Walthamstow residents protest the opening of a Gail’s bakery! screamed the headlines. As the pogrom that began on October 7 not only rolls on but seems to be intensifying, trickling right through everything, no matter how small, I was immediately on high alert. Was this because Gail’s co-founders (back in the late 1990s), Ran Avidan and baker Yael Mejia, were Israeli?
It seems that despite the excessive antenna for this sort of thing many Jews have developed since October 7, in this case the strength of the reaction against the opening of the shop was a pretty standard East London melange: against corporate homogenisation, against the chain’s anticipated threat to the many independent cafes in the district and of course against the general air of capitalism run amok (Gail’s is a mid-sized chain, with 131 shops; Pret has 498). Many residents also took umbrage with Gail’s chairman Luke Johnson’s pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown views.
But within this quite sizeable ragbag of objections, there was a sub-thread that needled my initial anxiety.
“Some reporting of the petition in right-wing outlets has focused...on loaded social media commentary about its Israeli baker founder,” said the Guardian. And yet, while the petition relating to the firm’s Israeli origins had only hundreds, not thousands, of signatures, it deserves to be noted, not simply dismissed as if it doesn’t exist at all.
Walthamstow has had a huge, vocal "ceasefire now" movement. And they really care about “Palestine” there. If Jews like me are on high-alert to antisemitism masquerading as anti-Israelism since October 7, this demographic are also radars-out towards anything that they can call complicit in what they see as Israeli “genocide" in Gaza.
The Labour-run Waltham Forest council has allowed part of its billion-pound pension fund to be effectively controlled by Waltham Forest for a Free Palestine (WF4FP), who pressured the council, without any well-publicised resistance, into withdrawing £773,000 from the fund under guise of divesting from “Israeli arms firms”. Even if anti-Israel passion isn’t the driving force in these protests against Gail’s, it is a driving force elsewhere in the area. And of course it is unthinkable that there would be any petition - and any publicity about said petition – against a food shop with, say, Chinese, Russian or even Lebanese Hezbollah-linked roots.
Is it “right-wing” to repeat the explanation from one petition-signing local: “Love local independent bakeries and hate Zionist moguls”?
Maybe. But it shouldn’t be. The fact is, there are lots more where this woman came from. She certainly isn’t the first or last in history to feel that way. And the reason I can’t stop looking at this fly in the otherwise standard right-on lefty multicultural anti-corporate ointment is that history. The sound of Jewish shop windows in Berlin and Tripoli, Bagdad and Vienna being smashed still rings down the generations. It is one of the hallmarks of pogroms: to express a pathological disgust with the system, “capitalism”, that has stolen from one and that is buoyed up by the crafty greed of the money-soaked, conniving other.
This takes many forms, of course, but going after a Jewish, or just a Jewish-coded business, is one of them. And I am to be forgiven, surely, when I read of petitioners against a shop because it has Israeli Jewish origins – long detached – for thinking of Judenboykott, the day on April 1 1933 when Germans were not supposed to shop at stores and businesses that the Nazis identified as Jewish, or visit the offices of Jewish doctors and lawyers.
Thankfully, though we are in a vile, despicable, nasty and dangerous place, neither the UK in general or Walthamstow in particular has anything like the sorts of conditions that were in place to enable the darkest decades in history for the Jews. Gail’s will be just fine, just like its sourdough. The bigger battles facing world Jewry, though, will take urgent courageous struggle to overcome.
