OPINION: The voice of British moderation needs to be turned up
We cannot expect others to speak up if we remain silent ourselves, writes barrister Gary Grant.
Among Jewish traditions, the newest may be our incessant doom-scrolling on Twitter and obsessive response to pings from the multitude of Kosher WhatsApp groups we’ve somehow found ourselves added to since the modern pogrom of October 7th.
Why? It may be our universal fear of needing to know what is going on around us to reassure ourselves that we and our loved ones are safe. Our minds may turn to the assimilated Jews of Germany and Austria in the 1930s who dismissed the rants of antisemites as just that. And did nothing except keep their heads down. Nobody, they thought, would harm us: after all we are proud Germans who fought in the first World War.
The misplaced confidence they had that their friends and neighbours would never forsake them led most to end their days in the gas chamber when nobody came to their salvation. And all this took place within living memory. So, the fears of British Jews are not without foundation. We are also not blind or deaf to what we see around us now.
We see what our Home Secretary has recently described, not inaptly, as “hate marches”, with crowds in the tens of thousands spewing through our major cities each Saturday. We hear angry chants to eradicate Israel “from the river to the sea”.
We hear calls by some of those marchers to follow the 7th century example of Muslims past to kills Jews at “Khaybar, Khaybar”. We witness Liverpool Street Station, which once welcomed the children of the Kindertransport, taken over by haters of the Jewish state when it has the audacity and means to defend itself against genocidal enemies.
Curiously, we have not witnessed a single banner suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Gaza needs to be freed from the Hamas death-cult. Nor have we seen similar marches decrying the hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians killed by Assad in Syria or by Iran-backed militias in Yemen or Uighur Muslims persecuted in China.
We see the posters of kidnapped Israeli children being ripped off walls by emboldened sneering Gen Zs to whom all lives matter save, it seems, for Jewish ones. We view the bien pensant Twitterati and University academics demonising Israel as the “oppressor”, the spearheader of “settler-colonialism” and characterising the Jewish state as the far-reaching tentacle of that wretched octopus of capitalism which is suffocating the world’s inevitable progress towards “social justice”.
We witness the ironically-named “progressive left” parroting 1970s Soviet antisemitic propaganda behaving like Iranian shills and allying themselves with decidedly non-progressive Islamist groups towards their shared aim to annihilate, directly or indirectly, the world’s only Jewish state.
And above all this we wonder, and occasionally tremble, at the deafening silence among so many of our friends and neighbours. It tempts us to conclude that the majority of our fellow countrymen hate us too because we had the temerity to be born Jewish and see Israel as the essential – the only – safeguard of the most important human right of all: our right to life.
But I believe this would be a mistake.
The 18th century statesman and thinker Edmund Burke put it best: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
It is incumbent upon us as British Jews to call out the antisemitism we see around us cloaked in the increasingly transparent garbs of anti-Zionism. We cannot expect others to speak up if we remain silent ourselves. But the duty should not fall on Jews alone.
It is natural for us to focus on those who are the loudest and in our immediate field of vision. But within our communities a virtuous few have reached out over recent weeks. Generally, they do so privately, with a text message asking if we are ok, or a subtle ‘like’ of a pro-Israel social media post. But why the continuing silence from so many others?
Their reticence is likely to be down to a number of factors. A fear of treading into the most complex of geo-political issues without sufficient knowledge to understand it. A terror of facing a backlash from the wokerati and Islamist sympathisers for not following the tune being sung so prominently by the unholy alliance of the far-left and Islamist movements. Some, the sociopathic minority I hope, may think Israel, the oppressor, got its just desserts on October 7.
But we were all ignorant and fearful once. It is the brave and wise who reach out to ask for information so they can understand why Israel must respond to the Hamas massacre with such overwhelming force when faced with a threat to its very existence. When, in the past few days, Hamas leaders proudly told television interviewers that, given the chance, they will repeat the October 7 massacres “again and again” until Israel and the Jews within are obliterated, it helps to explain why a ceasefire is a non-starter until Hamas is destroyed from top to bottom. Because Israel cannot survive Hamas being given the opportunity to rebuild its strength and carry out its express intention to attack Jews again and again. History has shown that when Jew-haters tells us they wish to exterminate us we should believe them.
