Nick Cohen: Our ancestors are mirrored in Kabul
Dominic Raab and Priti Patel, whose own forebears fled persecution and found refuge in Britain, should have taken much quicker action to help save the Afghans at risk of death
AFEW WEEKS ago, I stood in the synagogue at the Jewish museum in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill, close to where my great-grandmother Betsy Paymer made her home in rooms above a glazier’s shop. Betsy had fled from Skoudas, in what is now Lithuania, to escape the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. The anti-Jewish terror shocked civilised Europe. It drove two million Russian Jews to seek asylum in the US, Britain and the rest of Europe. It is worth remembering, however, that the vicious spasms of the late Russian empire were nothing compared to what was to follow. Racist gangs murdered about 40 Jews in the 1880s when Betsy fled along with Henry Cohen, the man who was to become her husband and my great-grandfather. In the sustained anti-Jewish persecution of 1903-1906, they took 2,000 lives.
One can imagine the politicians who turn their eyes from the disaster in Syria today and — trust me — will soon turn from the Afghan disaster wondering why Britain had to pick up the pieces. Couldn’t Jews have found another part of the Russian empire to live in?
My family would have been wiped out if a Britain we had no claim on refused to give us sanctuary. They might just have survived the First World War and Russian Revolution. But in the summer of 1941, the invading Nazis and local collaborators tortured Skoudas’s Jews in the local sports hall, led them into the fields, shot them and threw their bodies into a pit. There are no Jews in Skoudas today.
When I returned to work, my phone buzzed with contacts trying to find journalists who would help persuade Dominic Raab to stir himself and help save today’s victims of terror.
The Afghans they were trying to rescue were not ordinary refugees like my great grandparents
or, for it is worth saying this bluntly, like Raab’s father who got out of Czechoslovakia just before the Nazis took over. These were men and women Britain had a duty to protect because we had marked them out for persecution. They had worked for UK consultancies and charities on projects authorised and paid for by the Department for International Development, which is now a part of Raab’s Foreign Office. But the UK government was failing to respond to calls to put their names forward for evacuation and relocation because, technically, they were contract workers not employees of said UK government. The contracting out of public services had reached its terminus with the contracting out of moral responsibility.
The Taliban fail to grasp the subtleties of private-public partnerships. It was treating them as traitors, turning up at their homes and issuing warnings to their neighbours they would hunt them down when they failed to find them.
At first, I thought the Foreign Office had been caught offguard by the scale of the catastrophe Joe Biden had let rip. Not a bit of it. Labour and Conservative MPs went directly to the holidaying Raab. Organisations desperate to get their Afghan colleagues out before Kabul airport closed to refugees lobbied his officials. Civil servants told them to stop complaining because they were “pissing ministers off” — a barely concealed threat to managers whose business models depend on government funding.
White-collar workers thousands of miles from the front line have their forms of courage. They refused to be intimidated and went public. If the Foreign Office cut their funding, to hell with it. Faced with the threat of a scandal, Whitehall relented on Sunday. Several hundred people whose lives are in imminent danger now have a chance of escape — if the concession did not come too late, that is, which at the time of writing is looking depressingly likely.
As the story developed, Priti Patel, whose own parents escaped to the UK from African nationalist persecution of Ugandan and Kenyan Asians, promised to resettle 20,000 Afghans over the next five years. She sounded impressive until you realised that Afghans need help now, not in 2026. I find the attempts to police political ideologies repellent. I know I am dealing with a fool and a thug whenever I hear Jewish critics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank dismissed as self-haters. On the other side of the debased coin, the colonial mentality of much of the left is evident in the abuse it directs at members of ethnic minorities who fail to behave as required. Patel herself has endured the racism of the anti-racists and been caricatured in the crudest terms. The far left has developed a dictionary of racial insults — “Uncle Tom,” “coconut,” “house negro” — that justify the damnation of any member of any ethnic minority who splits from the party line.
As for politicians, any government — including a Labour government — would have to control our borders. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t last long. I merely want to make an observation, not deliver a sermon. A country that grants power to ministers like Raab and Patel, whose narrow eyes are so blind they cannot glimpse their ancestors in the faces of people fleeing an insane tyranny, has a vanishingly small chance of doing good in the world.