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Our cynical government isn’t moral. It’s politically expedient
At the last election, Labour was targeted by a campaign of widespread intimidation. They have now decided to appease it.
The anger has waned. Burnt itself through. Now I just feel hollowed out. It feels rather lonely in this part of the diaspora. It feels rather worrying.
Since 7 October, when we saw people on the streets of London celebrating that Jews were being murdered, my soul has been split in two.
As a journalist, I was speaking to people in Israel: survivors, those who had lost loved ones, parents of hostages. My heart was broken – my heart actually hurt. I would wake up crying, my hands curled up into fists.
And then the other side of me witnessed the rapid growth of antisemitism at home. The marches with swastikas calling for the destruction of Israel and Jihad. And yet other people in my country, non Jews, were blithely almost unaware. It was like living in a parallel universe.
The messages, the stories came in, too many to handle. Antisemitism in schools, universities, the NHS, the workplace, the street; you name it, there was antisemitism there. Then came the terror attacks and the fires. Murder.
Some would whisper fearfully about 1930s Germany. The Nazis are always our point of contact, our greatest worry, knowing that our ancestors felt everything was ok; then it was not ok, but you could deal with it; and then it was too late to leave.
I kept thinking it would get better. It had to get better. I assumed that the war would end and things would calm down. They haven’t.
Jew hatred, bubbling up in this country since the start of the century, unleashed in the Labour party since Corbynism arrived in 2015, exploded along with the Hamas rockets on 7 October. We are at a new normal, and every day Jew-hatred is being normalised.
This week saw a new step, in some ways the most frightening yet.
It was not like Nazi Germany, I used to say. Because however bad things were, the government was on our side.
But this week they showed they weren’t. It’s still not Nazi Germany – not anywhere near it – but its becoming more frightening.
Disclaimer that I don’t have to give but I want to: I don’t think Netanyahu has been a great Prime Minister; I hate some of the people in his crooked coalition. I have been appalled by the free hand given to violent extremist settlers. I have felt sickened by some of language of the people he is in bed with.
But at the same time I recognise the war that Israel is fighting. That its enemies hide among civilians and use hospitals as headquarters, recruit child soldiers and actively want to martyr its population.
That Hamas didn’t come and go on 7 October and that Israel is fighting a fierce enemy.
In choosing to boycott Israel six weeks before the country goes to the polls simply because they want to have a good look before Labour conference and the latest by-election, Miliband and our Prime Minister Andy Burnham have put the demands of political bullies and their hatred before allyship and their Jewish community.
They are playing with our lives because it is politically expedient.
The US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called them ‘Jew haters’. I don’t think they are – quiet – but perhaps more shamefully, they are willing to appease Jew haters. The same Jew haters who torched and vandalised the offices of MPs, who sent them death threats; a campaign of intimidation that they are too frightened even to discuss.
Cynically, oh-so-cynically, they put a Jew front and centre of this. Ed Miliband, for the first time perhaps in his life, decides to call himself a proud Jew as he digs the knife into actual proud Jews. Jews that aren’t afraid to say, ‘hang on, this Israel-Palestine thing isn’t a binary good and bad’. Jews that realise Israel has been fighting a war to save itself, a war against terrorists who have vowed to destroy it and still vow to destroy it.
And cynically they say this is about the two-state solution, as if the Palestinians hadn’t repeatedly and for decades rejected the idea of the two-state solution with campaigns of violence. As if 7 October hadn’t shown Israelis what happens if you leave a Palestinian territory in the hope for peace. As if the ‘UN watchers’ on Israel’s Northern border hadn’t allowed Hezbollah to fill the land with missiles and rockets under their watchful eye.
Miliband dares to even talk about ethnic cleansing when, in the last ten years alone – according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestinian population in the West Bank has gone up from 2.97m to 3.43m people, an increase of 460,000, a population growth of 2.1 per cent per year. Israelis appear to be as good at ethnic cleansing as they are at genocide.
Yet now those tropes are being thrown around by a Jewish government minister: war crimes, ethnic cleansing, killing children. And on the other hand he’s lauding the government giving Jewish communities more money to build higher walls outside our schools and synagogues.
Sick and scared, I want to curl up in a corner and cry. I am so tired of being angry.
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