Fury has exploded among prominent British Jews over the decision by the British Museum in London to postpone a lecture that was scheduled to be given this week.

Paul Collins, the museum’s keeper of the Department of the Middle East, was due to give a lunchtime talk on “Ancient Israel and Judah” as part of Jewish Culture Month, launched by the Board of Deputies to celebrate the Jewish contribution to British life.

The day before the event, however, this was postponed because of “security concerns.” The museum said it had been informed that “a significant proportion” of those registered to attend intended to “deliberately disrupt the event,” which it now intended to reschedule to a later date.

The postponement has fueled bitter criticism by Jewish community figures and others, who have accused the museum of “pathetic” cowardice and bowing to mob rule.

It’s also increased alarm among British Jews that Jewish life is rapidly being squeezed out of the country, as the political and cultural establishment seeks to appease Islamist and left-wing pressure to turn Israel and Zionism into pariahs and refuses to take the measures necessary to protect Jews from attack.

Valid as these charges undoubtedly are, there’s another aspect to this postponed talk of even greater significance.

Collins was due to do something that would have exploded the foundational lie at the core of the anti-Israel belief system that has Britain and the West in its lethal grip.

Advertising his talk before it was postponed, the museum said that “the histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah can be illuminated by the archaeology and art of the wider ancient Middle East.”

Some of the most significant of these objects were preserved in the British Museum, shedding light on the political, cultural and imperial forces that shaped the region between approximately 900 and 50 BCE.

Such archaeological evidence, it said, documents key historical moments, including the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid dynasty and the Hellenistic influence in Judea, and the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom through which the Jews ruled Judea from about 141 to 37 BCE.

In other words, it demonstrates the existence of the ancient kingdom of the Jewish people. This is explosive because it proves a truth whose denial lies at the very core of the war against Israel.

The Palestinian Arabs have gone to enormous lengths to suppress this history, even carting away and destroying crucial evidence of ancient Judea that’s been excavated in archeological digs around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In order to make their claim to the State of Israel, they try to steal the Jews’ own history in the land from them.

The Palestinian cause rests on the doctrine that ancient Israel and Judah didn’t exist, and that the Palestinians were the indigenous inhabitants of the land. But it was only the Jews for whom the land was ever their national kingdom, centuries before Islam was even created.

In other words, Collins was due to draw attention to historical evidence—proved by physical artefacts housed in the museum—that is held to be unsayable because it exposes the entire Palestine cause as a scam.

As the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore observed on X about Collins’s proposed talk: “It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption.”

In the West, where Palestinianism is the defining cause for progressives, its signature lie of Palestinian entitlement to the land of Israel has become embedded as a cultural consensus.

That’s because no one ever tells the general public about the Jews’ own ancient history in the land. And responsibility for that failure must lie with the Jews themselves.

Jewish community leaders don’t speak up for the truth of the Jews’ ancient inheritance because of a combination of ignorance, fear—and because too many of them are themselves progressives who sign up to the ideology behind the “Palestine” lie.

As for the State of Israel, it has never properly addressed the decades-long, massively funded Palestinian propaganda war because it thinks that, with antisemitism embedded in Britain and the West over many centuries, it’s a waste of time to engage with these falsehoods at all.

The Israelis couldn’t be more wrong. Many have signed up to this vile narrative through a profound ignorance, which has been exploited by darker processes of intellectual manipulation that have been at work for decades.

Within two weeks of the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Taryn Thomas, an African-American studying human biology at Stanford University in California, joined an encampment of campus activists protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza. She knew nothing about the issue, but was impressed that educated people like faculty professors seemed certain Israel was committing genocide.

Doubts started to grow, and out of curiosity, she visited the Nova Music Festival exhibition that had come to Los Angeles, expecting to find Zionist lies that would reaffirm her hatred of Israel. Instead, she was shocked, particularly by an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to tell him that he’d killed 10 Jews.

“My heart sank,” she said, “because [this was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for ‘any means necessary,’ I didn’t realize that’s what it meant.”

Months later, on a trip to Israel, she was shocked again when she met Ethiopian Jews, Arabs, Druze and Bedouin among Israel’s population. She hadn’t known Israel even had black people, she said. Back home, she posted pictures and video of her trip online. As a result, she lost her friends and became the target of online exposure campaigns and cyberbullying.

Thomas was unusual because she was prepared to entertain challenges to a sealed thought system. Many refuse even to listen to any pro-Israel facts. What her experience tells us is the enormous pressure wielded by what she rightly calls the “echo chamber” of the progressive world.

The way this works is that what matters is not the substance of what’s said but who is saying it. Everyone who challenges progressive ideologies like anti-Zionism is believed to be evil. So anti-Zionists fear that if they listen to evidence challenging the Palestinian cause, they will become evil themselves.

For them, such evidence about Israel and Zionism carries the threat of moral contamination. The appalling result is that their minds have indeed been morally contaminated—but by beliefs that sanitize Palestinian Arabs and others in the Islamic world who do evil. And these beliefs, in turn, vilify the Islamists’ Israeli victims.

People who feel the need to silence others are almost always motivated by fear. Anti-Zionists refuse to listen to the evidence because they fear their entire moral personality will be destroyed.

To combat this, defenders of Israel and the truth need to undermine that vicious echo chamber by showing how immoral it is. They can do this by using the Israel-haters’ own tactics against them.

The haters target Israel’s defenders with reputational damage based on smears, lies and character assassination. Israel’s defenders should target the haters with reputational damage based on truth and evidence. The haters think they’re moral because they believe in anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and think that these are embodied by the Palestinian cause.

So they should be called out for supporting the very things they despise as evil. They are promoting colonialism through the attempt by the Palestinian Arabs to conquer Israel. They are endorsing racist ethnic cleansing by claiming that there can be no Jewish “settlers” in a state of Palestine. And they are inciting and sanitizing genocide through the aim of erasing Israel “from the river to the sea.”

The main issue is not free speech. It’s the need to combat Soviet-style disinformation and psychological warfare that’s resulted in a cult-like grip on millions of minds.

It’s the need to destroy the Palestinian echo chamber in which so many are trapped. And the way to do that is to start speaking up for the truths on physical display at the British Museum.