modern Islamist ideology. Very different movements, but they converge on a single obsession – the conspiracy theory about Israel and the Jews – and on a striking eagerness to believe the worst, on the thinnest evidence.
Let me clarify. I am not speaking of Muslims in general, a huge number of whom hold no such views, any more than I am indicting the left as such, or every Christian for the deicide charge. My concern is narrower: an ideology – the Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood strand – with a known method. It begins in charity and social welfare, moves into community life, education, and sport, and then into political organisation and the vote; we are seeing, in Britain, the early signs of the sectarian voting that follows. And though those who hold its hardest version are a small minority, history teaches – and Gramsci understood – that a small, determined, organised minority can set the terms for a much larger, more passive majority. That, again, is the social-proof tendency from the other side. And it is an ideology that, I believe, represents a growing threat – not to Jews alone, but to many other faiths of the West besides.
Now to the present conflict, beginning with the concessions a reasonable man must make. Criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism; Israel is a state like any other, with its own virtues and sins, and must answer for them. The suffering of Palestinians is real and ought to grieve us. I hold all of that. What I ask is only consistency – the same unbiased judgement, applied to truthfully established facts, whoever the defendant.
And consistency is precisely what goes missing. Consider the timing of what followed the seventh of October. Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza did not begin until the twenty-seventh – three weeks later. Yet here in Britain, the first request to police to hold a national march against Israel was logged at ten to one on the afternoon of the seventh itself, while Hamas was still murdering people in their homes. And the Community Security Trust, which records anti-Jewish hate in this country, saw incidents leap from an average of five a day before the attack to thirty-one a day after it – a surge that peaked in the days immediately following the seventh, before Israel had mounted any meaningful response, and then subsided. The timing is the whole point: had the anger truly been provoked by Israel’s conduct in Gaza, it could not have crested before that conduct had even begun. It was set off not by anything Israel did, but by the bare fact that Jews had been attacked. Any other nation, attacked on that scale, would have responded with overwhelming force, and we would have thought it, if not natural, at least understandable – yet Israel’s critics condemn its response while offering no alternative. They will tell you what Israel must not do; they will not tell you what they would find acceptable, or what they would do in its place.
And consider how readily we believe a powerful image. Last summer in Edinburgh, outside my hotel, a crowd was protesting, holding up photographs of starving children. One of those images I later came to recognise – a photograph The New York Times itself was forced to correct, because the emaciated-looking child suffered from a serious pre-existing illness, and his much healthier-looking brother had been cropped out of the frame. Let me be scrupulous: there was real hunger in Gaza, and I will not pretend otherwise. But that is the point – even a real crisis was amplified with a misrepresented picture, accepted instantly by a sympathetic crowd, none of whom thought to question it.
And notice where the outrage does not go. The same voices that filled the streets for Gaza seemed wholly untroubled by the regime doing more than any other to fuel that war and others like it – Iran. It is Iran that funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis across the region; Iran that holds Lebanon in its grip through Hezbollah, against the will of a great many Lebanese; and Iran that has answered its own people’s longing for freedom with bullets, most recently crushing a nationwide uprising, with the dead numbered by some counts in the tens of thousands. None of this shook the protesters’ certainty that every wrong in the region belonged to Israel alone. A conscience truly moved by suffering would have had a great deal to say about Tehran. That so little was said tells us how selective the outrage really is.
There is a further asymmetry I find hard to bear. It is treated as natural, almost respectable, that the Palestinian territories – and most of the Muslim world – should be without Jews altogether: the very presence of Jewish settlers is called a crime against a land that ought to be Jew-free. Yet Israel itself is home to more than two million Arab citizens, a fifth of its population, with the vote, with seats in its parliament, with a place in its governments. One side’s vision of cleansed land is treated as ordinary – though a demand that a territory be emptied of an entire people would, by any neutral standard, amount to ethnic cleansing. The other side’s multi-ethnic democracy is treated as the offence. That is the double standard, laid bare.
I grew up in Britain as a fairly secular Jew – a communal Jew, you might say. I was in numerous nativity plays at school; for two years I went to chapel every morning and sang in the choir, and I sang the hymns with joy. I have always felt British first and Jewish second, with a deep affection for this country and its Christian culture. I only truly came to understand this conflict when I went and studied it – I took a master’s degree focused on the two-state solution eight years ago, because I wanted to become more informed, rather than continuing to know as little as your average Brit.
And what shocks me – what I never felt when I was growing up here – is to watch the old pattern return: the readiness to believe the conspiracy, the treating of contested claims as settled truth, and above all the willingness to hold UK Jews answerable for a foreign government – the very thing we would instantly call racism if it were done to anyone else. What unsettles me most is not even the hostility. It is the quiet – that when this is done to Jews, the great wave of objection that would rise for any other group somehow does not come.
And what saddens me is how the UK Jewish community is now reacting. A couple of months ago, after two visibly Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a terrorist, my daughter sent me a simple text: ‘We’ve got to go.’ At first I thought there was a march I didn’t know about. But she soon clarified: she meant we need to leave the country, for good. And that, I am afraid, is the most common conversation in the Jewish community in Britain today: ‘Where should we be moving to?’
We speakers were asked what we hoped to achieve today. My answer is that I hope the Christians in this room might have something to teach today’s antisemites. For in 1965, in Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church took an injustice that had lasted nineteen hundred years and had the honesty and the courage to correct it. And the Anglican Church has taken its own steps down that same road – acknowledging, in recent years, the part Christian teaching played in preparing the ground for antisemitism, and repenting of it. That is the search for truth winning out over the crowd and over inherited authority. My aspiration is that the same spirit might spread further still: a willingness to challenge the conspiracy theory, a hunger for truth over the comfortable lie, and the plain resolve to judge Israel as we judge other nations, and judge Jews as we judge other people – by the same standard, the standard of Jethro, the standard of truth.
Graham Edwards is a British businessman and Conservative Party official. He is the former chief executive of property company Telereal Trillium (TTG), and the current Treasurer of the Conservative Party. In 2015/7 Graham studied for a Master’s degree in International Relations at King’s College in London, writing a dissertation on The Causes of the Failure of Camp David 2000, effectively a dissertation on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.