I have really cut back on my intake of social media over the last couple of weeks, since the massacre of Jews by Hamas in Israel.
I know there’s a context in which this happened. I am not blind to it. I would love for different people to live peaceably together but there is so much hate and anger, which as just been compounded a thousand-fold, that I fear that is an aspiration rather than a possibility.
I am naive and openly claim that. I have grown up, very much on one ‘side’ if we can narrow it down to the base levels. But it’s hard to see so much anger aimed at Jews and not feel trepidation. I am, primarily, fearful for my friends and family in Israel. They have each other, but they also live in immediate threat.
But I wanted to write about the fear, possibly irrational, that I have felt in London these last few weeks. I believe in the right to protest against the government actions, of course. I have been on many protests myself. I feel passionately about the rights of Palestinians to live in peace alongside Israelis. But I cannot feel that I can join a march for Palestine at the moment, because of the way this cause has been overtaken by people who would likely want to see the end to all Jews.
This isn’t everyone or even the majority, I suspect, but formally stating that shouting slogans such as ‘From the River to Sea, Palestine will be Free’ when many have characterised it as a call for the end to the Israel, in the light of the Hamas attack which specifically targetted civilians in the more gruesome manner, is frightening.
It is easy to draw a good/evil dichomoty when you do not know the people involved and it is easy to paint Jews on the side of evil because that is the mindset of the world we live in, it’s not even a Western construct because Jew-hate is international in its scope. Imagining Jews to have more power and strength is a well-trodden trope of the left, and imagining Jews to be of impure blood, obsessed by money and ‘snakes in the grass’, hiding inside ‘indigenous’ communities is a trope of the right, although in Jew-hate, the far right and the far left, merge into one until it is impossible to see one from the other.
I try to be a ‘good liberal’ and support causes that are important to me, and that’s why I believe we need to listen to the voices of those most affected but I am also afraid to go into central London when there are rallies, especially knowing the police have no interest in calling out racialised hatred directed at Jews.
More frightening though, is knowing my fellow ‘liberals’, will not call it out. We are a very small community — I don’t think people realise how few Jews there are in this country, 0.4% of the population, mostly concentrated in London and Manchester. People across all political spectrums find it very easy to define antisemitism and anti-Jewish racism without ever having experienced it.
The police are able to explain away what we may regard as threatening chants because they have ‘language experts’ when I thought, within this ‘community of the good’ oppressed groups are able to define their own oppression.
I don’t expect anyone who isn’t Jewish to come out fighting for us, this is our inheritance and it is in the context of intergenerational trauma. I’ve stopped expecting anyone to listen to us either and I have been bullied off other social media platforms by people who don’t like to hear Jewish voices. I don’t expect anyone is reading this, if you are, well done and if you know me, don’t admit to it because I am frightened in a way I have never been frightened before.
I am learning how ‘apart’ from ‘White British’ I am but I cannot seek solace in ‘anti-racist’ campaigners as they are as likely as not, to frame me as an oppressor, so I do the only thing I feel is appropriate in these times which is to only seek out other Jewish spaces because, after 50 years and a couple of generations in this country, they are, ultimately and despite all my challenges to the community, the people who really understand me.
