David Baddiel: ‘It’s not completely true that I have no attachment to Israel’

“I don’t know if it’s absolutely true that I feel no attachment to Israel,” he told, JC editor Jake Wallis Simons. “I am more concerned about what happens there and to people there than I am [with] other countries.”

Although he doesn’t feel that Israel is his “homeland”, he added, he has “turned up the volume” on his antipathy towards Israel as a tactical move to outsmart antisemites.

“It completely undermines the constant reflex attitude of progressives towards Jews and
antisemitism,” he said.

“It is an intellectual tactic… it flushes out the fact that they rely very heavily on condemning Israel to nor have the proper conversations they need to have on antisemitism.”



Baddiel was speaking on the podcast about his new book, The God Desire, a polemic exploring his atheism in the context of his Jewish identity.

“God is like a crime for which there’s no evidence but enormous amounts of motivation… we are frightened of death,” he said. “We are frightened that the world has no justice in it.”

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