I’ve got a question. Were you at all surprised that the King spent Holocaust Memorial Day at Auschwitz, for the 80th anniversary of its liberation? It’s both an actual and a rhetorical question, because I would be amazed if there is anyone reading this who was, indeed, surprised. It’s what we expect from the royal family. Indeed, back when he was Prince of Wales, I was privileged to be invited to a reception he hosted at Buckingham Palace to honour the contribution of our community to Britain.
This is a tough time to be a Jew in this country. To put it mildly. You hardly need me to spell out what’s been happening since the hate marches began 15 months ago, and that came after nearly a decade of Jew hate unleashed at the time when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. But awful as things now are – such as Jewish children being advised to hide any visible signs of their Judaism – we need to keep things in perspective. At the very least, that means remembering how fortunate we are to live at a time and in a place where it is entirely to be expected that the head of state will devote himself to commemorating the Shoah.
This week the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) released a survey which found that just 34 per cent of British Jews believe we have a long-term future in the UK. I’ve no doubt that figure is broadly right – indeed I am almost surprised it’s as high as it is. The future of Anglo-Jewry has been a depressing topic of conversation since the Corbyn years, and things are even worse now.
I’ve had long discussions with my teenage children about whether their future lies here. But in those conversations, I’ve tried to avoid the idea that it’s all over for us here, not least because I don’t believe it is. Sometimes, and entirely understandably, we can let something that is genuinely alarming take hold in our minds, but omit to put it into the sort of perspective which is vital to drawing any serious conclusion.
Take the police’s pathetic response to antisemitism on the streets of London (until the Met finally decided to uphold the law for the last planned march, which, as a result, became a static demo). The CAA poll shows that three-quarters of British Jews are dissatisfied with how the police have responded to marches across the country and a mere five per cent have confidence in Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley. Of course: the police’s behaviour has been appalling and has created a major crisis for our community (and, surely, for the police). But to compare this, as some have done, with the years preceding the Holocaust is not only historically illiterate, it is the kind of alarmism that ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Antisemitism is rising, is at record levels and is getting worse. It is, certainly, a watershed moment. But it is not something experienced every day, and frighteningly so, by all British Jews, as it was in the Third Reich. And at the most basic level, the organs of the state are not focused on attacking Jews as they were in Nazi Germany; they are intended – that’s the operative word – to protect us. That they are not being sufficiently used to protect us is indeed a crisis. But it is a very different, and far lesser, crisis than their targeting us for being Jewish.
There is a self-fulfilling element to all this. The more it becomes normalised to accept that there is no real future for Jews here, the more it will become a rational decision to leave. And the more who leave, the worse the future will be for those who remain.
It’s possible to hold two different but complementary ideas at the same time. First, we are living through the worst moment for British Jews since 1945, and there is no good reason to think things will improve. They seem likely to get worse. But second, we are not living in a re-run of the years preceding the Holocaust.
Instead of false historical parallels and undue alarmism, we should focus on what is actually happening – which is bad enough – and how we tackle it.
