How sickening that, as a British Jew, I’m now being told to ‘go home’ — and it’s Corbyn who must take the blame
Questioning our loyalty mirrors how Nazis portrayed us
Three times in my life I have experienced antiSemitism. The first was in my second year at university.
It was a throwaway comment from a very close friend who told another friend to ‘stop being such a Jew’, when he was reluctant to part with some money.
I was devastated that someone I loved would say such an anti-Semitic phrase.
I explained how offensive it was and my friend was mortified. It was often used at his boarding school (at which there were no Jews) and through genuine ignorance had entered his common parlance.
The other incidents happened at work. I was a young journalist in London over a decade ago. One day a colleague came in, holding a leaflet on Judaism. ‘I’m going for lunch with ‘so and so’ today (a Jewish celebrity),’ they announced, waving the pamphlet at me. ‘I’m going to read this beforehand so I can understand people like you.’ Shocked, I said nothing.
Later, the same colleague began referring to where I sat (opposite the only other Jewish person in our office) as ‘Jew corner’. To my shame, I said nothing, despite knowing my workplace would have been outraged by it. It was early in my career. I feared that by challenging it I’d be labelled a troublemaker and never work in the industry again.
Perhaps it was the Britishness in me — but I believed the comments were not symptomatic of anti-Semitism in our society, just ignorance.
Now, for the first time in my 36-year lifetime, I have genuine concerns about the spread of vitriol and abuse against the Jewish community.
Because the ‘hatred’ of us has become entwined with Israel — the Jewish homeland. And somehow the Britishness of Jews, our loyalty to the country we call home, the culture in which we exist and are part of, is being called into question.
Not by a bunch of ignorant idiots, but by the Labour Party and seemingly the Labour leader himself, Jeremy Corbyn.
Only yesterday, Labour’s National executive Committee finally accepted the full International holocaust remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism — accepted around the world by organisations such as the United Nations — in my opinion, far too damagingly late.
even then Corbyn wanted to add a statement permitting criticism of Israel, specifically that the circumstances around its foundation are racist. Yet again, provoking outcry. Why? Because Israel was only necessary due to the Nazis’ mass extermination of the Jews.
I am devastated that the party I’ve supported my whole life bears so much responsibility for this.
having been horribly slow to deal with party members accused of anti-Semitism, they had refused to accept the full IhrA definition of anti-Semitism — wanting to omit four clauses, including one of accusing Jewish people of being more loyal to Israel than the country they live in.
Then Corbyn himself was accused of anti-Semitism by Britain’s former Chief rabbi, Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, after a video from 2013 appeared to show him conflating Jews and Zionists and suggested that ‘having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they [the Zionists, but many read Jews, because he was referring to a religious community defined by its immigrant status] don’t understand english irony, either’.
Last week, Labour MP Frank Field
resigned the party whip, citing that the party was ‘becoming a force for anti-Semitism in politics’.
It is against this whole backdrop that a deeply moving documentary is airing on BBC2, with the second episode tonight, called We Are British Jews, exploring antiSemitism in Britain today.
Eight British Jews, from across the political and religious spectrum, go from Manchester to Israel and the West Bank, where they are forced to confront and challenge their deeply felt views.
It’s compelling, heart-warming and yet heartbreaking. And brilliantly done. Participants include articulate, nervous university graduate Lilly, who has reservations about the Israeli government’s actions towards the Palestinians.
Then there’s deeply religious, pro-Israel activist Joseph, who is surprisingly open to what Lilly has to say. And Damon, a 58-year-old atheist Jew — but fervent Zionist — who’s never been to Israel.
It is significant that none of them wanted their surnames made public, for fear of reprisals.
I understand that. I’m writing this knowing it will open the floodgates to abuse of my family. Whenever I express concerns about antiSemitism on social media I’m hit with abuse about being part of the Zionist mafia or told to ‘go home’.
