Even before Israel’s modern-day rebirth in 1948, Jews routinely stood accused of not possessing sufficient loyalty to the nations where they resided.
One of the earliest examples of this libel was the suspicion in parts of medieval Christian Europe that Jews were in league with some Muslim powers.
The charge of dual loyalty could be seen in the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France through the Nazis’ rise to power; indeed, this notion in large measure underlays the failure of Jewish emancipation in Europe. In the United States in the 1920s, Henry Ford published The International Jew, which alleged, along with other calumnies, that Jews were pushing America toward war for financial gain and world domination.
Its contemporary manifestation almost always centers on the charge that Jews are more beholden to Israel than their own nation. Often, the dual-loyalty charge is infused with a narrative imputing enormous power to Jews and Jewish communities, which typically represent a tiny fraction of the overall population.
Such a synthesis of disloyalty on one hand and exaggerated power on the other allows the accuser to charge Jews of working to undermine their nation from within, alleging that Jews are dangerous aliens who represent nothing short of a fifth column.
In the early to mid-2000s, this toxic calumny about Jews pushing Washington to launch foreign wars for Israel’s interest manifested itself in spurious accusations—largely, but not exclusively, within the left—that Jewish officials within George W. Bush’s White House were responsible for the U.S. war against Iraq.
A cabal of Jewish “neoconservatives” in the Bush White House—Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle—had, the narrative went, hijacked U.S. foreign policy in the service of Israel, even though none were top-tier members of the administration.
Most recently, the spurious charge that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed a reluctant U.S. President Donald Trump to attack Iran has been common. Some have specifically pushed the dual-loyalty charge, accusing Jews qua Jews of having orchestrated the war.
Though most who have leveled this explicit antisemitic accusation were extremists, including Hitler enthusiast Nick Fuentes, at least one putatively mainstream outlet legitimized this toxic trope.
An article in The Guardian on March 17, “UK security adviser ‘attended’ US-Iran talks and judged deal was within reach,” included the following about Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president, and Steve Witkoff, both Jewish, who were Trump’s special envoys at talks in Geneva with Iran in late February.
One Gulf diplomat with knowledge of the negotiations said: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”
The term “foreign asset” insinuates that the person is serving the interests of a foreign power, often at the expense of their own country’s security.
So, it’s telling that the co-authors of The Guardian piece, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour and international correspondent Julian Borger, decided to promote this toxic accusation about Witkoff and Kushner, particularly given that it was entirely unevidenced and based on one anonymous Gulf diplomat.
Sadly, the dual-loyalty trope has been mainstreamed at other British outlets over the years, including after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when one might expect heightened sensitivity about the use of language and ideas evoking classic antisemitism.
In October, the BBC legitimized the dual-loyalty trope by uncritically quoting a spokesperson for the pro-Hamas group, the Council on American-Israeli Relations (CAIR), who referred to Jews as “Israel firsters.”
In 2024, former Conservative minister Sir Alan Duncan hurled the dual-loyalty charge during an interview at the British news outlet LBC. He charged that Stuart Polak, a Jewish Peer, should be removed from the House of Lords because “he is exercising the interests of another country.” The LBC presenter failed to challenge Duncan’s racism.
In 2023, CAMERA exposed a Financial Times review of a book by former U.S. official Steven Simon, which maintained that the author deserves credit for raising the sensitive question of whether “the largely Jewish team that led U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine through successive administrations was so committed to meeting Israel’s goals that they were never able to deliver a result.”
It is especially troubling that journalists made the conscious decision to promote this racist charge during a time when antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom (and in other Western countries) were at near-record highs. In fact, quite dispiritingly, polls show that the dual-loyalty trope still resonates in many democratic countries, including in the United Kingdom, where one-third of the population believes that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.
The tsunami of antisemitism in Britain over the last two and a half years has resulted in the murder last fall of two Jews at a synagogue in Manchester, England. More recently, London has seen a rash of arson and firebombing attacks on Jewish institutions, as have Birmingham and Hertfordshire, and just this week, two Jews were stabbed in Golders Green. Given this development, it’s extremely irresponsible for editors at putatively serious outlets to platform racist ideas about Jews that serve to fuel the flames of this dangerous hatred.
