Jews will not be silenced by the Green party's actions

Israel was founded on the promise of Never Again. That promise is not Israel’s alone to keep. It is ours too.

This weekend, a British political party declared that my late father was a racist. And me. And most of the Jews I know.

Our crime? Believing that the Jewish people have the right to a home in our ancestral land, and to live there in safety. The Green Party voted to call Zionism racism and to back a single state in place of Israel. In plain English: Israel should not exist, and if you think it should, you are a racist.

It did not surprise me. Since 8 October 2023, very little has. We woke that morning to a world we barely recognised, but it did not come from nowhere. For decades, a relentless, well-funded campaign had been building to delegitimise Israel, to make Jewish life untenable in the diaspora, and to erode the freedoms of the West itself. Since that morning, it has turned on us with full force. What was chanted on our streets is now the policy of a party with MPs in Westminster. This is how the unthinkable becomes respectable today, and mainstream tomorrow. The aim is unmistakable: to suffocate Jewish life in this country until we fall silent.

So let me answer as clearly as I can.

This Jew will not be silenced.

I refuse to cower, to yield, or to lower my voice and simply hope the storm will pass. I am proud of what this country has stood for, proud to be Jewish in it, and proud to call myself an unashamed Zionist. There is no contradiction between those things, and no party will tell me otherwise. Israel was founded on the promise of Never Again. That promise is not Israel’s alone to keep. It is ours too.

That pride is something my father gave me. After he passed away in 2021, we established the charitable foundation Bishnat to pass it on: to reconnect people with their pride in being Jewish through song.

My father loved Jewish music. I thought Bishnat would be a celebration of that love. Then, three weeks after 7 October, it was suddenly hard for us to host a Jewish concert in the UK. Think about that for one moment. A concert. Of Jewish music. In Britain.

That is when I understood what Bishnat is really for. When we come together and sing, something happens. A room of individuals becomes a community. Pride that people have learned to keep quiet becomes something they can say out loud. Young and old, religious and secular, Jews and the friends who stand with us: it is a melting pot, and our hope is that people will leave that little bit braver. That is an act of connection. In Britain today, it is also an act of defiance.

And it matters, because freedom is rarely lost all at once. It is lost inch by inch, quietly, while we look the other way. Every time we read or hear something and think, “I can’t believe they did that,” and then do nothing, we give up another inch.

It is time for us to stir.

Next week, I will stand alongside fellow Jews and our friends, and together we will sing, shout and dance in celebration of who we are. I want people to leave that night stirred: done with apologising for who we are or for Israel, and ready to stand up, take action and be a force for good.

And I will sing loud enough for my father to hear. We Jews will not be silenced.

Hilton Nathanson is the founder of Bishnat. The fifth Bishnat concert, Be The Light, takes place in London on 13 October.