Hate mobs rampage through London’s streets? Not a bit of it.

JVL Introduction

Two reports published in the Observer of the national demonstration for Palestine in central London on 9th March fail to find the hatred promised by Robin Simcox, the government’s commissioner for countering extremism when London turns “into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”.

Quite the contrary says author Natasha Walter who found the demonstration “peaceful in the sense of being non-violent, but loud, crowded and passionate”.

Reporter Tim Adams confirms that “It was extremely hard to reconcile that incendiary description [London a no-go area for Jews] with the large crowd that walked through central London this afternoon, sharing space with parkrunners and shoppers, and representing the full mix of London and British communities, which is to say every demographic under the sun.”

Attempts by the government and right-wing media to whip up fear among Jews in Britain needs to be fought tooth and nail. Agitators in the self-styled Campaign Against Antisemitism, with the Board of Deputies and the Community Security echoing their wild allegations, are inflaming tensions when they should be doing all they can to reassure Jews and to recognise the efforts made by the march organisers to ensure safety for all.

RK

PS: after posting we saw this important letter published in the Daily Telegraph signed by David Feldman, Emily Hilton, Zack Polanski, Francesca Klug , Andrew Samuels, Leo Reich, Jacqueline Rose, Lynne Segal and Daniel Levy, holding the paper to account for they way it reported  on the forthcoming march, “because doing so in the way you have undermines our ability to combat real threats to British Jews, increases our anxieties and risks dividing our communities.”

PPS: We also link to a new Doubledown News video about the Jewish prsence on the march.

London a no-go zone for Jews? Such harmful rhetoric just doesn’t reflect my experience

Natasha Walter, the Observer, 9th March 2024

Yes, there’s been a frightening rise in antisemitism in the UK, but that shouldn’t be used as a pretext for the authoritarian banning of marches

n 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)

For extremists trying to tear down democracy, this was pretty peaceful

Tim Adams, The Observer, 9th March 2024

The government’s commissioner for countering extremism said the marches are an ‘environment for radicalisation’

As on previous Saturdays in the past six months, there were two marches taking place in London today. The first, a gathering of tens of thousands of full-throated, flag-waving supporters of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza gathered at Hyde Park Corner at noon, and shuffled peaceably and patiently in the sunshine in the direction of the American embassy at Vauxhall, over the river.

The second march was taking place mostly in the imaginations of right-wing commentators and politicians who increasingly choose to see these displays of solidarity with the Palestinian cause only as a provocation and a threat. Following the prime minister’s Downing Street address on 1 March which represented these gatherings as representative of “forces trying to tear apart” our democracy, the latest figure to loud-hailer that version of reality was the government-appointed commissioner for countering extremism, Robin Simcox, who argued on Friday the marches were “a permissive environment for radicalisation”, leading to a hysterical Daily Telegraph front-page headline that read: “London is now a no-go zone for Jews”.

It was extremely hard to reconcile that incendiary description with the large crowd that walked through central London this afternoon, sharing space with parkrunners and shoppers, and representing the full mix of London and British communities, which is to say every demographic under the sun. I spoke to many of the hundreds of Jewish marchers for peace who were outraged to be characterised as extremists.

Simon Shaw, a politics teacher from Redbridge, east London, carried a placard reading “I’m Jewish and I feel totally safe marching for Palestine in London.” He rejected any idea that the Jewish community spoke with one voice: “I come from a different London Jewish tradition to that which the media like to present,” he said, “I’m culturally Jewish but anti-Zionist and atheist, socialist. I’m going to see the new musical about the [anti-fascist] Cable Street protest after this; I see that as my tradition.”

That’s not to say that the rhetoric of division is not potent. On Friday I spoke to Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. He suggested to me that in his view the majority of Jews are avoiding London on these marching Saturdays because of fears of intimidation. “From the perspective of how isolated many Jews feel at the moment,” he said, “I think hearing the prime minister stand up against a threat that feels very vivid to us came as a great relief. We finally felt somebody was drawing a line in the sand.”

