Georgia Gilholy: We should all shop at Gail’s. It’s a beverage and pastry based counter-protest
GEORGIA L. GILHOLY
Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
It is often said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.
Funnily enough, this quote itself is often falsely attributed to George Orwell. But regardless of who did or did not coin it, this memeified phrase strikes at something important. Indeed, sometimes as little as buying an overpriced iced matcha latte can feel revolutionary in deeply conformist London. This is especially true if one is doing so, not merely to lap up some delicious green caffeine, but to prove a point.
It is for this reason, I have henceforth decided to take a detour en route to my local tube station, in order to pick up something from Gail’s Bakery.
Yes, this is indeed a divisive thing to do, given that the chain’s newest branch in Archway, North London, has been vandalised twice in the same week. Aside from the usual string of anti-Israel slogans scribbled across the cafe, one simply read “Support Local businesses”. Is it not presumably better to support such businesses by offering them your custom, rather than ordering graffiti spray off Amazon and dousing rival eateries with it?
That numerous anti-Gail’s placards and graffiti also omit a vital apostrophe of possession tells us all we need to know about these charlatans’ poor attention to detail.
Luke Johnson, who masterminded Gail’s expansion and sale to Boston-based Bain Capital, and remains an investor, was a Brexit supporter and high-profile critic of the government’s tyrannical COVID-19 policies. He has also slammed net-zero zealotry. This is unusually gutsy for today’s typical high-profile businessman, who generally seeks to keep their head down and succumb to the whinging bien pensant, who have increasingly directed their ire toward Israel.
Johnson has also courageously bucked the trend on the matter of the Middle East, praising the so-called “Start-Up Nation’s” entrepreneurial grit, and slamming “the deranged defence of Hamas” in academia. While Johnson is not Jewish or Israeli, Gail’s founder, the baker Yael Mejia is both. The chain is therefore named, not after Coronation Street’s chaotic matriarch, but using the anglicised version of Yael: Gail. Although Mejia is no longer financially linked to the chain which calls her its namesake, Bain Capital reportedly has some investments in private companies based in Israel.
Is Israel committing a “genocide” as these anti-Gail’s goons claim in their messy graffiti? No, it is engaged in a war of self-defence.
Is Gail’s an Israeli company? No.
Even if it were an Israeli company, would that make it automatically complicit or approving of any and all actions ever taken by the Israeli government or military? No, especially given that Israel, unlike China, Russia, Iran and Qatar (who have far more business interests in London than the Jewish State) is a free market economy with a free press and free and fair elections.
The reality is that none of these obvious facts matter to those who have decided that any and all connection with Israel and its culture, however vague, is a grave moral offence.
It is not only Gail’s that has been subject to these nonsensical attacks for years, but Marks and Spencer, Tesco, or indeed any company that the anti-Israel mob deem inadequately anti-Israel. Just this week, ‘activists’ tweeted photographs of themselves sticking fingers inside Israeli avocados, and moving them inside supermarket freezers to render them inedible. In 1985, one person was killed when suspected Palestinian terrorists detonated a bomb inside a Paris branch of Marks and Spencer.
No better is the brainrot of this set exemplified than by Rachida Benamar, who describes herself as a “qualified Career & Life Coach”.
Benamar posted a viral X post reading: “Boycott Gail’s bakery. Gail’s was founded by Israeli entrepreneur Gail Mejia and Ran Avidan. The current owner Luke Johnson’s stances are disgusting and what he said about Gaza is horrific. Please share widely” One response noted: “What did he say? Would be helpful to put it up if you can.” Naturally, she did not. Why? Because Johnson made no such “horrific” comments about Gaza. But to those of Benamar’s persuasion, any remarks about Israel or Gaza that do not include a complete surrender to those that would see the Jewish State wiped from the map, qualify as “horrific”.
The Gail’s fiasco was never about protesting injustice, but about ensuring that anything and everyone Jewish, Israeli (or perceived as such) is driven out of public life.
We should all do our small part to avoid this evil coming to pass, one chilled beverage at a time!
See Related Article Below
The Gail’s attacks are brainless – and terrifying
If anti-Israel agitators wish to avoid being described as terrorists, they might begin by ceasing to terrorise ordinary people. The smashing of the Gail’s branch in Archway, north London, red paint flung across its walls, slogans sprayed beside its door, is the latest instalment in a now familiar pattern: vandalism presented as virtue, intimidation dressed up as solidarity. The activists call it protest, but let’s call it by its real name: menace.
To vandalise Gail’s in the name of Gaza is a deliberate effort to intimidate and must be treated as such
The branch’s windows were broken twice within a single week. Slogans reading “Reject corporate Zionism” and “Boycott” were sprayed across the frontage, an anarchist symbol scrawled beside the entrance. Staff arrived at dawn to clear shattered glass from the pavement while police opened a hate crime investigation. That sequence of events is not persuasion in any recognisable democratic sense, but coercion, carried out by people who operate under cover of darkness and disappear before they can be held accountable. Thugs.
It is at least on brand: this sort of violence and intimidation sits uncomfortably close to the political culture these activists claim to romanticise. For much of the past eight decades, the most visible export of Palestinians has been violence: hijackings, bombings, suicide attacks, knife assaults, rockets. They perfected many of these techniques which we now all have to experience. People can argue endlessly about history, borders, mandates and missed opportunities. That argument has been running for decades and will continue to do so. What has been far more visible to the outside world is the method that has so often defined Palestinian militancy over the past seventy-eight years: hijackings, bombings, shootings, stabbings, rockets, the theatre of fear. For many observers, that has been the most recognisable export of Palestinianism to the wider world.
The word was intifada, uprising through force. What we are now witnessing in London is its imitation. The smashing of shop windows, the ritual daubing of red paint, the attempt to make ordinary commercial life feel unsafe, all mirror that politics of intimidation. In that sense the product has been successfully exported. The intifada has been globalised, exactly as its most ardent advocates once promised it would be.
In that sense the vandalism in Archway is not an aberration, but imitation.
Contrast that with what Israel has exported. One example will suffice. Teva Pharmaceuticals manufactures roughly one in five of the generic medicines used by the NHS. I have stood inside the facilities in Israel where they produce these life-saving treatments. I travelled there with Kemi Badenoch when she was Trade Secretary as she worked on a renewed UK–Israel trade deal – talks that were later frozen by the incoming Labour government in response to the war started when the Palestinians savagely attacked Israel on October 7th. That decision punished both Israel and Britain, as a result of Palestinian terrorism. It didn’t do much to help the Palestinians, either. Pro-Palestinian campaigners have even targeted Teva, calling for the shutdown of its UK operations,
The targeting of Gail’s belongs in a dark historical context. The smashing of Jewish shop windows did not begin in Archway. It did not begin in 2023. It did not begin with the Palestinian cause.
[…]
Since October 2023, Jewish schools in Stamford Hill have been vandalised with red paint. In 2025, a Jewish-owned business in the area was attacked, with red paint thrown, windows smashed and ‘Drop Elbit’ sprayed on the frontage. A building housing Jewish businesses in north Manchester was also daubed with red paint and ‘Happy Nakba Day’ graffiti. In November 2023, the Wiener Holocaust Library’s sign was defaced with ‘Gaza’ in red paint. In each case, the perpetrators frame their actions through the language of Gaza and Israel, while the immediate targets are local premises that are identifiably Jewish or associated with Jewish communities.
This is intimidation. Its purpose is to make communities feel exposed, unwelcome, watched. That is why police classify such incidents as hate crimes. That is why they must treat them with severity.
The Spectator: continue reading
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