I wrote last month about Israel. As some of you may know, I don’t normally talk that much about Israel. I wouldn’t normally write about that country again. But writing about anything else at the present moment seems impossible.
My basic position — which is to set my stall against the idea that Jewish identity, and antisemitism, must be defined primarily by whatever’s happening in the Middle East — has not changed. I still think that an assumption of any homegrown ethnic community having complicity in the actions of a faraway country is a racist one, and one that would not be imposed by progressives on any other minority not living in that country. I think it now more than ever in fact, when antisemitism in the UK has risen to somewhere off the chart, where a mob in Dagestan attacked an airport hoping to lynch Jews arriving from Israel, and Jews everywhere are living under a constant sense of dread and race déjà vu. But I was moved, after the October 7 massacre, to go on BBC’s Newscast and speak about what had happened, because my emotional response to that day overwhelmed my normal sense of disengagement. That response isn’t to do with Israel specifically — it’s to do with Jews. With the long historical chamber in which the actions of that day ring only one echo: pogrom.
I felt connected, in a way that I don’t always, to Israelis, because the manner in which they were butchered spoke to me of our shared terrible history. And also: it’s hard to keep insisting on a clear line between Israelis and Jews when that nuance isn’t being so recognised by, y’know, Hamas, or by mobs chanting Gas The Jews.
Immediately after the attacks, there seemed to be some acceptance that there is a distinction between political violence, operating as a means to an end, and the dehumanising, triumphant, celebratory, senseless violence of Hamas. For a moment, the online cognitive biases were shaken, although obviously there were many, even directly after the attacks, who were keen to contextualise, without worrying too much about how far contextualisation shades into justification. And then the tiny, unusual window of sympathy briefly extended to Israel slammed shut, well before wider Jewish shock and dismay and fear could be processed. Most of the conversation is now about Israel’s response, and most of it is condemnation.