Zack Polanski, deputy leader of the Green party and a London Assembly member, rejected this characterisation of the demonstrations. As a Jew, he said, he has always been welcomed both as a speaker and a marcher. “There isn’t one single Jewish community. There are Jewish communities,” he said. “Collectively, we have to rise above the warmongers, both Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, and ultimately find ways to create peace. And that means recognising that British Jews are not responsible for the Israeli government, just as British Muslims are not responsible for Hamas. These things aren’t complicated, but too often they get conflated.”

Some still felt elements of that complication. A young man who would only give his name as Aaron was on his first march; his family, he said, would be outraged if they found out he was here, but he felt he had no choice. “You grow up being told one idea of how the world is, and then you watch the news,” he said. Others had fewer doubts. Haim Bresheth, 74, held a sign indicating that he is the son of Holocaust survivors, and therefore against this war. He served as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces as a young man, he says, but he could not feel more welcome here.

Protests are not generally full of subtlety and nuance. For many British Jews, Wallis Simons insists to me, the sight of a Palestinian flag, while not inflammatory in itself, takes on a different meaning in the context of a march, just as the union jack looks different at the last night of the proms from how it does at a Britain First rally. Likewise, when you hear the persistent chant of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, the popular echo of Hamas sloganeering,you inevitably hear a whole history of violent conflict – but does that really mean that no one should be allowed to shout those words on the streets of London? Part of Rishi Sunak’s line in the sand was the suggestion that police would start “policing” the marches, rather than “managing them”, by which he seemed to mean they would stop chants and confiscate signs. But as several Jewish marchers also insisted to me, if you start trying to outlaw placards on a protest, where would you ever stop?

In among the sea of flags you spot a few messages that try to reflect a full range of complication. Alistair Blunt, a semi-retired international development consultant, carries a suitably complex message in Hebrew and Arabic, calling both for a ceasefire and the immediate release of hostages. Shalem Bennett, 32, from Bristol, has, on the other hand, come simply holding an olive branch. Alongside the banner for “Skaters against genocide” is another that reads: “Do we look like extremists?”

However much this government and its cheerleaders wants to answer that question in the affirmative, the tone of the march itself insists on a far more equivocal answer. Just as London does not deal in no-go zones, so it resists any simple binaries. Minna Daum, 64, a psychotherapist from Kilburn, in the north of the city, does not walk with the “Jewish bloc” on the march, she says. She always prefers to walk under her own flag – today it’s a Palestinian one; previously it has read: “Elderly Jews against genocide.” If most of her outrage is directed at the bombing of civilians in Gaza, a little is reserved for those voices that would reduce the idea of London to a place of intolerance rather than tolerance. “I think you only have to be here,” she says, “to see that this is not about that at all.”

Letter in the Daily Telegraph

9th March 2024

SIR – As Jewish people living in the UK, we strongly disagree with the sentiment of your front-page report (“ ‘London is now a no-go zone for Jews’ ”, March , and believe that this kind of story only further entrenches distress and fear.

Anti-Semitism is a very real problem, faced by us for centuries and increasingly in recent months. That being said, it is not the case that London is a “no-go zone”, nor that the tone of the pro-Palestinian marches is a major problem that we face.

Many of us join those marches and feel safe on them; indeed, we are much more worried by the Government’s branding of them as “hate mobs”, and the constant stream of Islamophobia coming from the media and Westminster.

We urge care when it comes to reporting anti-Semitism – because doing so in the way you have undermines our ability to combat real threats to British Jews, increases our anxieties and risks dividing our communities.

David Feldman
Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism

Emily Hilton
UK director, Diaspora Alliance

Zack Polanski
Deputy leader, Green Party of England and Wales

Francesca Klug
Visiting professor, LSE Human Rights

Andrew Samuels
Former chair, UK Council for Psychotherapy

Leo Reich
Comedian

Jacqueline Rose
Professor of humanities, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Lynne Segal
Academic and writer

Daniel Levy
President, US Middle East Project