“We are leaving,” one of my oldest friends told me over dinner the other night. “We’ve had enough.” Earlier in the week his wife had been shouted at by a passing motorist as she crossed the road: “You fat fucking Jew.” His daughter goes to a Jewish school where, since October 7, the kids have been told not to wear their blazers because they have a Star of David on them. Their school buses have still been attacked.
We were a mile away from the place where, a few days earlier, some Jewish kids had been attacked by older teenagers at a tube station because of their religion — one of them had been kept overnight in hospital. It was a couple of weeks since the murder of two people outside a Jewish event for young diplomats in Washington, and a few days before eight Jewish people were hospitalised after being set on fire at a hostage vigil in Colorado — in both cases the assailants were “pro Palestinians”.
Sitting with us, unspoken, at the dinner table that night were the quieter, less violent stories of contemporary antisemitism we were all too aware of: in schools, universities and in the NHS, the Israel-obsession of the unions and the arts organisations where Zionists are increasingly being told we are Nazis. And Nazis deserve to be hurt, don’t they?
As Greta dusts off her keffiyeh hoping to land in Gaza (I hope they give her the same welcome they’d give me), pro-Palestinians are burning synagogues in Australia, shooting at Jewish schools in Canada. In Poland, a community event with Holocaust survivors was attacked, while in Berlin the police chief admits the city is not safe for Jewish people. Even America — once the golden medina for diaspora Jews — holds no promise of succor. And so, there is Israel. Despite the terrorists, the almost daily Houthi missile attacks and Iran threatening nuclear annihilation: antisemitic anti-Zionism only makes us more Zionist. Will we all have to move to the Jewish homeland because we are so unwelcome elsewhere?
Debate is what Jews are best at. Our earliest texts are filled with Abraham, Moses, Jeremian and Job arguing furiously with God. As former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “In the Mishnah the rabbis argue about Jewish law and in the Gemara they argue about the arguments of the Mishnah. In the 12th century, Moses Maimonides did the most daring thing of all; he wrote a code of law with all the arguments removed. This generated more arguments than any other text for the next 800 years. Other people have conversations. Jews have arguments.”
But our arguments have become increasingly shrill and painful. There are those who want to denounce Israel and those who want to protect it, and those who want to protect it by denouncing it. They are, like the ongoing divide in the Middle East, intractable. Rows have broken up families and friendships, divided synagogue congregations, and even shattered the unanimity of the normally staid Board of Deputies of British Jews.
And in the background, increasingly the foreground, drowning out our pain and fanning the flames of anger, a chorus of anti-Zionism gets louder and louder. Things have hardly been easy since the October 7 massacre, but Jew hatred seems to be reaching terminal velocity — the likelihood of more violence only a matter of time. There has been an avalanche of public letters since war broke out, three only last week by lawyers, writers and actors, each aimed at outdoing the previous one in its ramped-up rhetoric. The most self-important people of the lot, the actors, stated dramatically that “290,000 children are on the brink of death — starved by the Israeli government for more than 70 days. They cry until they can’t cry anymore — until hunger takes even their voices.” This is a dangerous new libel, exceeding even the lie of UN’s Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours if humanitarian aid wasn’t let in. But the new normal is lies.
The rhetoric is being fanned by a compliant media who willingly parrot Hamas propaganda and only ask questions of Israel — which wants to ensure all the right checks and balances are in place before it gives a confirmed reply — later. As President Trump’s press secretary pointed out this week, the BBC started Sunday telling one story and ended with another. The headline, “At least 15 killed in Israeli fire near aid centre, says medics” was changed to “26 killed in Israeli taken fire near aid centre, medics say” then “medics” were changed to “health ministry” and then to “Hamas-run health authorities” until, at the end of the day, you had the Israeli denial of the attack. While live reporting often involves changes, this is the first war where the word of a proscribed terrorist organisation is taken as gospel.
