On February 14, 2025, Vice President JD Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference when he stated that the threat to Europe he worries about the most is not from an external actor; it is “the threat from within.” He described it as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
Vance gave examples of how Europe and the United Kingdom have moved away from values once shared with the United States, such as freedom of elections, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.
Four months later, the UK is leading an attack on those American values through the sanctions it has imposed on the Jewish state. This, while Israel is in the midst of war.
Seventy-seven years after ending its physical occupation of Israel, the British are back, targeting Israeli sovereignty through sanctioning two elected Israeli officials whose views the British disagree with: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The British are not only disenfranchising 10% of the Israeli electorate who voted for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, they are also engaging in state-sponsored “cancel culture” against Israel’s religious Zionist community, which those ministers represent.
They are accused of vague “incitements of violence against Palestinian communities.” This is not only a blatant British attack on the concept of freedom of speech, but also an attempt to plant Jewish insecurity (subtle message to soldiers: spend less time on fighting Hamas, and more reviewing your text message: avoid saying “kill the enemy” or “go get them” – the British are watching).
Israelis on the Left and Right alike understand that the British attack has nothing to do with the two ministers. It is an ideological assault on Israel.
Therefore, it unites Israelis in a similar way that the Hamas physical assault did after October 7.
The UK’s actions underscore that we are in the midst of a fast-moving attempt to negate the idea of the Jewish state and, through it, the idea of Judaism. And as I discuss in my book, the assault on Judaism is also a proxy for an assault on America.
We need to address both the physical assault from Iran and proxies and the ideological assault from Europe and proxies concurrently, not sequentially. Both are on a ticking clock.
European anti-theism vs religious communities?
It is no coincidence that the UK is targeting Israel’s religious community. Europe is on a trajectory from atheism to anti-theism. This is required for its “politically correct” battle against Islam, which is masked as merely opposition to overt religiosity (Vance described how, in the UK, a Christian was arrested for praying outside an abortion clinic).
As discussed in last week’s article, the British are deploying logic that is erringly similar to that of the 20th-century attempt to eradicate Judaism: If there are no Jews in Europe, Jews will stop “committing atrocities” against Europeans.
Similarly, if there are no Jews in Judea and Samaria, Jews will stop “committing atrocities” against Palestinians. Therefore, the UK and its partners are targeting the leaders of the community – last month, civil leaders, this month, elected officials.
Those so-called Jewish “atrocities,” are referred to by Europe and its proxies as “settler violence” – a blood-libel promoted intensely after October 7, to underplay the Hamas attack and instill the notion that there are extremists on both side: On the one hand “extreme Palestinians” murdered 1,200 Jews on October 7, on the other, purportedly, “extreme settlers” engage in “widespread violence against Palestine communities.” (This is akin to saying: On the one hand, “extremist Europeans” send Jews to gas chambers, on the other, “extremist Jews” occupy European culture and pollute humanity).
On June 10, the UK fueled the incitement against Jews, as it claimed that there had been 1,900 attacks against Palestinian civilians between January 2024 and April 2025 – an annualized 1,400 attacks.
While even one single attack is deplorable, experts agree that this number likely includes verbal exchanges, acts of self-defense, and provoked altercations, as well as invented and unconfirmed incidents.
Yet even if we accept the UK figures, they are still only a fraction of the 6,000 confirmed attacks against Muslim civilians in the UK in 2024 alone. “British violence” against Muslims in the UK, as reported by the BBC, is four times higher than alleged “Jewish violence” against Palestinians in the West Bank.
By the logic of the British government, the UK should sanction King Charles.
European colonialism
To make matters worse, the UK is not only targeting Jews, but also Palestinians (apparent “balanced bigotry”). Among the reasons for its sanctioning of Israel is the IDF’s intent to evacuate Gazan civilians from the battlefield to humanitarian zones to save their lives.
The UK and Europe insist that Palestinians must remain among the rubble, on top of explosive-riddled tunnels and as human shields for Hamas, with limited food.
After all, how can Israel be accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BCC), and European governments of starving Palestinians, if those Palestinians are fed and safe in humanitarian zones?
This is European colonialism at its height: The Palestinians are being used as pawns for the Western assault on Judaism.
Some argue that this, too, is a proxy assault on the US: The UK is sanctioning Israel for merely moving civilians within Gaza. Is it a “warning shot” to Trump, who seeks to help civilians move out of Gaza?
Strengthening the view that this is a proxy sanction, the UK-led sanctions came just two days after the US sanctioned ICC judges, to the dismay of Europeans.
Reciprocal actions
To be clear, the UK is an ally, but it does not behave as such.
An ally does not attack friends from behind, as the US and Israel are front-facing a nuclear threat from Iran, a war with Hamas, missiles from Yemen, and hostages in Gaza.
The Trump response is rational: Rather than get drawn into brutal confrontations – physical war with Iran, sanction war with the UK and Europe, try to defuse it diplomatically first. And so, Secretary Rubio offered the UK a ladder, saying, “The United States urges the reversal of the sanctions and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.”
The British might do that, as a gesture to their “special relationship” with the US. After all, they can never win a sanctions war (it’s simple math). Yet, the assault from the UK and Europe will continue, and therefore, a long-term defense strategy is needed.
As suggested in the Palm Beach Countering Antisemitism Summit, the US should negotiate with European and other countries a long-term pledge not to engage in, or collaborate with, any form of lawfare directed against the Jewish state or the United States.
In addition, the US should negate the UK’s claim for legitimacy from the Biden-era “sanctioning Jews” program by taking measures that will ensure that those actions can never happen again (legislative or otherwise).
The US should also use its leverage to refocus Europe and the UK from its obsessive stance of “Israeli-Palestinian conflict first” to that of “Europe first.”
This will allow the UK and Europe to address the imminent threat to global stability, which the vice president so clearly articulated: The threat from within Europe.
The writer is the author of a new book, The Assault on Judaism: The Existential Threat Is Coming from the West. His Jerusalem Post column applies the ideas in the book to today’s policy decisions. He is also the chairman of the Judaism 3.0 think tank and author of Judaism 3.0: Judaism’s Transformation to Zionism (Judaism-Zionism.com).