Flight into Israel

I’ve always lived in London. I grew up near Baker Street and went to school in Camden. Even when I was at college in Kent, I lived in Islington and commuted. Five years ago I moved to Belsize Park and I’ve been here, the nicest place I’ve lived, ever since. I didn’t mean to stay — I was going to see the world, but my father died and my mother said she needed me to be close. She said it with a tremor in her voice, so I stayed.

London is in my heart and in my blood, but the wind has changed, like it did for Mary Poppins, and I think it’s going to blow me out of the city, all the way to Tel Aviv.

The referendum result didn’t make me decide to leave, but it was a penny on the scales. This no longer feels like home. I may spend too much time on Twitter, but the things people say about Jews and Israel there make me tremble. They feel safe in their hatred, and, scarier still, probably are.

There’s a train of thought among right-thinking people in London at the moment that Israel is culpable; that it is responsible for all the ills of the Palestinians, all the woes of the Middle East. If it weren’t for Israel, they say, the world would be a better place. If you go to a dinner party you can hear things that wouldn’t have sounded unfamiliar in 1930s Germany. They say they’re just ‘anti-Zionist’ but to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic. No one is anti- any other country. No one questions, say, Iran’s right to exist.

I’ve voted Labour in the past, but these days people in the Labour party all too often say things about Jews having big noses, or controlling the media, or somehow engineering the attack on the World Trade Center.