Our sukkah is open. No one gets to enter it by asking us to disappear

Tonight, as Sukkot begins, Jews will enter a structure that offers remarkably little protection from the world outside. Its roof lets us see the sky, its walls may shake in the wind and we are not merely expected to welcome guests into it, but required to do so.

The tradition of ushpizin, the key tenet of Sukkot, is an invitation to welcome spiritual guests, the ancestors of the Jewish people, into the sukkah over the course of the festival. Alongside them, we welcome living guests, especially those who might otherwise have nowhere to celebrate, especially those who we may not on other occasions have reason to welcome. This is because a sukkah is meant to be shared and its welcome asks us to make room for another person, to hear their story and to recognise their humanity.

Welcoming someone means hearing an account of the world that may challenge our own. It means listening to another person’s fear and grief without demanding that it resemble ours.

I believe in that kind of encounter, but I believe just as strongly that it needs a threshold. What happens when the person seeking entry refuses to recognise our basic humanity? If a guest insists that our pain is invalid, or that the Jewish homeland has no right to exist, what exactly are we being asked to welcome?

In late 2023, after an anonymous article in Broadcast about the difficulty of discussing Israel and Gaza in our industry, I made an offer. I would meet anyone in film and television to discuss or debate the conflict, in public or in private. I had one condition, they had to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

Beyond that, they could challenge me on anything. They could condemn Netanyahu, oppose the war, argue for a Palestinian state on pre-1967 lines, or tell me that Israel had committed grave wrongs or horrific crimes. I wanted a conversation robust enough to hold all of that. I was inundated with hostility from all those courageous enough to condemn me for saying I was a Zionist, yet nobody was brave enough to take up the offer to meet.

That silence has stayed with me. We work in an industry built on the claim that stories can help people see through somebody else’s eyes. Yet an invitation to sit down and speak honestly appeared less appealing than the chance to denounce me from a distance.

Some invitations are more troubling still and speak to the need to set boundaries. Jeremy Corbyn invited representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah to Parliament and called them his “friends”. Years later, he said he regretted the word and had wanted them to be part of the debate. But why was he offering that platform in the first place, and on whose terms? These were representatives of organisations responsible for murdering civilians. A politician who proposes to hear from them bears the burden of explaining what the encounter might achieve and of condemning their crimes without qualification. Corbyn’s language did the opposite. “Friends” told us something that in more recent years has been made clear about the regard in which he held his guests and the Jewish community.

Last night, at a hustings in Holborn and St Pancras organised for the Jewish community, Zack Polanski was asked where he stood on Israel, he answered with pride: “I am an anti-Zionist.” At least the ambiguity is gone, if indeed any still remained. Zionism means the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in our historic homeland. Polanski is free to contest that belief and I am free to say that someone who rejects Israel’s existence has crossed the one line I set for a conversation about its future. His own Jewish identity does not give him the authority to draw that line for the rest of us.

This week, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband met his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, and posted a photograph of the encounter. A foreign secretary may have reason to speak to the representative of a hostile regime. What jars is the ease with which such an encounter becomes an image to share. Iran’s regime has attacked Israel, murdered Jews around the world and backed organisations that attack Jews right here in the UK. The photograph, by itself, asks us to see diplomacy, but many of us see an official of that regime being granted a smiling place in the frame.

I have felt a similar discomfort when figures from our own community pose proudly beside members of a British government whose actions, or failures to act, have deeply hurt the people they claim to represent. Access and difficult meetings can matter, but the resulting photograph may imply a friendship or approval that the meeting certainly hasn’t earned.

Now student groups have chosen to march on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s massacre. They can protest for Palestinians on any other day. At a march on that date last year, an organiser said she did not think Jewish students’ feelings were valid. This year’s organisers know exactly what the date means; choosing it again tells Jewish students how little their mourning counts.

I will listen to someone who condemns the Israeli government. I will listen to someone who believes I have failed to grasp the scale of Palestinian suffering. I may leave the conversation shaken, angry or changed, those are risks worth taking.

But Jews cannot and must not be expected to lend the warmth of our welcome to people who excuse our murderers, reject our right to exist or treat our grief as an obstacle to their cause. Nor should our communal leaders offer meetings and smiling photographs that allow such people to claim Jewish acceptance without changing a thing. We must stop giving our enemies that cover.

Dialogue matters, I have offered it, and I will offer it again. But we must insist on the terms that make it honest: recognition of our humanity, our pain and our right to exist. Calling that insistence a failure of dialogue mistakes submission for hospitality.

Our sukkah is open. No one gets to enter it by asking us to disappear.

Chag sameach.