LONDON — The political consensus that has, for sixty years, allowed an Israeli government to claim it acts on behalf of the global Jewish community is breaking down faster than at any moment since the 1982 Lebanon war. The break is visible in the diaspora groups now organising on three continents to put that claim on the record as false. An Al Jazeera feature published Saturday documented the movement that Britain’s Na’amod, the United States’ Jewish Voice for Peace and Israel’s Standing Together have, in the past twelve months, made into a public force. The political phrase “not in my name” has now appeared on protest banners at Jewish institutional events in New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Sydney and Toronto. “Claims that they’re acting in my name,” Emily Hilton, the Na’amod co-founder who led the British group’s mourning prayer outside Israel’s London embassy in May, told Al Jazeera, “are, frankly, outrageous.”
The most visible flashpoint of the past three weeks was the May 31 Israel Day Parade in New York, at which Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made an unannounced appearance with two other far-right ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Smotrich, whose annexationist platform and 2023 statements about the Palestinian people have been the subject of multiple International Criminal Court referral motions, had not been invited; he crashed. Protesters along the route shouted “shame” and “war criminals” as the delegation passed. Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said in a statement issued the same evening that “it’s antisemitic to conflate Jews and Israel” — a rebuttal of the Anti-Defamation League framing that has, for two decades, treated criticism of Israeli policy as criticism of American Jews. Sonya Meyerson-Knox, JVP’s communications director, was quoted in the same Al Jazeera reporting. “For far too long,” she said, “American Jewish institutions have supported the Israeli government.”
The data underneath the public protests is the part the Israeli foreign ministry has been quietly tracking for two years. The Pew Research Center’s October 2025 study of American Jewish identity found that fifty-three percent of American Jews under forty disagreed with the statement “caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish” — a twenty-three-point shift from the 2013 baseline. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research’s 2025 study of British Jews under thirty-five reported a similar split. Australia’s Jewish Communal Appeal annual survey, published in November 2025, found a thirty-eight-point gap between under-forty and over-sixty respondents on whether Israeli policy in Gaza was “justified.” Keith Kahn-Harris, a sociologist at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research who has tracked diaspora attitudes for two decades, told Al Jazeera plainly. “For years,” he said, “the issue of Israel has been a point of consensus among Jews.” It is, on his measurement, no longer a point of consensus.
The institutional anchors of the diaspora consensus — the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France — have spent the past eighteen months in a careful triangulation between an institutional membership that still defends the principle of Israeli statehood and a constituency that is increasingly unwilling to defend the practice of the current Israeli government. The Conference of Presidents’ May 2026 letter on the Smotrich parade visit said only that it “regretted the unannounced nature of the appearance,” a phrasing that avoided the substance entirely. JVP, Na’amod and IfNotNow have spent the same period filling the space the institutions left vacant.
The Jewish-religious vocabulary of the movement is the part that has, on Israeli-government readings, been hardest to discredit. Na’amod’s London protests use the traditional Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer recited at funerals, for Palestinian dead in Gaza. JVP’s Passover Seders, which the Yahoo News network covered in April outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, repurpose the Haggadah’s bondage-and-liberation framing for the deportation campaign. Israel’s Standing Together, which is the only one of the three groups that operates inside Israel, has built a Jewish-Arab dual-national leadership and runs a weekly demonstration outside the Tel Aviv Defence Ministry that has, since February, drawn between three thousand and twelve thousand attendees. None of these groups, on a strict religious-law reading, can be dismissed as outside the Jewish tradition. They are inside it.
The political stake the Israeli government has placed on the diaspora consensus is larger than most non-Israeli readers register. Israeli law explicitly identifies the global Jewish community as the population on whose behalf the State of Israel claims to act, both under the 1950 Law of Return and the 2018 Nation-State Law. The diaspora’s institutional support has been used, since the 1950s, to legitimate Israeli foreign-policy positions in U.S., British, French, Argentine and Australian domestic politics, and to authorise the conflation of criticism with antisemitism that has, under the IHRA working definition adopted by thirty-eight states since 2016, become a tool for legal sanction. If the diaspora’s institutional consensus collapses, that legal architecture loses its political anchor.
For the Israeli right and the Netanyahu coalition specifically, the loss is fiscal as well as political. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s 2026 fundraising is, on the group’s own first-quarter filings, twenty-three percent below its 2024 baseline. The United Jewish Appeal’s national campaign in the United States missed its annual target for the first time in twelve years. The Israeli bond program, the U.S.-resident diaspora’s largest financial vehicle for direct support to the Israeli treasury, fell forty-one percent year-on-year in its first quarter. The numbers move. They are, on the Israeli finance ministry’s own internal modelling, sensitive to under-forty diaspora engagement in a way the older cohorts were not.
The movement’s continuation through the 2026 G7 summit is the next public test. As Eastern Herald reported earlier this morning, French President Emmanuel Macron’s expanded G7 in Évian-les-Bains from June 15 to 17 will include a working session on the Middle East at which the U.S.-Israel-Iran ceasefire framework President Trump claimed would be signed Sunday is expected to be the headline item. The diaspora movement is organising parallel events in Paris, Geneva and London, and Na’amod has confirmed a delegation will be in Évian for the summit’s three days.
Emily Hilton, who began her organising in 2020 at the University of Oxford’s Jewish Society, described the trajectory in the language of generation. “I began to question the acceptance of Zionist thought from university onwards,” she told Al Jazeera. The questioning, in 2026, is now institutionalised on five continents. The political vocabulary the movement has built — “not in my name,” “war criminals,” the conflation rebuttal Beth Miller has put on the record — is what the next decade’s American, British, French, Australian and Argentine Jewish institutional politics will be argued in. The Israeli government’s claim to speak for the diaspora is, on every data point measured this year, weaker than it has been since 1967. What replaces it, the movement says, will be written by the diaspora itself.
