The famous story about Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt has a particular lesson, according to the late British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. It’s fine to look back—even at Sodom—but not while you’re walking out of it. When entering a better future, keep your eyes forward. It ensures you’ll go in the right direction.
I’ve been thinking about this during my time in Israel this week. For most of the October 7 war, Jews had two stock responses to questions like “How are you?” There was the normal polite response to those in our professional lives and then there was the response when Jews asked each other this question: “Well, you know.”
That second response is starting to go out of style. Since the cease-fire deal returned nearly all hostages or their remains to their loved ones and IDF reservists to their everyday lives, “How are you?” has once again become a legitimate question. That is especially palpable here in Israel, for all the obvious reasons.
Israelis are looking forward, but that doesn’t mean the recent past is forgotten. Quite the opposite: Here former hostages speak to reporters regularly to make clear the whole truth of the war and its toll. Nova festival survivors have banded together to heal as a community and to educate the rest of the country on what they have discovered about themselves in the process. Faces of Hamas’s victims are still visible on walls and windows. The political and military echelons are daily facing calls for accountability, and steps in that direction have begun.
But this is all in the service of looking forward. Israelis are deciding what shape their national future will take, who they will be as they emerge from their longest war. This country is always building, always clearing its own path ahead.
You know who isn’t moving on? Israel’s enemies, specifically those who have made Gaza their personality. And I don’t mean the people of Gaza, who are prevented from rebuilding by Hamas. I mean the Western politicians, activists, donors. and others who have nothing to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning without the hope of a Hamas resurgence and permanent war in Gaza.
The best current example of this is the crackup of the British left. The Labour Party governs the country (for the moment) and yet is in a zombie-like state. Other parties to its left are gaining, and new parties are forming, none more perfectly Gaza-obsessed than former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s party, named Your Party. (The name was a placeholder but is now official. The jokes tell themselves.)
On Your Party’s website, visitors are told the party is spearheaded by Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, another anti-Zionist obsessive. Crucially, it states, “The founding process is being stewarded by the six members of the Independent Alliance.”
What is the Independent Alliance? It is a left-wing parliamentary bloc but is not, itself, a political party. In addition to Corbyn (and Sultana, who is not technically part of the Independent Alliance at the moment), the group is made up of candidates who, the BBC explains, “beat Labour candidates in [the 2024] election with their pro-Palestinian stance in constituencies with large Muslim populations.”
The Independent Alliance was essentially the Gaza party without a party. Now it is Your Party. Sultana recently spoke about the reason Your Party is needed and the role it intends to play in British politics: It is “a proudly socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist party rooted in a mass movement.”
So Your Party is made up of British parliamentarians whose entire political worldview revolves around the Jews of Israel: Corbyn and Sultana plus Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain, and Iqbal Mohamed.
What happens when the situation in Gaza begins to resolve and enters a prolonged period of low hostility and high foreign diplomatic engagement? The cement holding together the UK’s Gaza bloc disintegrates and Your Party becomes a two-headed self-pecking chicken.
Two of the Gaza independents walked out on the party, and for months Sultana has “mainly communicated with her supposed colleagues through lawyers.” She and Corbyn set up dueling political rallies and even dueling membership drives. “At one point we had six MPs and four different factions,” one source told the Guardian.
It turns out that personal and professional relationships built on paranoid anti-Semitism and dependent on permanent war aren’t so solid. Let that be a lesson for all politicians in the U.S. and Europe.
