We need to talk about Maureen
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Yesterday, Maureen Lipman used her Radio 4 platform to launder Israel’s atrocities in Gaza behind a façade of fragility, cultural authority and attempted moral superiority. Instead of acknowledging mass death, starvation, war crimes or Britain’s own complicity, she hid behind theatrical victimhood and weaponised antisemitism as a catch-all slur to silence global outrage. Every boycott, protest or demand for accountability was written off as “Jew hatred”. Lipman has chosen to act as a cultural shield for a far-right led foreign government openly committing ethnic cleansing whilst at the same time smearing millions and ignoring the Jewish voices calling for justice. Her Eurovision grandstanding exposed not fear of antisemitism but fear of accountability, fear that the world sees the truth and refuses to look away. She’s defending a murderous state, not Jewish identity and history will remember which side she chose.
TetleysTLDR: The long bit
There’s a particular sort in the British establishment who thinks draping themselves in the Union Flag and a bit of Yiddishkeit grants them the divine right to lecture the public about morality while bulldozers level refugee camps and the children they never mention are buried under Israeli rubble.
Maureen Lipman: stage royalty, professional national treasure, and now part-time defender of the indefensible went on Radio 4’s World at One yesterday to deliver precisely that performance. A genteel, clipped, Radio 4-friendly sermon of moral superiority wrapped around what was, to all intents and purposes, thinly veiled genocide apologism.
World at one clip 28m37s
Lipman’s shtick is familiar by now: hand-wringing about how horrible war is of course, but with that unmistakable pivot that always arrives like clockwork: the ‘what else can Israel do?’ moment. The moment where the tragedy somehow becomes your fault, my fault, the BBC’s fault, the weather’s fault, Mister Ben's fault, the Clangers fault and the fault of anyone and everyone except the heavily armed nuclear-backed state levelling cities and starving a population. And because she can’t defend the present atrocities without stretching reason beyond farce, she reached for her favourite party trick: the whataboutery carousel.
Eurovision boycotts? Antisemitism. Calls for a ceasefire? Antisemitism. BBC journalists reporting the facts? Antisemitism (with a side-order of accusations of being ungrateful). Half the Global South calling for accountability? Antisemitism. The world being tired of watching Gaza turned into a graveyard? Antisemitism, naturally.
This is the Maureen Lipman method: the deployment of antisemitism not as an urgent moral category, which of course it is, but as a cheap rhetorical get-out-of-jail card to shut down legitimate criticism of a state committing war crimes in broad daylight. What makes it so infuriating is that she does it from behind a veneer of fragility and cultural authority. ‘I’m frightened,’ she says, in that deeply theatrical way only someone long-trained in the West End can manage. Frightened of what, exactly? That the world might finally notice the carnage in Gaza and stop applauding?
It wasn’t just the victimhood pantomime; it was the sheer audacity of her claims. According to Lipman, the countries refusing to participate in Eurovision because they’d rather not whitewash a state engaged in mass killing – well, they’re all driven by antisemitism. It's all in her words "jew Hatred" - Not outrage at the bombing of hospitals. Not disgust at the killing of journalists. Not horror at the starving of civilians. No, simply irrational Jew-hatred. A conspiracy so vast and so absurd that it apparently stretches from Slovenia to Ireland.
Everyone who sees the massacres and says ‘enough’ is, in Lipman's world, a bigot in disguise. They're all brainwashed and ignorant. It’s the same rhetorical trick used by every shouty Israeli government spokesperson, every lobby group, every pundit who sees the public turning on the Gaza slaughter and panics: pathologise dissent. Pretend that global anger isn’t about dead children. Pretend it’s all about ancient prejudices. Pretend the world just woke up one day and decided the Eurovision semi-final was the place to reenact the Protocols of the Elders of fucking Zion.
