On Saturday, July 1st, I joined more than a 100,000 people in Tel Aviv for the weekly Saturday Night march against Bibi Netanyahu’s government and its proposed judicial overhaul.
On Sunday, November 26th, I will be joining the March Against Anti-Semitism here in London.
In general, I don’t go in for marching. I went on enough marches against the Vietnam War when I was an undergraduate; was teargassed on two continents, and to no avail. The War carried on for years after I had graduated and begun my adult life. The ritual of the “protest” march has evolved from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge to face a phalanx of truncheon wielding police with dogs at attack ready into a a risk-free day out with friends, conducted with permission of the authorities.
But I was in Israel on July 1st recording interviews for a documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and as a journalist I couldn’t really stay away from what was becoming the most important political movement in the country since that war, one whose outcome is now moot because of the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th—ironically a day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur debacle.
The Hamas attack leads directly to the second march, one in which I am not participating as a journalist but as a Jew. From the moment the first reports of the massacres in southern Israel began to filter into my social media feeds, what would follow was predictable: the Israeli government would retaliate disproportionately and the inciting outrage would be forgotten. Then there would be an upsurge in anti-Semitism that one would have to grit one’s teeth and endure until things calmed down and global attention moved on. But as the scale of the Hamas atrocity became clear my sanguine assessment became a more worried one: the scale of violence was so enormous that everything that followed would be paradigm shattering, including the Jew-hatred. And so it has proven.
Shortly after the last major Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2014, with the inevitable rise in anti-Semitism globally, I wrote a piece for the BBC’s website. This is how it began:
"Jew!"
The contents of the pint glass were already airborne as we turned towards the shout. The beer hit my friend Doug directly in the face, soaking his glasses and forming a little drip from the end of his long, classically Jewish nose. He removed his spectacles and tried to find a dry spot on his shirt to wipe them. I looked back towards the shout and saw the backs of three youths, wearing tight, white T-shirts, the flesh on their wiry arms chapped raw by the chill July afternoon. Their bony shoulders shook with laughter as they disappeared into the throng sluicing down into the centre of Durham, in the north-east of England, where the annual Miners' Gala was in full swing.
Douglas and I turned away and trudged wordlessly up the hill towards St. Aidan's College. It was the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, and we had been in England less than 24 hours. Despite that introduction, I have managed to live half my life here.
Anti-Semitism is a complex phenomenon and it grows more complicated all the time. The latest wrinkle is the jihadi double tap as practised in Mumbai, Paris and Copenhagen—attack a soft target in a big city and then find a Jewish target for a secondary attack.
The hope that somehow the blood sacrifice of the Holocaust would end it has proved false, but is the anti-Semitism of today the equal of that which led so many to either joyfully participate or quietly turn their backs when European Jewry was being eliminated? Obviously not.
Are Jews over-sensitive? Perhaps. For much of my life, despite the name calling, occasional threats and social slights it was clear to me that as a secular Jew, I was living in a golden age of security. Not since Solomon was building the First Temple in Jerusalem had there been a time or place when Jews were as safe as they were in post-war America. Not everyone in the Jewish community feels this way today.
The BBC essay played on the word Jew, providing its history going back to Biblical times, and telling a bit about my experience of the J-word.
The first time I was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.
The date is important: 1958. Surely the impact of the Holocaust, just 13 years in the past, should have damped down kids of eight learning the age old hatred.
“Dirty Jew, kike.”
My father eased me through the first exposure to anti-Semitism. He’d been through it himself. It’s just words. They can’t hurt you, son.
My younger brothers had it worse. About a decade later they were playing in some woods near our home when a couple of older youths grabbed them, held a knife to my youngest brother’s throat and threatened to kill him if my other brother didn’t swear allegiance to Jesus. No one was hurt. And neither brother became a Catholic.
For a Jew, the knowledge that anti-Semitism is always out there, lurks in the back of the mind. For many in the Diapsora there is a sense of security in knowing that Israel exists, is capable of defending itself, and although many might not say it out loud, possesses the Samson Option. Israel’s strength is a buffer against the hatred that is never far away.
Personally, I have tried to live a life in the wider world without hiding who I am nor succumbing to easy fears. I owe it to the millions transported and slaughtered in the Shoah to live with courage. Their deaths purchased—through guilt—a period of respite from the physical and more egregious forms of social hatred.
Committing journalism in the traditional way: trying to see events through an impartial, objective lens I have encountered anti-Semitism regularly. In Poland in 1995, to cover the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it was impossible not to see the Jew-hating graffiti on railroad embankments andnI couldn’t help but notice that every time Polish people I interviewed said the word Communist it was prefaced by the word “zhid”, Jew.
In the years following 9/11, I reported from every Muslim country in the Middle East from Egypt to Iran, with the exception of Syria. I travelled on my own, with no “security” infrastructure aka bodyguard. I felt no fear.
First stop was Cairo. I went to an elementary school run by the Muslim Brotherhood. I recorded some sounds of lessons in Arabic and later asked my translator what the teacher was saying. He told me it was a famous hadith about the Jews trying to bewitch Muhammad and kill him and how the Prophet turned the tables on them. There are many such hadiths about wicked Jews trying to hurt Muhammad and learning them is a part of the curriculum in schools.
Another evening in Cairo, in the courtyard of the Marriott hotel on Zamalek island in the middle of the Nile. I was having dinner with colleagues, the only American at the table and also the only Jew. An open and frank discussion about 9/11 and its likely impact on the region, root causes. Israel/Palestine inevitably came up. A prominent novelist at one point said in exasperation,
“The Jews should all go back to Poland.”
All over the Muslim world I heard comments about Jews that were roughly akin to comments Southern segregationsts might have made about Blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era. Most of those comments were directed at the citizens of the Zionist entity, as Israel is called, but the word “Jew” or “yehud” is what is used to describe citizens of that entity since there can’t be Israelis if there is no such place as Israel. When you hear, “Kill the Jews!” it is hard to hear whether they just mean Israelis or all of us. And at moments like that I don’t really make a distinction.
But I also had many conversations about Israel that did not descend into anti-Semitism, in which Arab voices were more nuanced about the Occupation and how to end it than many voices in the Jewish Diaspora. That is because the rise of jihadism instilled a new layer of bewilderment and fear among Jews after 9/11. What those outside my community can’t understand is how each act of Islamist terrorism percolates into the group’s psyche.
Before he was beheaded in 2002 by jihadis in Pakistan, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was forced to make a video identifying himself as a Jew from a Zionist family.
Think how that goes into the group’s consciousness. Any Jew is a Zionist by virtue of the fact that he is a Jew and all Zionists must die.
Beyond attacks on individuals and Jewish institutions, an extra layer of worry comes from the explicit linkage of Islamist attacks on the societies in which we live to the existence of Israel. The implicatio is: if you want quiet in your streets stop supporting the Jewish state.
Like most ideas propagated by terrorism this has failed to persuade the societies where the bombings took place. Only Britain’s Labour Party, when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn, seemed to buy into the idea that Islamist violence was caused by the existence of Israel. In 2019, Corbyn led the party to its worst electoral defeat since before World War 2.
Throughout the five years of Corbyn’s leadership, 2015-20, I resisted the idea that anti-Semitism in Britain was on the rise.
During the Corbyn era I found myself in on-line arguments with Jews who had been involved in Labour politics for decades. They seemed a little too fearful that the party was anti-Semitic. After all, the previous leader, Ed Miliband, was Jewish as were many Labour MPs. Corbyn calling Hamas “my friends” years before he became leader does not threaten me as a Jew. His saying that Israel had a right to exist within the original partition borders of 1948 was derisory. I’d heard it all before and much worse.
Verbal abuse directed at Jewish Labour MPs by Labour Party members who had joined in support of Corbyn and his views on Israel was unconscionable but public discourse had become abusive across all manner of issues. You call out the anti-Semitism, but you don’t fear it.
After my years in the Middle East I had unintentionally continued doing stories that brought me into contact with real anti-Semites: in Turkey, in Ukraine. It seemed to me the British Jews I was arguing with had no idea of what the true poison was like.
I reminded them Israel is rich and powerful. I indulged in the Fauda fallacy and reiterated to my co-religionists what I said earlier: Our obligation to the dead of the Holocaust is to live our lives without fear. Not quake at Corbyn’s stupidities. Anti-Semitism is always there, you can’t spend your whole life trying to eradicate it. You fight it when the hatred reaches the tipping point: when your community’s life or the lives of other Jewish communities around the world are threatened with true destruction.
The attacks of October 7th were such a tipping point and, ironically, it wasn’t the lives of Diaspora Jews that were threatened. It was Israeli lives.
Even before the blood was dry, before Israel’s retaliation had begun, in the public fora of social media, excuses were being made for the Hamas attack and a relentless, intemperate proselytizing calling for an end to Israel was underway. This went beyond anger at Israel’s Occupation. It demonstrated a hatred of Jews.
I’m not talking about the kids on campus waving Palestinian flags and chanting “From the River to the Sea”. They are an irrelevance, like student radicals who went marching in 1969 chanting, “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF are going to win” while waving North Vietnamese flags, and had no effect on the outcome of the war.
I am speaking about serious public intellectuals, academics with sinecures at elite universities, engaged on twitter and seeming to egg on the process of rationalizing incomprehensible violence and relentlessly deligitimizing Israel’s existence. Shouting Israel is a “Settler colonialist state,” “White supremacism=Jewish supremacism”, “The Balfour Declaration”, “Israel is an anachronism, a 19th century ethno-state.” They argue their points with out of context quotes and straight up false claims that they would never, ever include in their own deeply researched professional work.
Why such partisanship, expressed with all the subtlety of a drunk football fan at a derby match against his team’s most hated rival?
On the march in July I saw for myself how many Israelis from across the political spectrum were organizing against the Netanyahu government and its racist policies. These well-coccooned outsiders shouting for a just resolution to the Occupation might have added their voices in support of the anti-Netanyahu movement. They could have metaphorically marched on any Saturday night up to October 7th to show solidarity.
But this would have demonstrated an acceptance of the Jewish state. Perhaps they agree with the keffiyeh-wearing kids: there should be no Israel. And when you reach that conclusion, that is the line where you cross into anti-Semitism. Too many have done so, and now I have to march.
As I said at the beginning I don’t think marching changes much but in this case there is little choice but to take a stand. Let me indulge in bleak, Jewish irony and end by quoting the arch anti-Semite Martin Luther, defending his 95 Theses at the Diet of Worms,
“Here I stand. I can do no other. G-d help me.”