OPINION – HUGO RIFKIND: We expected sympathy to vanish but not this constant hate
It has become impossible, over this past year, to be irrelevantly Jewish. Impossible not to feel it, and be seen as it, by friends and foes, whatever you do, writes Hugo Rifkind
There are things I expected, and things I did not. A year after 7 October, one difficulty is remembering which is which.
I certainly remember knowing what was about to happen. I think everybody did. The day after, I was at the Cheltenham Festival on a panel and I said it out loud: that the wave of global sympathy Israel was at that point receiving would last, precisely, only until Israel retaliated. And then, such would be the scale and nature of that retaliation, it would disappear. This wasn’t a particularly insightful thought. Everybody knew it. I did, and you did, and Hamas did, and Benjamin Netanyahu did. It’s what always happens.
Did I, though, expect that within days, posters of Israeli hostages would be being torn down, in every western city? No. That was new, and the experience of being a Diaspora Jew in lands where that occurs is new, too. And did I expect, when that experience began to change, how few people would care?
Indeed, how many people would make a point of not caring? Again, no. I can remember, going back really not so far, how earnestly I tried to explain to people, for example, what that Hamas phrase – “from the river to the sea” – meant to most Jews. Honestly and truly, naively and stupidly, I really did think this might make them think twice about saying it. Instead, the opposite happened. It made them all love saying it even more.
It’s at this point in a column, I know, that I should set out my stall. Make a declaration about my Zionism, my feelings about the Netanyahu government, my condemnation of Hamas, my despair about the slaughter of the inhabitants of Gaza, my preferred technicalities of some theoretical solution for peace in the Middle East. I’ve been asked about all of that quite a lot over the last year though, and I think I’ve perfected my response.
Ready? It is “fuck off”.
It doesn’t matter what I think. Even I don’t much care what I think. I can’t solve this. Why must I pretend I can?
That’s the main thing that feels new. For a Jew to be expected to have all the answers, and to exhibit absolute moral perfection, before he or she is allowed to say anything at all.
Linked to this is the low-level, constant, burning sense that quite a lot of people now hate me. Obviously not everybody. I’ve experienced enormous kindness this past year, from friends who, as the phrase goes, are “checking in on their Jews”. Plenty have checked in on me, and I will never forget it.
Is there not a part of you, though, that now wonders how long they will hold out? Because that hatred is hard to miss, and it seems infectious. It’s hatred for existing, and hatred for not apologising about it. It’s hatred, even, for noticing the hatred, because how dare I think about that, how dare I even notice it, how dare I think it matters, far from Gaza, safe and silent and Jewish as I am. Which makes it hatred that grows when you mention it, which of course makes you wary of mentioning it at all.
The hatred is hard to miss, and it seems infectious. It’s hatred for existing, and hatred for not apologising about it.
It’s there because something has broken. And, in its absence, left-wing commentators will now make insinuations about Jewish power when they wish to fight the right, and right-wing ones will co-opt Jews into their own fights about the left. And when you ask them to stop, they will not, and when the hatred grows they will not wake in the night and wander to the bathroom and look themselves in the mirror and think: “I hope I didn’t make that worse.” Not anymore. Instead they’ll double down, feeling bold and brave. Thrilled in their relief that they need no longer pretend.
It has become impossible, over this past year, to be irrelevantly Jewish. Impossible not to feel it, and be seen as it, by friends and foes, whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever the circumstances, whatever you’d otherwise prefer. Is it worse than being in Gaza? Of course not. Neither is it worse than being in Israel.
Ask yourself, though, why I feel compelled to say that, when I’m here in Crouch End. I do, though, don’t I? Somehow, our society has decided that I have lost the right not to just be.
And no, I did not expect that, at all.
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