Lipman’s performance on World at One wasn’t just insulting, it was cowardly. Because she didn’t once, not once, address the reality staring everyone in the face. She didn’t talk about the mass graves. She didn’t talk about hunger being weaponised. She didn’t talk about UN warnings that Gaza is uninhabitable. She didn’t address the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, of evacuees, of aid workers of the fact the IDF are still killing children after the so called cease fire. She didn’t even attempt to reckon with the legal findings emerging from The Hague. No, all of that evaporated under a fog of Radio 4 niceties and emotional manipulation. She’d rather malign an entire global protest movement than tell the truth - and let’s not pretend this is accidental or born out of naivety. Lipman has taken it upon herself to become one of the most indefatigable cultural defenders of the Israeli state at precisely the moment when its actions have crossed every red line imaginable. She has chosen to plant herself firmly on the side of the F-16s and white phosphorus, the sieges and the carpet boming, the generals and the far-right cabinet ministers openly calling for ethnic cleansing. This isn’t the inadvertent blundering of a confused old luvvie. This is a deliberate political act from someone with a large public platform and a clear agenda. She has decided that her Jewish identity is synonymous with the Israeli state and therefore criticism of the latter is a personal affront to be met with theatrical outrage.
It’s insulting to Jewish people everywhere who want nothing to do with such horrors. What’s most galling is the arrogance with which she dismisses global solidarity movements. Hundreds of thousands on the streets across Europe? Bigots. Trade unions cutting ties? Bigots. Artists refusing to perform? Bigots. Human rights lawyers? Bigots. Entire national broadcasters boycotting a glittery kitsch-fest that has become a propaganda laundering machine? Also bigots. The only people not bigots, apparently, are those cheering on the death machines or politely pretending they can’t see anything happening. She laments those young people senselessly murdered at the NOVA festival but clearly doesn't give a flying shit about all the children murdered by the IDF.
And then, as if her Eurovision hysteria weren’t unhinged enough, Lipman swerved into that deranged grab-bag of geopolitical whataboutery she’s recently taken to peddling: dragging Ukraine and Armenia into the mix like some frantic conductor of the Great British Bullshit Orchestra. According to her, the world is perfectly happy to condemn Israel but mysteriously silent on Russia’s aggression and Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Armenians. Absolute fantasy. The world hasn’t stopped talking about Ukraine; it’s stopped listening to her excuses. And Armenians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh: another real ethnic cleansing, not the PR shield she wields, aren’t being ignored; they’re being invoked grotesquely by someone determined to use their suffering as a human shield for Israeli war crimes. It takes a special kind of moral bankruptcy to point at entire nations’ tragedies and say, ‘Look over there!’ while Gaza burns: but Lipman managed it with the breezy entitlement of someone who’s never had to live with the consequences of the violence she’s defending.
What she very pointedly didn't do, because to do so would detonate her entire narrative on air is confront the actual, glaringly obvious reason there is such volcanic public anger about Gaza: not because Israel is a Jewish state, but because our own bloody Government is complicit up to its neck in the carnage. British-made parts in the missiles. British diplomatic cover at the UN. British politicians bending over backwards to excuse the inexcusable while children starve. That’s what people are furious about. That’s what tens of thousands march over every weekend. Not some fever-dream of ancient antisemitic conspiracies, but the simple, uncomfortable fact that the UK is helping to enable a grinding, televised atrocity. Lipman can’t acknowledge that of course because the minute she does, her whole house of cards collapses. So she pretends the rage is irrational hatred rather than a moral reaction to our own government's fingerprints being found all over Gaza’s ruins.
Lipman’s argument – if it can be dignified with the term – hinges on the pernicious idea that any pressure applied to Israel is an assault on Jewish existence itself. It’s a strategy that does nothing but endanger Jewish people by binding their identity to the actions of a state committed to barbarism. The irony of it all is that the global Jewish diaspora has been some of the loudest voices demanding an end to the slaughter. Marches led by Jewish groups, rabbis chaining themselves to government buildings, Shaoh survivors condemning Netanyahu’s regime but none of that enters Lipman's worldview. They are invisible to her.
