The editor's story: Jake Wallis Simons on what Israelophobia means to him

Not that this is a surprise. Anyone who speaks up for Israel or attacks antisemites knows what the social media response will be.

“The first tweet that I put out simply announced that the book would be published in a few months’ time,” Jake recalls. “It was viewed more than 600,000 times. Ninety-five per cent of those were haters. They hadn’t read the book, but they found the word ‘Israelophobia’ so unbearably triggering.”

Which, of course, proves Jake’s point: there is an irrational hatred of Israel among certain people, which is not based on evidence or facts but on prejudice. The genesis of the book, he tells me, came in 2021.

“The book opens during the Gaza offensive when there were tens of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets in London. About 250 Palestinians were killed in the conflict, yet it attracted thousands upon thousands of people protesting, often in the most vicious terms, calling for the blood of ‘Zionists’ and driving through Jewish areas shouting through megaphones that they would ‘rape Jewish daughters’.”

As he points out, there were so many other much more serious conflicts taking place around the world with far higher death tolls, but without any protests. The Syrian war alone had claimed half-a-million lives, mostly Muslims. It led him to reflect on the confusion surrounding the distinction between antisemitism and so-called anti-Zionism. “I saw that the murkiness of the debate needed to be cleared up,” he says. “It gets so feverish that even the most obvious point, that it’s unacceptable to single out any country for hatred, becomes drowned out. Just today I saw a video in which a couple of Palestinian activists were coming out with blatant untruths about Zionists smashing children’s heads against rocks. This sort of antisemitism has become sanitised when directed at Israel, and getting into an argument about whether it’s antisemitism or anti-Zionism is just a distraction.”

Jake’s path to his position today is made all the more fascinating by the fact it has not been a linear progression. When he was born, his family had no Jewish identity at all. “My father is not Jewish and my mother is not from a family that’s in any way observant, so I went to a church nursery school. Then my parents split when I was five. After that, my mum got interested in Judaism by degrees, so I went from the church nursery to Akiva (a Reform school) for a year, then the next year to an Orthodox school in Stamford Hill, commuting from Finchley.”

Such was the lack of Jewish identity that Jake did not have a brit when he was born; he was not circumcised until he was eight. Understandably, he didn’t want anyone at school to know. “It was a sort of metaphor, of the physical and psychological trauma of going from one type of life to another so quickly. But I wasn’t aware of that back then.”

His secondary school was Menorah Grammar, which was even more religious. “There was only enough time in the secular schedule to do six GCSEs in a year, and there was no music, no art, no drama and no meaningful sport,” he recalls.

Unlike almost all of his classmates, Jake opted to do A-levels, which he undertook at the less religious Hasmonean High School. But he decided that his future lay in Israel on the Hesder programme, which combines yeshivah with IDF service. When his mother suggested that he toughen up before joining the army, he began training at a local martial arts gym. “I began mingling with non-Jewish friends pretty much for the first time in my life,” he says. “I got this sense at the age of 17 that the world was much bigger than Israel, and I wanted to explore it.”

He cancelled his plans to go to Israel and went travelling for two years in south-east Asia instead, studying Chinese in Taiwan and abandoning any sense of his Jewish heritage, let alone observance.

Despite what he calls his “patchy” secular education, his application to read English at Oxford was successful. But he was in for a culture shock.

“I felt completely out of my depth,” he says. “I had travelled in Asia, but because of my Orthodox upbringing, I didn’t share any British cultural signifiers with the people around me. I remember not even knowing what Brie cheese was.” All he knew of English literature was the A-Level texts he had studied, and he was floored on his first day, in a class on the Victorians. “People were discussing which writers they wanted to study, Shelley, Byron, Dickens and so on. But I was left thinking, ‘Who are the Victorian writers?’” Despite his imposter syndrome, Jake got a top first. This was the era of big-hitting novelists such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, and he decided he wanted to be a writer. “I lived in poverty and wrote my first novel, The Exiled Times Of A Tibetan Jew, in those halcyon days before the credit crunch,” he says. “I didn’t intend to give it any Jewish focus at all, but it just exploded into it out of my unconscious. It made me suddenly feel it all again and realise that Jewishness mattered to me.”

His second novel, the bestselling The English German Girl, about the Kindertransport, was written while he was on the legendary East Anglia creative writing course. In his early thirties, however, he found himself with two novels under his belt and a PhD in Holocaust Fiction, but no money — and a wife pregnant with twins (they already had a toddler). He tried lecturing but didn’t really like it, so he began pitching ideas to newspapers. “I ended up becoming a freelance features writer for The Times, and started broadcasting for BBC Radio 4. Then I got a job at the Sunday Telegraph.”

He later moved to the Daily Mail, where he spent most of his time on the road, from Sri Lanka to the West Bank. “I loved waking up on a Monday morning and not knowing where in the world I’d be by the end of the day,” he says.

“I loved the thrill. I loved the story getting, the whole thing.”

As exciting as it was, there were moments of terror. “In Venezuela, I agreed to be kidnapped by a gang in the slums where the police do not go, so I could interview the boss of the kidnap gang. That was pretty hair-raising.”

In October 2019, Jake was on his way to Syria when, just three miles from home, he was almost killed in a car crash. “It’s ironic that I was going to Syria and was hit in Winchester,” he says. “I had multiple injuries including broken vertebrae and a stroke. I was off work for four months.” Then came the pandemic. “It felt like my time on the road was being stifled by fate,” he reflects.

When the role of deputy editor at the JC came up, the timing seemed just right. As editor at the time, I was struck by Jake’s reporting of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, which had complemented our own.

Long before Corbyn became leader, Jake had been following his antics. But no editor was interested; it was only the JC that was bothering to report these stories back then. In 2015, however, when Corbyn won the leadership, Jake unearthed the material and had a ready-made series of scoops. Years later, he seemed a natural fit for the JC.

As editor, Jake is shaping the paper his own way. And he has yet another string to his bow: a superbly researched and much-needed book, which is, as Howard Jacobson put it, “excellent and fearless”.

Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do about It by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £11.95) is available to order on Amazon now.

Rob Rinder will interview Jake Wallis Simons about Israelophobia at JW3 on September 12. Tickets cost £15. Visit: JW3.org.uk/Israelophobia.