Tommy Robinson is no one’s saviour – he is division in human form

On Thursday the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the visit to the area around Gaza of “the leader of Britain’s growing far-right movement”, Tommy Robinson. Robinson is currently the guest of the Israeli government. He was invited by Israel’s minister for the diaspora and combating antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, who said he was “proud to host British patriot” Robinson.

On the same day I caught a clip of a news item from last month that featured residents of a southern English suburb talking about the flag campaign, largely run by supporters of Robinson. One middle-aged white woman said they didn’t bother her because they were just national flags. But her friend, who was Black, hesitantly told the interviewer that the flags made her worried for her family. She said she felt that the intention behind them was to say to people like her that they weren’t welcome in their own country.

It all testified to the rise from the far fringe to the edge of the political stage of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. And where he has led, others – including politicians who were once mainstream Tories – have followed.

Mainstream Jewish organisations have expressed horror at the invitation. Many of us have experienced the antisemitism that Robinson followers are routinely capable of expressing – indeed recently Robinson himself talked about how the “liberal Jews” had been selling out to Islam. For many on the far right, Israel is exactly where they would like all their Jews to be.

To anyone who desires a peaceful and harmonious society, it is beyond obvious that different faiths and different ethnicities have to find ways of cooperating. The casting of long-established communities as an existential threat to the nation can have only one long-term aim – their expulsion. That’s the logic of Tommy Robinson and why I now see him as so dangerous. Like many others, however, for a long time I thought of him as an irritation.

But Robinson’s rise from fringe pariah owes a lot to Elon Musk and the tycoon’s boosting of the far-right Briton on his X (Twitter) platform. It has brought Robinson an international audience of millions – Musk has 220 million followers and Robinson currently has 1.7 million – more than four times as many as the leader of the opposition. It has brought Robinson money, not least in the form of Musk paying for Robinson’s legal costs in a trial now interrupted by his Israel visit.

Ideologically, Robinson now fits squarely into a narrative of the threat to the West that is deployed by right-wing politicians all over the democratic world (and beyond – Vladimir Putin was one of its earliest proponents). It’s a narrative that serves different purposes in different countries, and in Israel it currently very much suits the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. After attracting initial almost total support, Israel has become isolated during the bloody, prolonged Gaza war, in which so many civilians have been killed. The recognition by several important countries of a Palestinian state has been a bitter blow to a coalition administration that contains at least two ministers who can credibly be described as fascist.

One part of the fightback has been to talk up disruptive far-right figures in these countries; figures who, for whatever reason, now express complete and unwavering support for Israel’s military campaign. The battle between Israel and Hamas is now reframed as the battle between Western civilisation and Islam. Indeed, when Chikli first made his invitation he described Robinson as “a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam”, adding “together with friends like Tommy Robinson we will build stronger bridges of solidarity, fight terror, and defend Western civilisation and our shared values”.

And there is one other function served by this two-pronged attack on progressive Jews: distraction. October 7 happened on Amichai Chikli’s watch. There is yet to be a reckoning within Israel for the incompetence, bad strategy and low-level corruption that helped lead the region into a humanitarian catastrophe. Polarisation – and Robinson is the very expression of division – is Netanyahu’s friend; his saviour almost.

The capacity for this new internationalisation of extreme politics to cause trouble or exacerbate tensions outside the region where they originated is illustrated by the aftermath of West Midlands Police considering banning fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv FC from coming to Birmingham for their team’s match against Aston Villa. As the debate over this stance was playing out in Britain, from Israel, Robinson – still the doyen of ageing football hooligans in the UK – posted a picture of himself in a Maccabi shirt and attached an invitation: “Who’s coming to support Maccabi at Villa Park on November 6th?”

If his followers do show up, one thing is for sure: it won’t be the football they are interested in. Last year Elon Musk delightedly predicted civil war in Britain: this autumn it seems his protege will be doing his best to fulfil the prophecy.