You might think the massacre of Jewish civilians will stop anti-Jewish hatred in Britain. Or, if that is too much to ask, you might think that the atrocities would at least merit a decent period of silence before normal service resumed.
Not a bit of it. This morning, Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish hate crimes, was reading reports that the windows of Pita, a kosher restaurant in Golders Green, had been smashed. His first thought was that it could be a racially-motivated attack: a Jewish restaurant in a north London suburb famed for its large Jewish population. What were the odds? Slogans calling for a ‘Free Palestine’ had also appeared on a bridge on Golders Green Road.
The failure to confront anti-Semitism has been a disaster for the British left
‘Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews,’ Rich told me. ‘Sorry to be blunt but I am in an uncompromising mood. They’re not angry because Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians. The sight of Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them instead and filled them with joy. We’ve had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting “kill the Jews” and “fuck you”.’
The violence will get worse. The Israeli government will respond to the murders by broadening its attacks on Gaza. Whether Israel is willing to take the casualties an occupation of the strip will bring is far from clear, but it has said Hamas had declared war and will fight back accordingly.
The Israeli counter-attack will provide a new justification for anti-Semitic violence in the UK. Everyone who monitors anti-Jewish racism knows it. The conflict between Israel and Hamas from 8 May to 7 June 2021 produced what the CST called ‘the most intense period of anti-Jewish hatred seen in the UK in recent years.’ We can expect more of the same.
The violence raises questions too few people are willing to ask. When Russia commits crimes against humanity in Ukraine, no one targets Russians living in London. When Islamists murder Christians in Africa, no one calls for the death of British Muslims.
Yet, as we have learned over the weekend, if anything happens in Israel, Jews are targeted in the UK. If Hamas massacres Israeli civilians, Jews pay. If the Israeli Defence Forces attack Hamas, Jews pay.
In our supposedly progressive times, when anti-racism is a moral mission, few concentrate on a shameful statistic. There are only 271,000 Jews in the UK according to the last census. Yet the Home Office says that this tiny group contains the victims of a quarter of all religious hate crimes.
There is one final inconvenient fact: Hamas is a far-right wing clerical fascist movement. It supports everything progressive people say they are against: genocide, misogyny, homophobia, and dictatorship. Sections of the Hamas charter of 1988, which contrary to the claims of Western apologists, the organisation has never renounced, are so filled with anti-Semitic conspiracism, they read as if Hitler wrote them.
Yet it has proved impossible for a significant minority of left-wing and liberal-minded westerners to walk and chew gum at the same time. Why do they condemn the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and deplore the crimes of its security forces, while ignoring the actions of Islamist extremists, who, in other circumstances, they would loathe? Why are Harvard students holding Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the murder of Israelis, and pro-Palestinian protestors taking to the streets before the blood of the Jewish dead has even dried?
This isn’t simply a niche concern. The failure to confront anti-Semitism has been a disaster for the British left. All the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Socialist Workers party, the Stop the War coalition or the campaign group of left-wing Labour MPs needed to do was build a barrier that excluded anti-Jewish racists from the left. They never did it. They never said that racist views were simply unacceptable in left-wing movements.
The failure to tackle anti-Semitism helped destroy the left’s one chance of gaining power. Polling on why Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to its worst defeat since 1935 in the 2019 general election found that working-class voters saw him as ‘weak, indecisive, and lacking in patriotism’. He had ‘failed to deal with anti-Semitism’ in the Labour party. They would rather vote Conservative than put up with that.
The kind explanation for the failure to confront racism and fascism on the left is that the tidy liberal mind hates not having neat answers. If progressives accepted that Hamas was an Islamist movement from the ultra-religious right, they would have to accept that a just settlement to the Palestinian question was impossible.
Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right make peace impossible too. But liberals know how to oppose them and can imagine a day when they are gone. Radical Islam is different. It is not a part of progressives’ mental universe. It’s not just that they don’t know how to oppose it, they don’t understand what it is.
Racist stereotypes play their part. Centuries of anti-Semitic hatred cast Jews as rich. The new ‘woke’ identitarian ideology casts them as ‘white’. Rich, white people cannot be the victims of racism, as every right-thinking progressive knows.
The harsh answer is that, though it is in their self-interest, many on the Western left cannot oppose anti-Semitism and radical Islam because the first two decades of the 21st century saw the Hamasification of progressive movements. As the old Marxist revolutionary faith died, Islamist politics provided the far left with a new source of anti-Western zeal. So we had Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War coalition and Ken Livingstone allying with clerical forces previous generations of leftists would have regarded, quite rightly, as reactionary.
Inevitably, anti-Semitism is a part of some of the left’s Hamasification, and inevitably left-wing movements could not make an anti-racist stand without repudiating their new Islamist allies. It has taken the Labour party an almighty effort to rid itself of the stain, but racism is still there in the wider left. It is no use pretending that leftists don’t know about the dangers this poses. They know but don’t care.
After monitoring anti-Semitic violence for years, Dave Rich has concluded that the people who are still prepared to go out and blame the murders of Jews on Israel are ‘just obsessive cranks who hate Jews’. It’s that simple.
As I listen to Jewish people warning their children to watch out for themselves it is hard to disagree. Anti-Semitic violence will return to the UK because polite progressive society lacks the will to stop it or the honesty to admit that it exists.
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