There’s no room for racism in Britain, we’re told. EDI (equality, diversion and inclusion) initiatives and anti-racism strategies are everywhere. We’re all familiar with the ‘horror’ of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias. We are forever on alert for dangerous racial ‘dog whistles’. And yet the last few weeks has exposed a troubling blind spot when it comes to tackling racism: it’s clear that Jews don’t really count.
Hamas’s attack – and the response from Israel – has unleashed a tide of hate on the streets of Britain. Posters of kidnapped Israeli children have been torn off walls. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada,’ demonstrators chanted during the Palestinian solidarity march this weekend. We’ve heard calls for ‘jihad’. Britain’s Jews are terrified – and who can blame them? So where are the anti-racist campaigners?
Several of my Jewish friends are frankly terrified of what’s been going on in our cities
Earlier this year, Gary Lineker compared the language used to launch the government’s migration policy to Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis were seizing power. This weekend, Lineker was less keen on pointing fingers. His choice of words was a little vaguer:
‘Is there any chance, ever, that human beings will stop killing each other? We’ve evolved into a species that has just enough intelligence to be really f**king stupid….and downright awful. It’s all so bloody depressing and intolerably sad,’ he wrote.
Lineker isn’t alone. Too many of those who, five minutes ago, were all over ‘anti-racism’ like a rash, are either silent, shaking their heads in a non-specific ‘what a world eh’ way (hello Gary ‘1930s’ Lineker), or joining in with the jamboree. They don’t seem to find any of it scary, unlike the time Liz Truss wore the same dress as the villain in a sci-fi TV series, or when Nadine Dorries threatened to sell Channel 4. Those were truly chilling incidents that carried the whiff of incipient fascism. This is…nothing much. And as for those dog whistles? There are now racist bullhorns going off – heigh-ho, nothing to see here, carry on as before.
But we can’t, because we are living in a new country. It may feel like the same UK from before the first of the ‘pro-Palestine demonstrations’ on 15 October. The same things are there: there is Strictly and Ant and Dec and Emmerdale, and putting the bins out and the clocks back. But the lid of the UK has been ripped off, and now we can see the contents. Because right in the middle of it all, every week, there is a massive unchallenged display of ethnic hatred against a tiny minority dressed up as a ‘peace protest’ (not very convincingly).
This is a weekly Mardi Gras of murder cosplay, a family fun day out shouting for a global intifada, followed by a pizza. The silly twee activism of the British middle class pretend-left meeting the dangerous well of ancient ethnic hatred. Central London becomes a no-go area for Jews. And it just gets waved through.
Imagine a scenario involving this animus towards any other country or ethnic group. Picture hundreds of thousands of people led by Tommy Robinson marching through London shouting bloodcurdling threats against Muslims and/or Pakistan. It would be, rightly, shut down in seconds. Jews though? Never mind. Too tricky. Don’t want to upset anybody important. Fill your boots.
Several of my Jewish friends are frankly terrified of what’s been going on in our cities. They are baffled by the ‘de-escalation’ policing tactics of the Met which, in effect, amounts to a declaration that might is right. They are scared of what this means for them as Britons. One friend told me on Saturday how he is dreading going back to work this week, at a punctiliously ‘anti-racist’ public sector body where the staff are foaming at the mouth about Israel having the temerity not to just lie back and take it. Another how she couldn’t risk attending an important appointment in central London on Saturday. Another is agonising about keeping his kids out of school.
But then, we are all afraid – not only of what the problem is, but afraid to say what the problem is. And we are right to be afraid. Because our institutions, the things set up long ago with the primary purpose of protecting us, are afraid of that too – of acknowledging that there is a serious issue. But we have been too squeamish, too embarrassed, to go anywhere near it. It punctured the story we told ourselves about Britain. Now we see the result.
This is affecting different people in different ways – anger, fear, disgust, despair, depression, grim humour, or various combinations of the same. After a while, like someone with a terror of flying on a long haul flight, you just can’t keep that level of adrenalin up. You get accustomed.
How do we live day by day in this new country? Already, not even a month after the Hamas massacre of 7 October, I can feel we are getting used to it, like Americans with school shootings, or like Saxons with Viking raiders. Maybe we should have forecasts – ‘cloudy, brighter later, with a chance of Islamism’.
It’s reassuring to make such jokes. But if we really are serious about racism, if all of that wasn’t just a status game or a pose, we need to take this seriously and defend British Jews.
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