‘I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.’ Rob Stothard/Getty Images.
A year ago, on Yom Kippur, I went to a house party. Perhaps that was my first mistake, but I am a secular Jew. It was in a house in Bath so central the weekly Palestine protest was outside the door. It was a 50th birthday: a party made of people I had known for 30 years, and other media professionals I had not met before.
It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.
This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.
Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.
If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.
The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.
Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.
Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.
“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”
I was mesmerised by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?
I stood with counter-protestors too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.
I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.
Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.
Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marvelled at how odd their civilisation — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.
The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behaviour of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.
