On my way to a recent march, I found myself feeling nervous. Sitting on the tube with my placard, its painted slogan calling for the release of hostages as well as a ceasefire, I realised I was avoiding people’s eyes and that my heart was racing. When I got out of the underground and heard the drums and the chanting, I wondered if I should have stayed home. As a Jew, was I safe?
If I had taken advice from Robin Simcox, the government’s commissioner for countering extremism, I would have stayed home. He stated last week that London turns “into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”. He is following many others, such as the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, who said that Jews were “too intimidated to venture into the heart of their own capital city”, or Simon Schama, who said the marches were “weekly public calls for their [Jewish] annihilation”, or the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard, who also called London on Saturdays a “no-go zone for Jews”. Such comments really do stoke a sense of vulnerability.
On that day, once I joined the demonstration I realised that there was no need for me to feel nervous. I met up with a group of friends – from Jewish, Muslim and other backgrounds – and marched with them in the sunshine. It was much like any other big London demonstration, peaceful in the sense of being non-violent, but loud, crowded and passionate. It wasn’t fun, but nobody would have expected a march with such a purpose to be fun. And there were some revolting placards I saw afterwards on social media. But my initial apprehension that I might be walking into a situation where I would be unsafe was totally unfounded.
That’s not to say that the anxieties that Jews are feeling are misplaced. Not at all. Even before this war, there has been a terrifying rise of antisemitism among young people in the UK. Unhinged antisemitic conspiracy theories (hello Jewish space lasers) are strengthening online. In his London school, my teenage son has witnessed the kind of antisemitic behaviour – he calls it banter, I call it racism – that I believe would not have occurred a decade ago.
Knowing this, we need calm discussion, evidence and education to ensure that the situation doesn’t get worse. What we don’t need is the kind of rhetoric that inflames division. Simcox’s comments make me feel much less safe. That’s not only because his statements are unfounded but also because he is using the pretext of Jewish fears to press for a further clampdown on the right to protest, which is already so eroded by recent legislation. His full sentence read: “We will not have become an authoritarian state if London is no longer permitted to be turned into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend.” Unpick the triple negative, and what you are left with is the aim to ban the protests, but because it’s ostensibly being done for our protection, we mustn’t call it authoritarian.
Let’s be honest. Such desire to silence dissent is always authoritarian, whether in Britain or in Israel, where protest can result in loss of livelihood, arrest and imprisonment.
Indeed, looking at the situation that protesters in Israel are facing, I feel it’s all the more important that Jews in London not only stand up for our precious rights to protest but also exercise those rights. I know that some British Jews have been bravely speaking up against Israel’s crimes for decades. But for too long, too many diaspora Jews have been too quiet. Indeed, I am ashamed that I have stayed mostly silent up to now. For me, as for many Jews, that silence often stems from the part that Israel has played in providing safety for my own family.
My grandmother Eva got out of Hamburg just in time, in 1939, with a precious domestic worker visa. She squeezed through a closing gate. Eva’s brothers had already made it out, a few years previously, to Palestine. And if they hadn’t? Undoubtedly they would have shared the fate of Eva’s parents, who were deported to Treblinka in 1942. That visceral knowledge of Israel as a necessary haven for my people has muffled my criticism for so long. Who am I, privileged descendant of one who fled west rather than east, to stand in judgment of other Jews who took the only route to safety that was available?
But there comes a time when silence is no longer tenable. There is a time when, even if we are grieving those killed and kidnapped and assaulted on 7 October, we cannot stand by as we see Israel piling horror upon horror. The images and voices of murdered and starving Palestinian women and children haunt our dreams just as the tales of the hostages do. Silence feels less like neutrality, and more like complicity.
I know that I am coming into the debate late, and doing little, but if all I can do is raise a voice or a placard, I want to do it. And I know other Jews who are also experiencing a huge and painful change in their relationship to Israel, and either speaking up, or privately sending support for those who are speaking up, or thinking about speaking up.
The space where we are able to do so safely is a precious space. Let’s not give it up. Let’s protect it – and not just protect it, let’s use it, let’s enlarge it. Let’s say that as Jews we will not let our fears be used to clamp down on the rights to protest. And that we will no longer let our own sense of vulnerability be used to dehumanise others, not here, not there, not now, not ever.
• Natasha Walter is the author of Before the Light Fades: A Family Story of Resistance (Virago)
