British columnist Melanie Phillips lashes out at Palestinians at pro-Israel NYC event

Controversial British columnist and broadcaster Melanie Phillips has claimed there is "no such thing as the Palestinian people" and only Jewish people "have any entitlement" to historic Palestine.

During a twenty-minute speech at the "Rage Against the Hate" conference at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City last month, Phillips, who writes for The Times, also claimed the "West" is facing a "death cult" in the "forces of Islam".

Organised by Shurat HaDin, an Israeli legal organisation known for targeting organisations which document international law violations by the Israeli government, the 27 October 2025 conference aimed to bring "together Jewish community and pro-Israeli activists from around the globe at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC".

"The world has been made to believe that peace and justice in the Middle East hinge on the Palestinians getting a state of their own," Phillips said in her speech.

"Justice for Palestinians has been deemed to be the issue that drives all before it. By apparently denying that happy outcome, the state of Israel has been perceived as the enemy of humanity itself."

She continued: "This is the big lie that we are all up against. But the Jewish world has never identified this big lie as such and has never fought it.

"It has never told the world the truth; there is no such thing as Palestine. There is no such thing as the Palestinian people.

"The Jewish world has never told the rest of the world that the indigenous people of the land of so-called Palestine are the Jews," Phillips declared.

"That the Jews are the only people who have any entitlement to any of this land, an entitlement based in law, in history and morality.

"And they are the only people who have an entitlement to all of it."

'The basic lie of Palestine'

Phillips later decried what she called the "steady rise of an Islamic political bloc in Britain, and I'm afraid here in America".

She claimed: "It is as if we are living through a posthumous victory of both Stalin and Hitler."

She urged Jewish community leaders to "address head-on the basic lie of Palestine".

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Phillips also said in the speech that the Palestinian cause "is based on stealing the Jews' own history in the land from them", describing it as a "holy war" and a "Trojan Horse for the Islamisation of the West".

"The West has bought into the agenda for its own destruction at the hands of Islam. 

"This is a death wish by the West. And if you have a death wish, you cannot fight a death cult, which is what the West is facing in the forces of Islam."

She further said that "one could say Christianity was a Jewish sect that got slightly out of hand".

Phillips drew criticism in 2019 for writing that claims of Islamophobia were inherently antisemitic in an article for the Jewish Chronicle entitled, "Don't fall for bogus claims of 'Islamophobia'".

"The Palestinians constantly spew out medieval and Nazi-themed hatred of Jews, presenting them as the source of all evil in the world," she wrote in the piece, which was criticised as an "error" by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.