Several Jewish schools in London today stand closed out of fear for the safety of the children who attend them and the staff who teach at them. I was about to follow that with the sentence, “I’d love to hear from anyone who thinks that’s OK.” But on reflection, I really wouldn’t love to. Be in absolutely no doubt that many, many people would be in touch – and probably will be in touch anyway – to explain why, relatively speaking, it is OK. From the unspeakable monstrosity of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last Saturday to the hellish humanitarian crisis unfolding now in Gaza, there is always someone on hand to explain why, relatively speaking, this horror or that horror is OK. They know more about it than you, they’ve read more about it than you, they did their degree in it, they’re less naive than you, they’re less racist than you, they’re humanitarians, OK, you animal? This is a subject with countless brutal gatekeepers, each one working tirelessly to exclude any concerned plebs from even daring to enter the conversation.
But I don’t care about them today, because the answer is very simple. It cannot be OK, can it? It absolutely cannot be OK that there are Jewish children in London not going to school today because there is a reasonable fear of intimidation or even a threat of violence against them or their school. It cannot be OK that some Jewish schools that are remaining open have advised their pupils not to wear their blazers, with boys covering their skullcaps as they travel in. It cannot be OK that Jews in this country feel scared and menaced. It cannot be OK that in the past week, a Jewish charity has recorded a 300% rise in reports of “anti-Jewish hate” – a fourfold increase in abuse of one small minority group of British citizens. It cannot be right. It cannot be.
A friend who turned her life around from the darkness of addiction often says to me, “I can only sweep my side of the street.” Part of her turnaround came via absorbing that adage – the acceptance that you are only responsible for your own choices, for owning your own mistakes, and for putting them right as best you can. You can’t control anything else. I’ve thought about it a lot in the past week. What happened in Israel – what is still happening – is not, to repurpose Neville Chamberlain’s notorious wartime curtain-raiser, “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. People in the UK know varying amounts about the realities of life for Israelis and Palestinians, and most of them will know more than they did even a week ago. Yet at this distance, watching and reading the horrendously grim and upsetting stories, many people’s compassion mingles with powerlessness and becomes despair. You cannot bear the thought that it is beyond hope. You cannot escape the powerful sense it will get worse. It feels beyond words, beyond imagination, beyond control.
But this country – this country is our side of the street. Here, we have more control. Here, we can make differences in daily life for ourselves and others, however small. Here, we can consider carefully which steps to take in our politics, and in which direction they might lead. I say “this country” – I am writing this in the UK, though in some ways what I am saying would apply to many peaceful countries in Europe, as well as the US and beyond. It is in these places, too, where Jewish populations are saying they are feeling more alone and more scared than they did last week – and in some cases less supported or less understood by people they thought were friends. This is not a completely new feeling. For years now, UK synagogues and the government have felt they need security on Shabbat, some of which is provided by police, some of which is funded privately, and some of which is made up of volunteers from Jewish communities themselves. That the government felt it necessary to boost the funding for it this week is a further blot on a country that for a long time took pride in thinking of itself as a safe haven.
Other blots are, of course, available, and I felt perfectly free to feel disgusted by rallies celebrating Hamas’s atrocity, with demonstrations popping up in various parts of the country. But just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so a few hundred aggressive ghouls on Kensington High Street do not make Britain broken. Yet plenty are claiming just that, using the demos to rally people to a flag that Suella Braverman hoisted recently, when she declared in knowingly incendiary fashion that multiculturalism has failed. And yet, has it? As the Times writer Hugo Rifkind observed: “She’s a British home secretary descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?”
This is far from saying we live in a perfect multicultural country – of course not. There are some problems with integration and with racism, some of them significant, and they should be talked about and tackled. But extrapolating societal failure from them feels an exploitative sort of wickedness in itself. The politicians and populists choosing this moment of all moments to bellow that multiculturalism has failed are not sweeping in to help others, but to help themselves. You might see the past week as a complex tragedy; they see it as a simple tragitunity.
All of which brings us to the question of leadership. If we can only sweep our side of the street, then the people we choose as leaders are the street sweepers-in-chief, if you like – the people we entrust with making our corner of the world a better place. Choosing anyone happy to flirt with extremes will open the door to extremism, while those culture warriors like Braverman, who equate “hardline” with “effective”, should take the opportunity to re-evaluate that delusion in the wake of Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s catastrophic failings. Strength of character, however, is essential, and it was pretty unedifying to note Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry seemed unable to stand behind the idea of international law in interviews this week (particularly given the suspicion they might have said the diametric opposite four years ago). These are some of the worst of times – but they are also a good time for politicians and, indeed, all of us to at least attempt to be better and more thoughtful versions of ourselves. This is our side of the street: we should do our best with it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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