Last week was my last day at the Guardian, where I’ve worked for more than 22 years. Quite a seminal moment for me, probably less so for all of you, but it did make me think about what it’s been like in recent years to be Jewish, British and on the left.
The Guardian is the newspaper of the British left, of course, and I am now off to the Sunday Times, which is not. My own political persuasions haven’t changed, by which I mean I’m not voting Tory at the next election. But there’s no doubt I am – like Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden – leaving the garden of the left. So it seems like a good time to take stock.
Well, as I sit here, getting ready with my kids for the start of Chanukah (the actually fun Jewish holiday!), things seem fine for British Jews. David Baddiel’s documentary Jews Don’t Count recently screened on Channel 4 and Jonathan Freedland’s Jews. In Their Own Words played at the Royal Court.
The last time I heard from so many Jews was when I went to my cousin Ben’s barmitzvah. And yet, all this almost over-the-top fine-ness is a reaction to the very much not-fine-ness that came before.
I don’t think any of us want to rehash what I shall delicately refer to as The Corbyn Stuff. But I recently looked up what I’d written during that time and I found a 2016 article in which I mentioned that the Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth was heckled with abuse at the launch of Labour’s antisemitism report (contrary to one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most famous claims, this Zionist can see the irony in that.)
Afterwards, Corbyn chummily chatted with – no, not Smeeth, but the heckler, ending with a friendly, “I’ll call you.” And the weirdest thing about this very weird episode is I’d forgotten all about it.
Honestly, what a dumpster fire that whole period was, to the point that it’s almost hard to remember what actually happened. But just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I remember lefty non-Jews saying to me back then:
1. “I don’t think you should write about antisemitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it.”
2. “What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It’s not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms.”
3. “Jews have always voted right so of course, they don’t like Corbyn.”
4. “It’s not that I don’t believe that you think he’s antisemitic. It’s just I think you’re being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you’re wrong…”
5. “Come on, you don’t really think he really hates Jews.”
All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as “friends”, or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.
What we were seeing, they said, we were not actually seeing. You could not design an exercise more perfectly structured to cause madness. It was, to be blunt, gaslighting.
Anyway, that’s all in the past now, right? Well it is for me, because I’m walking away. A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn’t. Not really. Not at all. So I have left the garden. And it feels bloody great.