And then, in the most unintentionally comic twist of the whole Radio 4 séance, she tried to slam the door shut on the debate by announcing, with great gravitas, that she’s ‘recently been to Israel’, as though this were some kind of moral end-point, a certificate of truth, a stamp of divine authority. As if popping over on a curated visit, sipping coffee in Tel Aviv, and being chauffeured past the bits they want you to see magically resolves the matter. It was deployed like some sort of conversational mic drop: I’ve been, therefore I know, therefore shut up. But the only thing it really proved is that she thinks proximity is clarity, when in fact it’s the biggest blinder of all. Visiting a state mid-atrocity and emerging with nothing but government talking points isn’t insight, it’s complicity dressed up as worldliness, a sort of bourgeois travelogue masquerading as moral authority.
The real target of her fury isn’t antisemitism it’s accountability. And that brings us back to Eurovision, the bizarre hill she’s chosen to die on. A campy, kitsch, sequined festival of questionable vocals somehow became, in her mind, a battleground for civilisation. But let’s be real: Eurovision boycotts work precisely because cultural isolation hurts. Israel’s leadership understands that art, music, and entertainment are as much part of its diplomatic arsenal as weapons shipments. They trade on their image: the façade of modern, liberal, democratic, tolerant, fun. Every refusal to play along, every artist who says ‘no, not this time’ is a crack in that façade. Lipman’s panic reflects the fact that those cracks are now widening into chasms. Her desperate attempt to smear the boycotts as antisemitic only shows how little actual argument remains in her arsenal, because if she were forced to debate the substance – the bombardment, the blockade, the deaths – she’d crumble. So the only move left is to accuse the world of bigotry. It’s lazy, it’s cynical, and it’s morally bankrupt.
The World at One interviewer, to their credit, attempted to gently push back, but what can you realistically do when the person opposite you has decided that the facts of the war are irrelevant, that the only relevant factor is her own emotional narrative? The entire interview collapsed into the theatre of polite British tragedy: the frail voice, the faux-bewilderment, the lament that artists and audiences are turning their backs.
What she never acknowledged is why: because to acknowledge it would require confronting the reality of what the Israeli state is doing, and Lipman clearly has no interest in reality. No amount of theatrical quivering can obscure the fact that she, like many other public figures in Britain’s cultural class, have aligned herself with a foreign government run by fascistic elements who openly espouse ethnic cleansing. She is defending the indefensible. She is attempting to turn genocide into a matter of personal grievance. She is part of a machine that seeks to make moral clarity taboo. Her comments are not just reactionary; they are actively dangerous because they aim to delegitimise global solidarity and transform human rights activism into a hate crime.
What’s most nauseating is that Radio 4 presented this as balanced debate. As though someone attempting to justify the flattening of a civilian population is a normal, acceptable contribution to public discourse. As though Lipman’s revisionism deserves the same oxygen as international law. As though Palestinian lives are merely an abstract talking point for well-meaning rounds of Westminster chin-stroking.
This is how the BBC sanitises horrors: by letting genteel establishment voices reframe genocide as a cultural misunderstanding. A bit of bad PR. A touch of unwarranted hostility from the masses. Something to be explained away between the Shipping Forecast and some soft-focus features about village fetes.
What Lipman did, knowingly or otherwise, was launder war crimes through the language of victimhood and cultural grievance. She became the velvet glove on the iron fist and the worst part is she expects us to applaud her for it. To respect the courage, the vulnerability, the supposed moral clarity, yet all she did was cover up the stench of blood with the scent of genteel self-pity.
There was a time when Lipman was a sharp, observant voice who could use comedy and drama to illuminate uncomfortable truths. Now she uses her platform to obscure them. To turn reality upside down. To take a world screaming in horror and declare that its screams are the real problem - and in doing so she has made herself something truly grotesque: a cultural figure using her public standing to excuse mass killing. A cheerleader for state violence posing as a frail victim of public bullying. A self-appointed moral guardian telling the world that caring about Palestinian lives is bigotry and ignorance.
