This cognitive dissonance takes two forms. The Metropolitan Police has already reported a “massive” rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the capital. Fear is proving very effective indeed. As well as the visible threat, when the leader of Hamas called for a day of global attacks on Jews last Friday, schools closed and families stayed indoors. This is 2023 in what is supposed to be the most welcoming multicultural city in the world. The reason there is a Jewish community here at all is because of Russian pogroms and then the Holocaust. Does this no longer matter?
Enduring attacks from knuckle-dragging thugs, listening to lectures from the victim-fetishists of identity politics and hiding from a religious hate mob, British Jews have had their assumptions — long held but suppressed for sanity’s sake — confirmed. And yet worse than all this is the sound of silence. Nobody cares, it seems.
It is inconceivable that the reaction to the attacks on Israeli families by Hamas — either blaming Jews or radio silence — would have been replicated for any other community. It doesn’t delegitimise criticism of Israel to argue that British Jews should be free from fear in London.
Just as it would be indefensible to attack or terrify a London-born Iranian because of the horrors of the Iranian regime, it should be so to do the same to a British Jew because of the actions of the Israeli government (that’s not to say there is an equivalence between Iran and Israel because there isn’t).
The idea you can’t separate the Israel-Hamas war from community relations at home is far too convenient
The demonstrations in London over the weekend had as much to do with Jew hating as with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. It was there for everyone to see and hear.
More disturbing is that so many institutions, respected public figures and usually gobby celebrities have turned away so as not to alienate anyone with a negative view of Israel.
All this leaves British Jews in peril, not because those who already hate them have found their voice, but because those who should support them have lost theirs.
George Chesterton is executive editor
