This is an anti-fascist

The name we should remember from this weekend is not Bob Vylan. Or Pascal Robinson-Foster, to give the Israelophobic punk who caused such a stink at Glastonbury his real name. No, it’s Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. For as Bob Vylan was whipping the smug mob of Glasto into a frenzy of violent loathing for the IDF, this young IDF soldier, himself a Brit, was laying down his life for the Jewish people. He was killed in Gaza on Sunday as he did battle with that army of anti-Semites, Hamas. Now that’s anti-fascism.

Natan – as he was known – was 20 years old. He was born in London and moved to Israel 11 years ago. He was a sergeant in the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion of the IDF. He was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza. His sister’s boyfriend, also an IDF soldier, died in combat during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Natan’s father paid tribute to him this morning. He was fighting ‘for his parents, his family, his people’, he said. ‘I feel he has a place in history.’

This is the Briton we should be talking about – not the sozzled, moneyed brats of Glastonbury who got a sick thrill from chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’, but this fresh-faced warrior against Islamofascism. Not that Bob Vylan faux-punk who hollered for the death of the Jewish State’s soldiers, but this soldier of the Jewish State, this British Jew just out of his teens, who ventured into enemy territory to fight the Islamists who butchered so many of his people. Not the fake anti-fascists of Britain’s wet, vain left, but this real anti-fascist who put his life on the line for the Jewish homeland.

That Natan died just hours after thousands of his one-time compatriots chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF’ is chilling in the extreme. One can only hope that in his final few hours he did not see any clips of these privileged, hateful Gentiles in the country of his birth dreaming of the death of Jews like him. How betrayed he would have felt. To look from Natan’s smiling face to the malicious gurning of that Glasto mob is to behold the Two Britains: one brave, optimistic and willing to fight for what it believes in, the other indolent, self-regarding and only able to derive meaning through its hatred of others.

Here’s what horrifies me. Two groups of people were thinking ‘Death to the IDF’ on Saturday – the keffiyeh classes at Glastonbury and the barbarous militants who planted the device that ended Natan’s precious life. Britain’s middle classes were saying out loud what that neo-fascist militia was thinking as it laid its deadly trap for the soldiers of the Jewish nation. There was a meeting of minds, a most sickening meeting of minds, between the fashionably Israelophobic of the West and the murderously Israelophobic of Hamas. ‘Death, death to the IDF’, roared affluent Britons; ‘Okay’, replied Hamas.

If this does not force a moral reckoning in 21st-century Britain, nothing will. It is incumbent on everyone who cares for the future of this country to confront this profoundly disquieting fact: that the fortunate, educated Britons who make up Glasto’s audience share with the brutish, racist, regressive army of Hamas a yearning for Israeli death. I never again want to hear the self-righteous of the Israelophobic left say ‘We’re pro-Palestine, not pro-Hamas’. Because we all heard it. We all saw that mob of puffed-up festivalgoers chant ‘Death, death to the IDF’ as Hamas was plotting that very thing, as it murdered one of our own, as it slayed a young British lad who became a soldier for the Jews.

What a stark, unsettling insight into the crisis of our times. Those grim wails of ‘Death to the IDF’ are all the proof we need that many in the West have taken the wrong side in the great civilisational clash of our time. Hamas’s pogrom opened up a whole new front in the war for the future. It pitted medieval butchery against modern democracy. The apocalyptic bigotry of Islamism against the rights of the Jewish nation. The anti-human delirium of the neo-fascists of Hamas against all that the West is meant to hold dear: freedom, tolerance, reason, truth. And many of our young aligned themselves, not with Israel, not with the West, not with the Enlightenment, but with the furious, hateful enemies of those things. So much so that they now give voice to Hamas’s own battlefield cry: Death to the IDF.

Not everyone, though. Not Natan. This was one Briton – and there are many more – who knew what was right. His death shatters the lie that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. His death is proof – crushing proof – that it is a war. He is the 20th soldier of the Jewish State to be killed in Gaza this month alone. Almost 900 IDF troops have died in battle since 7 October 2023. The depiction of the war in Gaza as a Nazi-like extermination of Palestinians is the sickest calumny of our times. It is the blood libel resuscitated. The truth, as Natan’s death in combat attests, is that the IDF is fighting Hamas, and Hamas is fighting back.

To see an anti-fascist, forget the poseurs and haters of Glastonbury – look, instead, to the short, valiant life of Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. Where ‘anti-fascism’ to the lethargic narcissists of the Western left means little more than yelping ‘Fuck Farage’ and eating vegan ice-cream at a music festival, to Natan it meant signing up for war against the men who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. In the face of the racist lies of our Israelophobic elites who damn the IDF as genocidal demons, Natan, this modern-day Maccabee, fought for his nation and his people against their fascistic tormentors. His uncommon courage heaps shame on the lowlifes of Glastonbury who wished for his death.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy