One of the only questions I have been asked by both Jew and gentile alike is how much of an impact I believe the left will have on Jewish life in Britain. It is, on reflection, the wrong question; not because the answer is difficult \u2013 it certainly is \u2013 but because the question contains a premise that is fundamentally false. That question contains in it the notion that there is a safe side: given that the left has given in to the anti-Israel (which is itself a euphemism for the vile Islamist antisemitic drivel that wiggles its way through the cracks of the \u2018anti-genocide\u2019 camp), then the right must, surely, be the only reasonable base for any self-respecting Jew. But there is no safe side, nor has there ever been. Jews in Britain have understood this for generations; we have simply, out of a mix of politeness and exhaustion, not always said so in public.<\/p>\n
The hatred most recognize needs little introduction: the far right\u2019s antisemitism is sufficiently brazen that it rarely troubles to disguise itself for long (why waste the effort?). Its iconography is aggressive enough as well: swastikas on synagogue walls, the neo-Nazi imagery passed between channels, the Great Replacement theory in which Jews serve as some sort of group of evil masterminds of the white demographic decline. This is the very sort of hatred my grandparents fled eight decades ago. In Britain, it has its own unlovely tradition: Mosley\u2019s Blackshirts marching through Jewish neighborhoods in the East End, the National Front, the BNP, and the succession of rebranded movements that followed, albeit each slightly more presentable than the last, but still exactly identical at their core. This is the antisemitism we recognize immediately.<\/p>\n
The other variety is trickier, and it is that trickiness, rather than the hatred itself, that makes it ever so corrosive. You see, the antisemitism of the left does not bother to arrive in black uniforms. It has donned the new clothes of justice and anti-imperialism, and it has learned to present itself as the structural opposite of racism. This is its way in. It says, with the utmost certainty, that it has nothing whatsoever against the Jews themselves (after all, that would be racist, and they certainly aren\u2019t!) \u2013 only against the \u2018Zios\u2019, against the State of Israel, against colonial power. And, because it deploys the pre-approved vocabulary of the Left \u2013 who wants to be a racist, a colonial, an oppressor, after all? \u2013 and because it nests inside movements engaged in other causes that are entirely legitimate, the jig continues. The trick has been well rehearsed.<\/p>\n
What tends to be forgotten here is that both the extreme right and left are in agreement over their antisemitism, but not in what Jews actually are. To the right, the Jews are, as I wrote above, the masterminds of white demographic decline. They may look white, they may sound white, but they are not white. They are some separate entity, one that has weasled its way in through the Middle East millennia ago to infiltrate the white camp. Antisemitic propaganda campaigns in Europe during the height of the Nazis demanded that Jews \u2018go back to Palestine.\u2019 Surely, then, the Jews\u2019 native land is in Palestine \u2013 a name that only arose following the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE) in which Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the province of Judea to Syria Palaestina, to adopt the name derived from that of the Philistines, an ancient enemy of the Jewish people?<\/p>\n
But those on the left are not so easily convinced. Jews \u2013 \u2018Zios\u2019 \u2013 are the white colonizers who do not belong in the Land of Israel. The Dreyfus Affair \u2013 that convulsion of nineteenth-century France \u2013 split the European left not along the obvious lines. Conspiracy thinking about Jewish financial and political influence had long been embedded in socialist and populist movements, in which the banker, the speculator, the cosmopolitan without national loyalty were recurring villains, and those villains had a recurring face. (First, they hated the Jews for being without a nation of their own; now, they hate the Jews for having a nation.) The Soviet Union purged Jewish intellectuals and party members throughout the postwar decades while insisting that this had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism.<\/p>\n
In Britain, the Corbyn years brought it into the open, to be explained away, but they could not \u2013 and it was not for lack of trying. There was a systematic tolerance in the Labour Party; a party, mind, that had once claimed the confidence of British Jewry. Their anti-Jewish ideas and associations would have ended careers for good in any other context: can you imagine what would happen if, instead of a Jew being called a money-grabber, it were a \u2013 I shall let you complete that sentence on your own. Keep in mind that the Labour Party is hardly a hard-left staple of extremism like the National Front and Restore Britain and the BNP: it is the socialist party of record for Britain.<\/p>\n
Then there was the mural, of hook-nosed financiers playing Monopoly on the backs of the prostrate poor, which the then-leader had endorsed online before thinking better of it. And then there was Ken Livingstone, persistent as a foul smell, insisting that Hitler had been a Zionist. (He was, apparently, under the impression that he was making a historical point rather than an exhibition of himself.) The likes of the Greens have in their ranks members who have denied the Holocaust, called Zionists \u2013 the latest term for Jews, of course \u2013 \u2018rats\u2019 and \u2018vermin\u2019, and celebrated violence against Israeli civilians while it was happening. Throughout all of it, British Jews, of lifelong commitment to this country, were told that their concerns were only \u2018perceived\u2019, or that they were instruments of a foreign government.<\/p>\n
In both tellings, Jews are a biological threat. They are a foreign body in the national organism, conspiring against those among whom they have the impudence simply to live. The experience of British Jews has a familiar texture. When a friend shares something about the Israel lobby\u2019s grip on Western governments, or traces this war or that financial crisis back to that familiar long-nosed, sniveling source, one tends to notice something. One tends to notice that if the word \u2018Zionist\u2019 were replaced by any other ethnic or religious identifier, the friend would recognize it immediately for what it was. Why is it, then, that that recognition does not occur?<\/p>\n
I asked. The response is defensiveness, or impatience, or a quick pivot to Israeli government policy \u2013 as though that were the argument being made. But it is not. This is the shape of the thinking.<\/p>\n
And the shape is, on examination, identical to the one on the other side. The far right holds that Jews control the banks, the media, and the governments of the West, deploying that control in their own interests at the expense of everyone else. The far left holds that Zionists control the banks, the media, and the governments of the West, and that they deploy that control in their own interests at the expense of everyone else.<\/p>\n
The right holds that Jews cannot be authentically British, and that our real allegiances lie elsewhere, and our presence among the nation is therefore permanently conditional; the left holds that our attachment to Zionism disqualifies us from genuine solidarity with the oppressed, that we must publicly renounce Israel as the price of admission to progressive company. Prove yourself, or be cast out. The proof, needless to say, is one that no Jew can ever conclusively supply: the question is fundamentally about what we are.<\/p>\n
When any of this is raised, both extremes grab desperately for the nearest, same exist. The far right: what about George Soros, what about media ownership, what about the things we are not permitted to say? The far left: what about Israeli policy, what about Palestinian suffering, what about the weaponization of antisemitism? But these are evasions. British Jews should not be required to condemn Israel as a condition of being heard.<\/p>\n
Some Jews have absorbed one tradition or the other and turned it inward. There are Jews on the hard left who will tell you that Zionism is racism, and that Jewish anxieties about progressive antisemitism are a cover for something worse. (Ahem, Zack Polanski.) There are Jews on the nationalist right who will tell you that the real threat comes from elsewhere entirely, and the left\u2019s obsessions are a distraction. Both, ultimately, have paid the price of admission to their respective tribes.<\/p>\n
What does it feel like, as a young British Jew, to inhabit all of this? It feels like being surveilled from both directions by two equally deadly predators without intermission. In neither direction are you straightforwardly a person. Jewish communal life in Britain carries this awareness the way old buildings carry damp. It says something that I felt safer in Israel when it was absorbing rockets than I do as a Jew in Britain. Antisemitic incidents spike with geopolitical events, and the spikes come from multiple directions simultaneously. Both the right and left draw swastikas on synagogues, and stab Jews in the middle of the street in broad daylight. It matters not where the vitriol comes from; the effect on the family walking to synagogue on a Saturday morning is, in practical terms, identical.<\/p>\n
We, the Jews, are not asking anyone to abandon their convictions. We are only pleading for consistency. If you would identify antisemitism wearing the costume of race science and eugenics, identify it also when it wears the costume of liberation. If you would challenge the conspiracy theorist across the aisle, challenge the one in your own movement, or your own comments section.<\/p>\n
Jews in Britain are hardly a monolith. We disagree, at times with much heat, on Israel, on religion, on class, on just about everything that it is possible to disagree about \u2013 two Jews, three opinions, as the saying goes. But we have all had considerable practice in reading the room with some accuracy. The pattern we are reading now, visible at both ends of the British political spectrum, is one with which we are, regrettably, quite familiar.<\/p>\n
The Jews are very tired of being the thing the horseshoe bends around. We remain, nonetheless, here. And we are certainly paying attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the only questions I have been asked by both Jew and gentile alike is how much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13801,13802,93,13,3509,172],"class_list":{"0":"post-31714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-anti-zionism","9":"tag-antisemitic-violence","10":"tag-antisemitism","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-british-jewry","13":"tag-great-britain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116539714834867030","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}