We are taught to judge ourselves by our friends, it is a comforting idea, it’s also deeply naïve.
Alliances are transactional. Friendships in politics are rarely moral, they are by there very nature strategic. Today’s partner is tomorrow’s critic, while the “enemy of my enemy" becomes a temporary ally.
If you want to understand who you are, morally, strategically, historically, do not look first to who applauds you, look to who condemns you. Instantly, instinctively, without hesitation and always with total disregard for previous positions taken on comparable situations.
Instinct reveals worldview and the last 72 hours have been ever so instructive.
Following the joint US-Israel strike on the Iranian regime, a regime that has:
- financed and armed Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis for decades
- directed nearly 50 years of proxy warfare across Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Yemen
- sponsored terror attacks against Jewish targets worldwide
- used diplomatic infrastructure and intelligence networks to facilitate global terror operations
- repressed its own population since 1979 with executions, torture and mass imprisonment
- killed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in crackdowns, including women protesting compulsory veiling laws
- institutionalised gender repression under clerical rule
- weaponised hostage-taking and proxy militancy as instruments of statecraft
- condemnation from parts of the West’s political class was immediate, not cautious, not conditional, immediate.
That reaction tells us more than any official statement, but not all condemnation comes from the same source.
When Jeremy Corbyn describes action against Tehran as “unprovoked," and when Zack Polanski and Mothin Ali deploy the language of “rogue states," this is not simply tactical disagreement. It reflects an ideological framework.
In significant parts of the contemporary progressive left, Zionism, the belief in Jewish national self-determination, is increasingly framed as uniquely illegitimate.
That shift is profound.
Because once you define the Jewish right to sovereignty as inherently racist, once you characterise the existence of Israel itself as structural injustice, then Israeli self-defence becomes aggression by definition.
Not because of what Israel does, but because of what Israel is.
Within the Green Party there is open debate about formally defining Zionism as racism. That is not peripheral nuance, that is an attempt to place Jewish nationhood outside the boundaries of moral legitimacy.
Electorally, anti-Israel mobilisation has already demonstrated its potency. The by-election victory in Gorton and Denton showed how polarisation around the only Jewish state can translate into parliamentary gains. What we saw in Manchester last week was sectarianism, pure and simple, the successful pandering to hate.
This is strategic positioning. Opposition to Israel becomes not one issue among many, but a defining identity marker. It is ideological, it is absolutist and it renders Israeli deterrence illegitimate in principle.
The asymmetry becomes even starker when we examine the facts on the ground.
In just the past days, Iran has launched documented missile and drone attacks not only toward Israel but toward multiple neighbouring Muslim-majority states across the Gulf, more regional cross-border aggression in 72hrs than Israel has initiated across sovereign Muslim states in the entirety of its history.
That is not rhetoric, that is record. If cross-border missile strikes across the Gulf do not qualify as destabilisation, what does?
Then there is proximity.
The fact that the deputy leader of the Green Party, Mothin Ali, attended a rally openly in support of the Iranian regime after the attack began, where regime flags were visible, is not incidental. Public proximity to that symbolism, at such a moment, is not morally neutral. This was not a fringe gathering in a vacuum. It was publicised on Iranian state television, the regime itself used the imagery for propaganda.
When the deputy leader of a major political party in Britain appears in a context that is then amplified by a regime whose record includes repression, terror sponsorship and direct regional aggression, that has consequence.
Whether intended or not, it provides validation.
Whether intended or not, it projects division within Western democracies.
Whether intended or not, it signals to Tehran that ideological allies exist inside the political systems of the very countries debating how to respond to its actions.
That is not a trivial matter, it is not merely optics, it is geopolitical signalling.
The motivation from Rupert Lowe is different, it is not rooted in anti-Zionist ideology, but in isolationism.
The instinct that this is “not our fight" draws from a much older Western tradition, the belief that disengagement preserves peace, that foreign confrontation is inherently destabilising, that distance equals safety. Hardly all that shocking to think that Rupert Lowe would follow the same playbook as Neville Chamberlain!
The progressive anti-Zionist current and the nationalist isolationist current arrive at the same policy outcome, distance from Israel, condemnation of deterrence, reluctance to confront Tehran, but they travel different intellectual roads.
One questions the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. The other questions the legitimacy of democratic entanglement.
Both converge in effect, both weaken deterrence, both project hesitation. Both signal to authoritarian regimes that Western resolve is for sale and both disguise ideological hostility as moral principle.
Yet, the pattern extends way beyond Westminster. In the United States, figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rahida Tlaiab have repeatedly framed Israel as a primary destabilising force in the region, often collapsing distinctions between democratic self-defence and authoritarian aggression.
That reframing shifts causality. If Israel is structurally culpable, then Iranian hostility becomes contextualised. If American support is cast as imperial complicity, then deterrence becomes escalation by default.
The rise of Zohran Mamdani demonstrates how this framing can be mobilised electorally. Anti-Israel activism becomes catalytic, it binds coalitions and creates moral litmus tests.
Movements scale, so what gains traction in New York for a Mayoral election informs a US social democratic movement’s playbook for a Presidential election.
First: redefine Zionism as structural injustice. Second: portray Israel as uniquely illegitimate. Third: recast American support as colonial aggression. Fourth: treat confrontation with authoritarian regimes as the true moral transgression.
Once that architecture is in place, any action against Tehran is painted as bloodlust rather than deterrence. That is not neutrality, that is a dangerous worldview that leads to only one result.
For diaspora Jewry, this debate is not abstract.
October 7th, carried out by Hamas, funded and armed by Tehran, was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Within days, antisemitic incidents surged across Britain, synagogues required heightened protection, Jewish schools strengthened security, public life narrowed.
What happened in southern Israel reverberated in London, New York, Toronto, Sydney. Because the ideology that fuels Iranian-backed militancy does not stop at Israel’s borders, it bleeds outward.
This is not simply about Israel, it is about whether liberal democracies retain the clarity to distinguish between states accountable to voters and courts and regimes accountable only to clerics and coercion. It is about whether sustained proxy warfare is recognised as aggression or normalised until it becomes unmanageable.
Make no mistake, applause is strategic, condemnation, however, is truly revealing.
When action is taken against a regime that represses its own people, subjugates women, finances militias, sponsors massacres of Jews abroad, openly threatens democratic stability and the fiercest outrage is reserved not for that regime but for the democracy confronting it, something is exposed, a moment of existential clarity.
Your enemies reveal more about your position than your friends ever will. We must not judge ourselves by who applauds us, we must judge ourself by who condemns us.
I know where I stand. I do not seek the approval of friends; I demand the judgment of enemies.
Because when evil is named and confronted, the outrage of your enemies is the clearest proof that you have chosen the right side.
LEO PEARLMAN is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.