On October 14 last year, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of London. In a parallel universe, they would have been marching to show their sorrow for the victims of October 7 and their solidarity with the hostages. But in this universe they wanted, rather, to spit on the memory of the dead and to show their solidarity with the perpetrators.
“From the river to the sea”, they chanted. Remove the Jews, they meant. “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahu, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Yu’ud” (watch out Jews, the army of Mohammed is returning), some screamed. There had not yet been an Israeli ground invasion, which in the following months the marchers used to provide cover for their Jew hate. On October 14, though, it was stark and clear, with no other pretext.
They don’t call them hate marches, of course. No, no – these are for Palestine. It just happens that the main slogan of the marches, “From the river to the sea”, demands the elimination of the Jewish state. It just happens that Hamas is openly supported. It just happens that Islamists parade proudly.
For decades the antisemites have sought to decouple the Shoah from the Jews – to restore Jew hate to the status quo ante, before the Holocaust made it impolite to attack Jews for being Jews. Now, with a perverse audacity, they have co-opted the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as the springboard for the return of unashamed Jew-hate.
So yes, it is shocking. But surprising? Did we expect the oldest hatred to disappear after 1945 just because Jews were the victims of the worst single act of evil in human history? We saw the poison in the Corbyn years – the mainstreaming of Jew hate. Now it’s just on a bigger scale.
Yet for all that, it’s not the Jew hate itself that has had the most searing impact. Expecting Jew hate is in our DNA. Trauma is in our psyche. We might be unsettled by the increased scale and its more naked expression, but we have always known it is there. Rather, it’s the silence. The loneliness.
Even worldwide we are a small people, so when 1,200 of us are killed, the connections are there. We know hostages or people who know them. But the truth is that in Britain we have been shielded from the brutal reality of October 7 and its aftermath in Israel. Hamas has not come here to butcher us. The Islamists and their terrorist friends may want to kill us, but here we still are. Our world has also been destroyed – the fool’s paradise in which we lived before October 7 – but not by Hamas. It is our friends and our neighbours.
You know your real friends when you need them. And we have needed them. But where are they? I have – had, I must now say – one friend I have known since childhood. As you do, we’ve seen less of each other since marriage, kids and divorces – since adult life took over – but we have kept in touch for nearly 50 years, annual lunches, texts, phone calls.
It’s now a year since October 7 and I have not heard a word. Nothing. That is not a passive silence. It’s an aggressive, loud silence. It says everything. It screams, “Go away, Jew, remove yourself from my life”. We all have it: friends, acquaintances, neighbours who turn out – at best – not to give a damn and at worst decide they no longer want contact with Der Jude.
For years we have looked at the BBC and despaired at its inability to report fairly or even accurately on Israel. But that has been taken to a new level since October 7. BBC Arabic employs “reporters” who appeared to celebrate the massacre. And on the mainstream BBC, the stories to blame Israel for everything, always, are on display daily. Its international editor, Jeremy Bowen, admits insouciantly that his reporting is wrong. On October 17 he reported that the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza had been flattened by Israel. It had not been touched. “Oh yeah, well I got that wrong”, he replied when this was pointed out. “I don’t feel particularly bad about that. I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout, I didn’t race to judgment.” The American writer HL Mencken said that reading a newspaper was like injecting yourself with poison for breakfast. Since October 7 the BBC has injected our country’s body politic with poison.
But there have also been the allies – the mensches who in the weeks after the explosion of hate following October 7 went out of their way to show that they get it. The Alison Moyets, who told the world last year, “Seeing my Jewish neighbours and friends shrink into themselves as antisemitism rears its head again on our shores is heart wrenching. Years now we have trumpeted the righteousness of protecting our nation’s minorities. We need to remember that need for all as the world hardens.” Or the Tom Hollands, who posted: “All of us in the UK who are not Jewish – an immense, an overwhelming majority – have a responsibility in these troubled times to make our Jewish fellow-citizens feel valued and safe. A responsibility that clearly right now we are failing to meet. It shames the country.” Or the people we hadn’t even thought of as friends who simply asked how we are simply because they are good people, without even realising quite how much it meant to us.
That sense that we are on our own – that our moorings have gone as the ground has shifted underneath us – has been overwhelming. Our community has always thought of itself as, above all else, British, who happen to be Jewish. But so did German Jews. So did Viennese Jews. So did Jews everywhere throughout our history.
But what happens now, when it is clear that so many of our fellow countrymen – not the Jew haters, but the silent majority – do not think of us as British Jews but as Jews who happen to hold British citizenship? We are only a year on from October 7, but even now it is obvious something fundamental has changed.
This past year has changed almost everything. We know the hate is out there. We know the indifference is out there. And yes, we know the support is out there, too.
What we do not yet know is how all of that will change what it means to be a British Jew.