I’ll tell you what bigotry looks like, Maureen. It looks like erasing an entire population’s suffering because it inconveniences your political commitments. It looks like smearing millions as antisemites for daring to demand basic human rights. It looks like using your heritage as a shield for a far-right government that treats Jewish identity as a political weapon rather than the ploughshare of a lived culture. It looks like weaponising real, serious, horrifying prejudice to protect a state that is committing acts too monstrous to fit into polite Radio 4 conversations.
And as for your Eurovision martyrdom – spare us. No one is obliged to sing and dance while civilians starve. The glitter doesn’t cover the graves and your pearl clutching crocodile tears won’t wash away the blood. The world doesn’t have to keep performing for a regime that has turned Gaza into a wasteland. If that offends you, that’s your problem.
The truth is this: Lipman isn’t frightened of antisemitism. She’s frightened of accountability. She’s frightened that the moral consensus is turning. She’s frightened that the world sees what Israel is doing and refuses to look away. She’s frightened that Palestine is no longer a fringe issue but a global demand for justice and what's more she’s frightened that the cultural class she once relied on for uncritical support is slipping away, because they are sick of her bullshit too.
Let the cheerleaders of massacres feel the chill of public outrage. Let the defenders of war crimes realise that the old tricks – the guilt, the theatrics, the moral blackmail – no longer work because the world is changing. People are no longer nodding along to the BBC’s sanitised scripts. They’re watching live streams of bombed-out hospitals. They’re reading human rights reports. They’re marching. They’re boycotting. They’re refusing to let cultural institutions become fig leaves for atrocity. And none of this is because Israel is a Jewish state, that insults the diaspora that doesn't subscribe to this revisionism. It is because Israel is an out of control pariah apartheid state being ruled by far right out of control murderous cunts. This is what you are defending Maureen and no amount of your Radio 4 hand-wringing will stop that.
In the end, her performance revealed far more about her than it did about Eurovision, or antisemitism or the global boycott movement. It exposed a woman clinging desperately to a narrative that the world no longer believes. A performer out of her depth, improvising wildly as the script collapses around her. A public figure who long ago traded integrity for propaganda and if that sounds harsh, so be it. It needs to be said said because there is something fundamentally obscene about someone sitting in a comfortable British studio complaining about people refusing to participate in a song contest with murderers while families in Gaza dig their children out of rubble under fire with their bare hands. Maureen Lipman chose her side. She chose the bombs, the siege, the starvation, the propaganda machine. She chose to slander the world rather than face the truth and history will remember that, because when the dust finally settles, when the archives are written, when the documentaries air and the memorials stand – who will want to be remembered as the person who used their public voice to justify atrocity?
What makes her performance even more galling is how violently it clashes with the ethical tradition she claims to be defending. The Talmud is explicit: “One who embarrasses another in public is as though he shed blood” a stark reminder that moral standing isn’t claimed by shouting down the oppressed, but earned through justice, compassion and truthfulness. Yet here she is, using her platform to belittle an entire people’s suffering and smear anyone who stands with them.
The date of writing this is 16 Kislev 5786. Kislev as a bridge month: a time for reflection, repairing spiritual neglect, reevaluating one’s commitments, relationships, priorities and essentially using the quiet of the season as a spiritual reset. Lipman may believe she’s defending something noble. But all she’s really defending is a lie soaked in blood. And the world has stopped believing her. Perhaps she should reflect on this.
It isn’t Jewish identity she’s championing but a state’s brutality and in doing so, she strays miles from the values of dignity, honesty and human decency that Jewish teaching elevates. It’s the behaviour that brings shame, not the ancestry and no amount of Radio 4 sanctimony can disguise that.
Shame on you Maureen.
Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK. A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.
A bit of shameless self-plugging here. This is www.TetleysTLDR.com blog. It's not monetised. Please feel free to go and look at the previous blogs on the website and if you like them, please feel free to share them.
