There is a special place in hell reserved for people who exploit the pain of others – and it’s becoming very crowded. It’s filling up with those who look at the war between Israel and Hamas, and the grief and fear it prompts in the hearts of Jews and Muslims especially, and see not tragedy but opportunity – a chance to advance their own interests.
Early to rush in was Suella Braverman, who is determined to be the hard right’s candidate to succeed Rishi Sunak. Her chosen playbook is the one authored by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, the tactic simple: pick a culture war issue that drives people apart, and crown yourself as head of one of the two warring camps. That’s why she said multiculturalism had failed, that Britain faced a “hurricane” of migration and that homelessness was a lifestyle choice – each one of those provocations designed to make her the standard-bearer of nationalist populism in the UK.
Accusing the Metropolitan police of being too woke and leaning on the commissioner to crack down on this weekend’s Gaza marches is, for Braverman, just another salvo in that campaign to win the leadership of her party. She doesn’t care that in the process she tramples on the principle that, in a democracy, policing – and the entire criminal justice system – has to be operationally independent of government. Like Trump, she is happy to tear down any democratic guardrails that stand in her way.
But nor does she care whether she ignites a tinderbox. British Jews have been in a state of anxiety and fear since the brutal murders committed by Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October. Antisemitic incidents have surged by more than 500% compared with the same period last year, each day bringing word of more. In Manchester, the proprietor of a takeaway threw cups and plates at customers, shouting: “We do not serve Jews.” In Hertfordshire, a man barged past a group of girls walking home from their Jewish school, saying: “What is this, a Jewish walkway? Free Palestine, you cunts.” In a primary school, a Jewish boy was told by his classmate: “I support Palestine, I want to kill all the Jews.”
Islamophobic attacks have risen by a similar proportion, with red paint thrown at a mosque in west London three times in a fortnight, a pig’s head dumped at the site of a proposed mosque in a Lancashire market town and a headscarfed woman being told in the street that she doesn’t “belong here”.
In this atmosphere, the job of the home secretary is to calm tensions, not inflame them. Yet in her Times article this week Braverman pitted one community against another, praising Jewish vigils – whose focus is the return of the 240 hostages held by Hamas – as “dignified” and those calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as “mobs” and “hate” marchers.
Now, it is certainly true that pro-Palestinian marches have included hateful messages – and that “from the river to the sea” is a slogan that literally allows no room for Israel, home to the world’s largest Jewish community, and so is heard by many Jews as a chilling call for elimination. For those reasons, there will be some Jews currently feeling so beleaguered that they will be grateful for Braverman’s apparent support. But it is a poisonous gift. For it identifies British Jews with a widely despised government, and as being against free speech.
What’s more, the home secretary’s suggestion that police are failing to do their job invites others to step in. Sure enough, assorted elements of the white far right have promised to come to London and do some policing of their own. Like Braverman, the founder of the English Defence League, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, has clocked the fear and tension – and spotted an opening.
In service of the cynicism and the exploitation is the distortion of the Israel-Palestine conflict, forcing it into a pre-existing ideological frame. In this field, Braverman has company. Witness the associate editor of the Spectator, Douglas Murray, who has long railed against what he sees as the threat that Islam and Muslims pose to Europe and the west. He is using the current crisis to press that case, telling one US interviewer this week that Humza Yousaf has “infiltrated our system”, and that he is not really first minister of Scotland, but rather “first minister of Gaza”. Murray has thoughts too on the future of Gaza, writing that “it could be a good time … to clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip”.
The pro-Palestinian left will look on all this and rightly be appalled. And yet the left is not free of its own tendency to flatten and squeeze Israelis and Palestinians into a shape that fits its worldview, even if that means riding roughshod over some pretty elementary facts.
Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement have been quick to identify Israel-Palestine as simply another front in the battle for civil rights, one that can be smoothly mapped on to the racial politics of the US. Put aside that such thinking led the Chicago branch of BLM to tweet a message that could only be read as support for the Hamas butchers of 7 October, complete with an image of a paraglider, just like those that descended on the 260 young Israelis murdered at the Nova music festival. It also rests on an assumption that Israeli lives are “white lives” – when in fact about half of all Israeli Jews are not white by any definition, but Mizrahi, with roots in north Africa and the Arab world, most of them the descendants of refugees pogromed out of their homes in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco or beyond in the aftermath of Israel’s creation in 1948.
That’s one reason why seeing Israel as a construct of European imperialism doesn’t work. But how many of those now branding Israel as a settler-colonialist entity – the better to fit their ideology – know that by the late 1940s, the push for Israel’s establishment came in armed defiance of the British empire, to the extent that plenty of British leftists and anti-imperialists were marching back then not against Zionism but for it? How many know that far from enabling the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, as it had promised in 1917, the British empire did much to thwart it, all but blocking Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1939, at precisely the time it was needed most – when Jews were desperate to flee Nazi-occupied Europe?
The point is, this conflict has its own complex history and its own shape. It should not be bent and twisted to fit the doctrinal dogmas of others, and it should not be used by politicians and hucksters to push an agenda, build a brand or pursue their own selfish ambition. There are too many people grieving on the ground there and racked by fear here for that. If you’re looking for fuel to feed your own hellfire, back off – and find some other agony to exploit.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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