“This is the first war where the word of a proscribed terrorist organisation is taken as gospel.”
It doesn’t help that the Israeli government is remorselessly providing the haters and the casual bystanders with ammunition. The Zionist dream echoes the biblical demand of Jews to be “the light among nations”, yet our nation is feeding the fire. Innocents are being killed. Yes, because there is a war and, yes too, because Hamas hides behind and below civilians, but also — it is still killing children. It may be the only democracy in the Middle East, but it is also one that is led by a coalition involving genuine and unashamed racists. Israelis have long boasted that the IDF is the most moral army in the world ,but the IDF is still made up of humans, some of whom are criminals. Should I feel shame (just as I would if this was the British army)? Sometimes I do. I am also scared.
We all are. So backwards and forwards we go, like a tennis match, with these debates in our siloed WhatsApp groups where we can drive each other to distraction, posting stories of antisemitism, all while tears and the rows get ever fiercer. You can both want Israel to let Western journalists in and also see why the excuses not to — it is dangerous urban warfare and journalists could also unwittingly help out the enemy — also make sense. You can both see why the Netanyahu government, after letting in extra aid during the ceasefire, had attempted to force Hamas to a better ceasefire deal by forcing a siege and also see it both as morally unconscionable and a terrible PR move. You can feel the horror of the dreadful images coming out of Gaza, while also reminding yourself that all war is awful and that this one could be stopped by Hamas. You can feel for the hostages and the people of Gaza. You can hate the extremistsSettler movement and the free reign they are given, you can hate the venality of Netanyahu in his determination to keep power — but also understand that until Hamas is deposed from power in Gaza, Israel will never have peace. On and on, round and round. It sends us mad, and leads to sleepless nights. And, still, there is no right answer.
As diaspora Jews, we feel uneasy, queasy, untethered from our moorings — feeling despised in the countries we call home. But Israel, devastated not only by the 1,200 killed on October 7 and the 58 hostages still being held in Gaza, but also the 420 soldiers killed since the ground invasion of Gaza, is torn too. It is split by those who hate Netanyahu and believe he is prioritising his coalition over the hostages and ending the war, and those who believe the war has to continue until Hamas is fully removed from power. All seem to agree that there is no viable plan for what Gaza might look like in the future. And meanwhile the problem of Iran — which has threatened to annihilate Israel once it can get its hands on nuclear weapons — is a real and present threat.
In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where I stood at a rally a few weeks ago, the sharp anger towards the government was palpable. At one point all the names of the hostages were shouted out with the crowd screaming “bring them home NOW”. While posters of the hostages are still all over Israel, some, on the Right, have crossed out the word “now” as beating Hamas is seen as the first priority.
And amid all of this, Hamas just rejected a new ceasefire deal. The terrorist group is the ghostly spirit of Gaza, not once mentioned in a single one of those letters denouncing Israel. Their “resistance” might be celebrated on weekly marches in cities across the world, but what happened on October 7 is, they say, “a false flag”. In this world of fantasy terrorists and conspiracy, they believe that Israel chose to kill its own. The Palestinians are never given their own agency in this war. That they fight and kill, and are still fighting and killing Israelis: this is never mentioned. That Hamas is also killing its own people who dare to rebel against these fascist Islamists goes unreported by most Western media.
For neither the people of Gaza nor the world’s 14 million Jews, now living in a new age of violent antisemitism, there is no end in sight. Just debate, death and hatred. It is exhausting. One day the war will end — I hope it is one day soon — but for diaspora Jews in this new age of antisemitism it may be too late. The genie is out of the bottle. Conspiracies merging medieval antisemitism of “bloodlust” with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion descriptions of Jewish power and Soviet era libels of the enemy within have merged with today’s obsessions so that the Jew, maligned for millennia and murdered in our millions within living memory, have become the ultimate white supremacists and the most evil colonialists. And, once again, as we have throughout our long history, we are wondering: is there anywhere in the world that is safe for us?