We must continue to make these points, not to persuade those too far gone in Israel-hate, but to inform the majority of people of goodwill who retain open minds.
It is the nobly curious who try to learn the basics of international humanitarian law. That the proportionality of the force the IDF is now using against targets in Gaza is to be judged, in international humanitarian law terms, according to the magnitude of the very real threat facing Israel and military value of those targets, rather than by reference to a crude tallying of casualty numbers on each side.
After all, far more German civilians died in World War II than among the Allied nations but few would argue the Nazis were the wronged party.
We must explain that Israel is strictly abiding by international law when it warns Gazans to evacuate a war zone before each justified targeted attack. Why Israel goes to extraordinary lengths, beyond those adopted by most other civilised nations, to draw a distinction between military targets and civilian ones even though, as with every war, there will be civilian casualties. In response to the abhorrent claims that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza, to respond that if that were the intention of the IDF they could achieve it within 48 hours. But it is not, and never will be.
So many of our friends, neighbours and colleagues simply have no idea about the existential fight Israel has had to put up since its creation 75 years ago. Some are clueless that the Jews in Palestine/Israel have proposed, or agreed to, a two-state solution on at least five occasions since the 1936 Peel Commission first suggested it (the latest opportunities being in 2000 and 2008 when, respectively, Arafat and Abbas walked away from the negotiating table). Abba Eban’s quip in 1973 that the Arabs “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” has aged well.
It is our duty to explain all this to those who wish to hear. Not to harangue them or despair at their lack of knowledge. (After all, how many of us know the intricacies at play in the conflicts within Yemen or Myanamar?)
There are bright flashes of hope. Both our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have displayed a moral clarity and steadfastness in support of what Israel is necessarily trying to achieve in Gaza that has been, on the whole, unimpeachable. (The former leader of the Labour Party has displayed different instincts, and it remains a mystery why Mr Corbyn’s peace ministry does not begin with a nice chat with his “friends” in Hamas suggesting that, perhaps, they start by releasing all the hostages, lay down their murderous arms and try a little bit harder not to go around raping, torturing and murdering Israeli men, women, children and babies and then post their efforts on social media or brag about their Jew kill-rates to their mums on the phone).
I recently stumbled across a body of which I was previously ignorant: Muslims Against Antisemitism. Their website bears reading and their objectives are worthy of support: “We are a charity made up of British Muslims who believe it is the duty of everyone to challenge antisemitism in all of its guises. Antisemitism is not just a problem for British Jews, It is a problem for us all.” (See further at https://muslimsagainstantisemitism.org/). The group accepts the IHRA definition of antisemitism, including the “targeting of the state of Israel” and at these difficult times have held out their hand of friendship to British Jews. They represent the nobleness and decency present within moderate Islam.
In his recent Times column, Daniel Finkelstein recalls the final scene of the film Exodus, and I quote, “where Paul Newman speaks over the open grave of a young Jewish refugee and an Arab friend, both murdered in the early days of the War of Independence: ‘It is right that these two people should lie side by side in this grave, because they will share it in peace. But the dead always share the earth in peace. And that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn’.”
I believe that the majority of my fellow Brits, the virtuous silent majority, our neighbours, friends and colleagues, look with abhorrence at the events of October 7.
I believe they understand, when properly informed, that Israel must defend itself and, at the same time, also feel enormous empathy towards the innocent Palestinians caught up in the horror of war and weep for each innocent death in Gaza and Israel.
My plea is that these voices do not remain muted. That their volume be turned up and their hands of friendship reach out towards us so we do not feel so alone.
Because “Never Again” includes never again being silent when the age-old mutating evil of antisemitism spasms in our midst yet again.
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