The Hamas apologism of Sarah Helm

It’s never a good sign when a PM’s adviser makes the news, let alone when it’s down to his or her other half. Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, is finding that out the hard way this week, following revelations about his wife’s Israel-focussed social-media activity. She has denied Hamas’s crimes and even blamed the existence of Israel for Hamas attacking it on October 7. She has also expressed support for Palestine Action, which led to a brief police investigation.

Powell’s wife is the author and former journalist, Sarah Helm. She initially made headlines last week by sticking her oar into the Sally Rooney imbroglio. Faber, Rooney’s publisher, said it would no longer stock her books in the UK because of the novelist’s pledge to donate all of her earnings to Palestine Action – a proscribed terror organisation, which it is illegal to support. ‘God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action’, Helm wrote on X.

Unsurprisingly, this comment soon emerged in various media reports. How was it that the wife of the national security adviser could seemingly express support for an organisation that her husband’s very government made illegal? (The Telegraph suggests that the controversy has even led him to consider quitting, although reports of his unhappiness predate Helm’s Palestine Action tweet.)

The police announced last Saturday that they would take no action against Helm, which was a relief for those of us who believe in free speech. But they did assure the public her post had been ‘assessed by specialist officers’. It now turns out that Helm’s Palestine Action post was just the tip of the ‘anti-Zionist’ iceberg.

The Spectator’s Andrew Gilligan went digging into Helm’s social-media history. What he found can only be described as a toxic obsession with the Jewish State.

In 2024, Helm dismissed a UN report detailing Hamas’s rape of Jewish women on October 7 as ‘botched’ and ‘utterly meaningless’. The day after the pogrom itself, Helm posted: ‘1948 [the creation of Israel] is the root cause.’ In other words, the simple fact of Israel’s existence, rather than Hamas’s genocidal anti-Semitism, was to blame for October 7. She has also called for Western intervention against Israel and compared the Jewish State to Nazi Germany. Last year, Helm even suggested that Keir Starmer and David Lammy – then prime minister and foreign secretary respectively – should face trial at the International Criminal Court for their supposed complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza.

Helm seems to dedicate an unhealthy amount of time to posting about Israel. In recent days, she has charged ahead, furiously posting and re-posting, either oblivious or indifferent to the severe problems she has created for her husband. She reposted a tweet affirming that ‘Zionism [is] racism’. And she reposted another referring to the ‘Zionist Labour government of Andy Burnham’. What next, blaming Israel’s actions for anti-Semitism? Well, yes – only Helm was saying as much in 2019, before it was ‘cool’.

Who knows what Helm might have come out with or endorsed since this article has gone online. Keeping up with her online activity – a task Gilligan has tried manfully to do – appears to be an all-consuming endeavour. But her opinions raise a troubling question – just how commonplace is the myopic loathing of Israel among those who operate at the top of British society?

Jonathan Powell’s career as national security adviser might well be over soon. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about the establishment’s obsessive loathing of the Jewish State.