Edgware shows what happens when symbolism replaces strategy

A property exhibition became a flashpoint on a residential Jewish street, but the real failure lies in mistaking confrontation for strength

By now you will have seen the pictures from Edgware. A thousand people on the street. The A41 shut. The Territorial Support Group deployed. Fifteen arrests. All of it in the area where our children walk to school and play.

But strip away the flags and the police presence and the headlines, and look at what was actually at the centre of it. A property exhibition. A sales event, with stalls and brochures and a chance to register interest in a flat. That is what was allowed to become a confrontation on our own doorstep.

I write as someone who loves Israel, and who is tired of watching that love be spent so carelessly. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether a thing was wise and started asking only whether backing down would look weak.

We knew this event had already been dropped by its first venue. We knew a protest had been called days in advance. And rather than ask whether a real-estate roadshow was worth dragging into the heart of a residential Jewish neighbourhood, a commercial event was treated as a test of loyalty. We mistook noise for strength.

It did not keep our children safe. It drew the danger closer to them, handed our opponents a better image than they could have hoped for, and brought chaos to a visibly Jewish area.

That said, I understand the instinct. After years of fear, of arson and abuse and the sense that no one is coming to protect us, the urge to plant a flag and refuse to be cowed is human. I feel it too. But an instinct is not a strategy, and pride is not a plan.

We should be able to hold an event like this without a mob gathering on the corner, and the fact that today we cannot is a disgrace. I am not asking us to accept a smaller life. A community that quietly tells itself, as a matter of course, that it can no longer do things has already conceded something far larger than any single event. It has surrendered its voice, and that we must never do.

But accepting how things are today is not the same as accepting them for good, and there is a world of difference between choosing our ground and giving it up. The right to live, gather and celebrate openly is the long fight, and it is worth every ounce we have. Walking into a foreseeable confrontation over a property fair, on a residential street, is not that fight. It is the wrong ground, badly chosen.

Other fights genuinely matter. Our right to religious practice, communal gatherings, the public moments where we stand up and are counted. Those are worth every effort, and we should be fighting to hold them. But there is a reason the larger solidarity events are staged in places like Trafalgar Square: open ground built for crowds, with the security and the police relationship worked through properly, whether that takes months or comes together in days. That is what taking our own presence seriously looks like. It is the opposite of being dragged towards danger following the last-minute change of address of a property fair.

There was always another way. If the right venue could not be secured in time, the right answer was to wait until it could. A commercial event moved to a later date loses nothing that matters. Holding it in a residential area put an entire visibly Jewish neighbourhood at risk.

Loving Israel has never required us to leave our judgment at the door. We can be proud and we can be smart, and on the day we accept they are the same thing, we will stop handing our opponents the airtime they so desperately crave.