This is West Cornwall, land of fishing, jam first and Trotskyite crafters. There is a sizeable community of nutters yearning for a Cornish intifada: the freedom within, and the freedom without. The old joke is: the duchy is shaped like a Christmas stocking and all the nuts are in the toe.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) used to be the big thing down here. My cleaner, a serious deal in XR, screamed at me when my husband put a Tory sign in our garden for the 2019 general election campaign – but fashions change.
There are other things to be extinguished now. Since 7 October 2023, the nutters have embraced their own version of Palestinian nationalism and, this being West Cornwall, it is art-themed. I don’t know what it is about anti-Semites and bad art, but some here make Hitler look like Auerbach. There are few Jews down here – I know five-and-a-half, including my own family and a tree surgeon with a floor-length beard – so, as the cliché about Poland runs, it is anti-Semitism without Jews.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is a franchise, like KFC. It began promptly after 7 October with an inaugural rally in the middle of Penzance, which I attended. They were heckled before they got started. A clearly drunk Cornishman staggered past and shouted: ‘Who started it?’ The true Cornish have an inherent sense of fairness. They hummed at him, confused. He was indigenous to Cornwall – another floor-length beard – so must be treated with respect.
Many of the nutters are blow-ins from Hackney and Bristol, and Newlyn is beginning to resemble Frome. They tried out a few blood libels. Then I spoke. These things are run like Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: anyone can have a go. I asked the leader: what do you want? He said he didn’t know; that he was still learning. I understand this: their activism mirrors their internal strivings, and they end up where they started.
Soon a life coach specialising in sea prayer rose. I am serious. Whether she is part of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who knows. Most days she writes a message on the sea wall that says CEASEFIRE NOW in pebbles, or sometimes seaweed, and videos it for Instagram. Sometimes however she – or a collaborator – paints Stars of David on pebbles. They are in my garden now. I stole them on grounds of cultural appropriation. I wanted to write back YOU DON’T MEAN IT, also in pebbles on the sea wall (I don’t work with seaweed), until my husband reminded me I am a professional writer and that writing slogans in pebbles is like shouting at buses.
There are few Jews down here – I know five-and-a-half, including my own family and a tree surgeon
They also dance with red ribbons along the promenade – a red line for Gaza – and draw in red chalk on the concrete, and video it for Instagram, while chirping to each other about the morbid power of the visuals. I would take them more seriously if they ever spoke about Hamas, and what they do to Palestinians, but they don’t. They are in it for the visuals and the purity of the rage: their democracy is not real to them. One of the five-and-a-half local Jews rose at dawn the night before the red line installation to tie yellow ribbons for the hostages. The pro-Palestine activists didn’t cut them down. I don’t think they know what the ribbons mean.
When I am not stealing their artwork – their original red line poster is still in my recycling bin – I try to avoid them because they are nutters. I met a woman reading Chinese poetry in a churchyard who told me Ukraine was a false flag, and I had a long argument on Facebook with a woman who claimed to be Jewish but then downgraded herself to Quaker with a Jewish husband. It is easy to pretend to be Jewish if you think Jewishness is a fiction.
They gather at the coffee shop in Newlyn which sells Gaza Cola, and the sauna on the prom whose owner is always hugging me while shouting about Karl Marx, because she wants a Jewish friend. Last month I sat in a café in Penzance. The woman at the next table was reading The Librarian of Auschwitz. ‘That looks interesting,’ I said, looking for a fight. (I am an expert in disgraceful Shoah culture.) ‘Oh yes,’ she said happily. ‘I love reading about the Holocaust.’ ‘Are you Jewish?’ she then asked, with the same frank curiosity with which I stare at puffins. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m a real Jew.’ Her next question was: ‘Why did the Jews let it [the Shoah] happen to them?’ Just lazy, I wanted to say but fell back on ‘they didn’t have any weapons’. (I was hedging that she didn’t know about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I was right.) It’s amazing, she went on. Did I know that lots of Jews have ADHD and that helped them survive the Holocaust? It made them ‘nimble’. In revenge, I asked her if she had heard of Primo Levi. She hadn’t, but she looked angry.
I laugh at them because the alternative is not laughing. But, after the Yom Kippur attack last week, I stood at the Palestine rally in Truro with a large Israeli flag. It was a ragtag of socialists, environmentalists and people so lacking in irony that they could applaud a speech calling for Israel’s end while carrying the flag of peace. I could have interviewed them, but I have covered the anti-Semitic hard left for a decade, and I know what they will say. So, I wore the flag and measured the stares.
Then a peculiar thing happened. A man came and stood by me: an ex-soldier, in Truro for a hospital appointment, and he did not leave my side. Passers-by thanked us for coming. They said ‘Good on you’ and ‘Well done’ and ‘Isn’t this shit?’ and ‘Shalom’. When the rally progressed to the cathedral for a vigil it was met by a wall of mute hostility. The Trotskyite crafting will go on but Cornish people are serious. They won’t take Truro.
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