Jacob Schimmel: How the words of a Tory MP in Parliament made me think ‘Britain is better than this’

Jacob Schimmel is a British born businessman serving on the boards of several international humanitarian organisations. He often writes for the Jerusalem Post.

When Kit Malthouse stood in the House of Commons not so long ago and described Gaza as “a shooting gallery, an abattoir, where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at,” he crossed a line Britain should never have allowed.

He made an accusation so grotesque, so untethered from fact, that it betrays everything this country has always stood for.

I was born and raised in Britain, growing up with the belief that public service was built on dignity, that Parliament held moral weight, and that words spoken from its benches carried responsibility to truth.

My father arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee child fleeing Nazi Germany with nothing but hope and a suitcase. Britain gave him safety, dignity and a future. I was raised with reverence for the country that took him in, not blind reverence, but the deep respect born of witnessing Britain at its finest. That reverence is what makes this moment so heartbreaking and what compels me to speak.

Gaza is not an abattoir. To call it that is antisemitism dressed up as political commentary. It implies that the Jewish state is not engaged in warfare against a genocidal terrorist organisation but in mechanised slaughter for its own sake. It reduces a democracy defending itself to a regime that deliberately butchers civilians.

This war did not materialise from nowhere.

It began on October 7th when Hamas broke through the border and committed acts of deliberate barbarism. Babies beheaded. Women raped beside the corpses of their friends. Children taken hostage. Entire families burned alive. It was the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

None of this is to ignore the terrible suffering of innocent Palestinians whose lives have been devastated by a war Hamas chose and continues to wage from among them.

My father was living proof of antisemitism’s dangers. He fled Nazi persecution and found sanctuary in Britain. Churchill was one of my father’s heroes, and Britain’s willingness to protect Jewish refugees was the country it chose to be in its finest hour.

When Malthouse stands in the very Parliament that once offered my father sanctuary and uses the language that has always endangered Jews, he abandons the principles that once defined that institution. The Parliament that once stood against antisemitism now grants it the protection in its own chamber.

To describe Israel’s military response as an abattoir is to invoke the language of industrial slaughter. Language that carries specific historical resonance when applied to Jews. When British forces fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria, urban warfare involving similar challenges, no MP described these operations as luring civilians out to be shot. No one called them an abattoir. That inflammatory rhetoric is reserved for the Jewish state alone.

The consequences are not theoretical. They are felt in synagogues across Britain, in Jewish schools, in the daily lives of British Jews, many of whom now walk to synagogue under police protection. When Parliament uses language like this, it gives permission to those who need little encouragement.

What makes this particularly shameful is the position from which Malthouse speaks. He once held responsibility for public safety as Policing Minister and for education itself. Britain trusted him with shaping young minds and protecting citizens. That makes his words all the more disgraceful.

This is not a call for silence on Israel or Gaza. Britain’s tradition of robust democratic debate is one of its greatest strengths. Criticise policy by all means. Debate strategy. Demand accountability. But Britain has always known the difference between legitimate criticism and something far older and far more dangerous.

I still believe in the Britain that gave my father a future. I still believe in the Parliament that once stood as sanctuary against antisemitism. But I also know that this tradition must be actively defended. It does not preserve itself.

The Britain that became my father’s home still exists. It lives in the institutions my father came to love, in the principles this country has long championed, in the commitment to stand against antisemitism that once made it a refuge. But those principles are being abandoned by MPs who now speak the very language Britain once stood against.

The question now is whether Britain will remain a place where Jews can feel safe, or allow hatred to flourish across the country, legitimised by its own Parliament.

Britain is better than this. It still is.

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