As the mother of Rose, four, and Thea, four weeks, I’m speaking up because it is exactly this rhetoric — the questioning of Jews’ loyalty to the country in which they reside, the characterisation of them as ‘other’, as money-grabbing, as not part of general society — that mirrors how Nazis portrayed Jews in the run-up to World War II.
I don’t write any of this lightly. I never believed I would write any of this at all. I’m the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors.
What happened to my granny and grandfather was so horrific I find it hard to believe anything so revolting could happen again.
My grandfather was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo on Kristallnacht and was one of the few men to escape. My granny lost her entire family, including her mother and two sisters who were exterminated at Maly-Trostenets concentration camp in Belarus.
In July it was revealed there are now 100 anti-Semitic incidents reported a month (with a 34 per cent rise in anti-Semitic assaults from 2016 to 2017). I’ve often told my worried parents it wasn’t possible it could get worse — with the Holocaust such a recent memory.
Now, I’m certain that if we stay silent, there’s a danger the poison seeping into our society will become unstoppable. I hope tonight’s programme will counteract this tide of anti-Semitism. Viewers will be able to see the breadth of the Jewish community, captured intelligently and sensitively. Still, do we really have to showcase the banality of our normal lives, just to prove we are British and normal, like you?
You may well warm to a number of the participants, no matter your own politics. Even though I am politically opposed to Right-wing Joseph, I agreed when he noted that Jews, wherever they live in the world, are expected to explain their stance on Israel’s government, when ‘we wouldn’t expect any Muslim to say ISIS has nothing to do with me’.
Equally, I supported Lilly questioning the legitimacy of the Israeli government-backed settlements in the Palestinian West Bank — that they’re still building despite being declared illegal by the UN — and the actions of the army against some of the Palestinian citizens.
The programme also highlighted the inflammatory way the nonJewish community speak about Israel, Corbyn in particular.
When Corbyn opposes the Israeli government, he almost never uses those words. He takes on Israel — and by extension its people, the Jews. He calls terrorist leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah his friends, yet doesn’t engage with Israelis. He attacks Zionists, not the government. And given that the accepted definition of Zionism is simply the right of Jews’ to selfdetermination — i.e. the right to a Jewish homeland, just as there exist Islamic states and Christian states — it’s easy to see how easily ‘Zionists’ and ‘Zionism’ can be substituted for Jews and Judaism.
In a difficult and upsetting part of the programme, the group visit Manchester University during ‘Israel Apartheid Week’. They encounter streets plastered with posters from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Group (BDS) that specifically target Israel.
One of the cast, Alan, 77, observes: ‘There’s never a Syrian Apartheid Week, there’s never any demonstrations against the terrible deaths in Syria. Nothing about the horrible happenings in Yemen. It’s always about Israel.’
And as one Manchester Jewish Society member notes: ‘When there’s a pro-Palestinian or BDS event, we don’t start a fuss. When there’s an Israel event there’s always protests and security issues. When we raise our opinion we’re shouted down. We’re scared to do things in public.’
That last sentence would break my late grandparents’ heart. Because the final few months of their lives in Austria were lived in enforced secrecy — even their Jewish wedding, on July 31, 1938, was conducted under cover of darkness in a friend’s house. By the end of their time in Vienna, they were banned from living publicly as Jews.
Having been rejected and expelled from their home country, they clung intensely — like many other Jewish refugees — to Britain, the land that welcomed them, and their newfound Britishness. Austria could never be home again.
This is why I’m so disturbed at anti-Semitism in Britain today, where the hatred of us is so entwined with criticism of Israel and a questioning of loyalties.
While some comes from the Right, the Left has turned anti-Zionism into a trend. It has become de
rigueur to typify us as a homogenous group. The Jews, make no mistake, have become a symbol of hatred.
This is why I can no longer stay silent. I am many things in my life — Jewish, a writer, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife. I’m also British. All my life I presumed that was a given.
The fact we, as British Jews, need a programme to show our fellow Brits that we are one of them? Well, in a way, we’ve already lost. The weight of history is on all of us to rectify this.
If we stay silent, this poison will be unstoppable