On a podcast appearance this week, Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking with Avi Harush.
Harush is a former Israeli military officer whose son Reef was killed while serving as a soldier during the war in Gaza. Netanyahu and Harush had an obvious point of connection: Netanyahu’s older brother Yoni was killed in 1976 while commanding the Israeli operation to rescue hostages at Entebbe.
They were talking about remembrance, and about naming children after people who had died.
That eventually led Netanyahu to discussing Winston Churchill. He recalled meeting Churchill’s grandson, Winston Spencer Churchill, and talked about how Churchill’s son Randolph and grandson Winston had come to Israel and covered the Six-Day War in 1967. Netanyahu remembered the younger Churchill’s coverage for The Daily Telegraph as having been very positive towards Israel.
And then the conversation took a rather extraordinary turn.
“Go find that in Britain today,” Netanyahu said, “in what is called the Islamic Republic of Britain.”
Harush didn’t challenge the description. Instead, he suggested that perhaps the same thing had happened all across Europe. Netanyahu agreed. Then he recalled the joke (originally made in similar form by JD Vance) that Britain would become the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons. Netanyahu then added that Israel was making sure there wouldn’t be another one in Iran.
Reaction in Britain was characteristically frosty:
The foreign office called the remarks “completely unacceptable”.
So, I live in Britain. I’ve lived here for the majority of my life. My response is that I just don’t understand Netanyahu sometimes. Britain is no way an Islamic republic. Yes, there is a Muslim population totalling 4 million people, which is about 6% of the population.
Yes, there has been a great increase in the number of mosques in the UK in recent years:
But mosques do not make a country into an Islamic country. The reality is that Muslims are a tiny minority of British people.
In fact, proportionately, there are more Israeli Muslims than there are British ones! Israel’s Muslims (some of whom identify as Palestinian more than Israeli, yes) total 18.5% of the population!
Britain, legally speaking, is a Christian kingdom. Its government today is effectively a secular democracy.
What’s the route, realistically, for Britain to become an Islamic republic? More immigration from Islamic countries? Yeah, that’s pretty unlikely. Britain has become firmly in favour of migration control across the political spectrum:
How about conversion?
Right now, the rate of conversion to Islam is about 5,000 people per year in the UK. To get to 50% of the population with all else being equal would take approximately 5,867 years.
And the reality is that the descendants of those who move to Britain as Muslims often end up secularising as a result of life in a secular society. I know very well about this. My Dad was a Muslim. I am an atheist. I have zero interest in Britain ever becoming a Muslim country. I am a secularist. I want equal rights for people of all religions and none.
The number of Muslims leaving Islam per year is estimated at another 5,000 to 10,000. So, actually, the numbers just don’t support Britain ever becoming an Islamic republic based on current trends. It would take a really radical shift.
No doubt, all of those mosques have some impact. Their goal is to convert British people to Islam. This is something Islam is very open about—dawah (calling people to Islam) is considered to be a communal obligation for Muslims.
But right now, overall, it’s not working. Yes, British people on the whole are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis:
But being sympathetic to Palestinians is not translating to large numbers of people converting to Islam.
So, Islamic republic of Britain? I very much doubt it.
Of course, the joke about Britain becoming the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons is particularly silly, because Pakistan is an Islamic republic and it already has nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu’s comments are unlikely to win much favour with people in Britain. It’s very strange for him to criticise a country in this manner that has been Israel’s ally for many years. It sounds like he thinks Britain is a lost cause, as if he is assuming that Britain is no longer Israel’s ally at all.
But the thing is, even actual Muslim countries are not a lost cause for Israel. Israel—under Netanyahu!—has established relations with multiple Muslim countries in recent years via the Abraham Accords: Morocco, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan. And they have peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
At the end of the day, Israel is in a Muslim neighbourhood of the world. And good relations with Muslim neighbours probably should be a high priority for Netanyahu, or whoever replaces him after the next election.
I can only think that Israel’s ideological enemies are celebrating Netanyahu’s comments. They will see it as him driving a wedge between Israel and Britain.
I read that from British twitter Bibi's quote got tons of up votes while Piers got mostly down votes. You know whatever you read doesn't mean its true and you couldn't pay me to go back to twitter.
But I think Bibi is hitting on something that many in Britain feel and that is the 2 tier policing not the least of it is the rape gang inquiry and how the government let hundreds of thousands of working class girls be raped by muslim grooming gangs simply because the gangs were muslim and the police did not want to appear racist. The denigration of British ethnicity and Peoplehood and the vilification of everything Britain stood for over thousands of years. I think Bibi hit a nerve.
Netanyahu has lost his mind, not to mention his soul. He has done so much damage to Israel and its people. Imagine if Trump were in power for 16 years.