UK Jews must realise: a defensive strategy against an attacking narrative won’t work
The irony of the past two years is that a community which filled Britain's stages, screens and bookshelves has stopped telling its own story
In 2016, the Remain campaign lost a referendum it began with every advantage. It had the government, the Treasury, the experts and the polls, and it spent four months doing almost nothing but answering the other side. Every week brought a new claim, every claim brought a rebuttal, and every rebuttal repeated the claim. By polling day, voters could recite the case against membership and could not name the case for it. The lesson has held in every campaign since: the side that fights entirely on its opponent’s ground loses even the exchanges it wins.
For almost three years, British Jews have been running a Remain campaign.
“Genocide”. “Apartheid”. “Starvation”. We correct, we contextualise, we rebut, and much of that work is necessary. But when answering is all we do, the public remembers the nouns and forgets the answers. Two years of diligent defence, and the only vocabulary that has sunk in is our enemies’. We have argued about our right to exist, and Israel’s right to exist, for so long that we have forgotten nobody ever fell in love with a rebuttal. It is time to stop defending and start making our case. There are two of them, and they are magnificent.
The first is the story of British Jews, which happens to be the most British story there is. A community that arrived as refugees, with nothing, fleeing the pogroms and then the camps, and repaid the country that took it in by helping to build it. Jack Cohen came out of the East End with a market stall and left Britain Tesco. Michael Marks arrived from the Russian Empire with a penny bazaar and left it Marks and Spencer. Fish and chips, by most accounts, began with Jewish immigrants frying fish in the East End. Jewish doctors fill the hospitals, Jewish teachers fill the schools, Jewish scientists have filled Britain’s Nobel lists, and every Shabbat morning, in every synagogue in the land, this community prays for the King. All of that from around half of one per cent of the population. We are not tenants in this country pleading for the lease to be renewed. We are co-authors of it, and we should say so.
The second is the case for Israel that Britain has never been allowed to hear. Not the tired lines we reach for under fire. Only democracy in the Middle East: true, and it has changed nobody’s mind in twenty years. The case is what the relationship delivers to Britain. Israeli intelligence has been publicly credited with helping to foil dozens of planned attacks in Europe, including a plot to bring down a passenger jet, and joint operations with European agencies have dismantled Hamas cells preparing attacks on Jewish targets on this continent. An Israeli company is among the largest suppliers of medicines to the NHS. Israeli technology sits in the phone in your pocket, and NHS patients now test their kidney function at home with an Israeli-designed smartphone kit. When British Jews talk about Israel, this is the conversation to force: not whether Israel may exist, but how many British lives the partnership has saved, and how much poorer, sicker and less safe this country would be without it.
None of this replaces the fight against antisemitism. We are a community under attack, the numbers are the worst on record, and we must keep saying so. But a case for the defence is not a case. People do not rally to a community that only ever explains what it is not. They rally to a story, and ours is one worth telling.
And no community is better equipped to tell one. British Jews gave this country many of its storytellers: Pinter’s plays, Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, the Grade brothers’ television, Brian Epstein walking out of a Liverpool record shop with the Beatles, Simon Schama narrating Britain’s own history back to it. The irony of the past two years is that a community which filled Britain’s stages, screens and bookshelves has stopped telling its own story. And storytelling is not a skill we picked up here; it is the oldest discipline we have. Every Pesach, in every generation, in whatever country would have us, Jewish families sit down to tell one story as though it happened to each of us personally. A people whose central ritual is telling its own story has no business losing a narrative war.
The shift this needs does not belong to any committee. It belongs to all of us. For every rebuttal, a story. For every correction, an introduction: to who we are, to what we have built, to what the partnership with Israel actually delivers. Say it at the dinner table, say it in the classroom, say it online, say it in the pages of papers like this one. The defensive crouch has had two years, and the polling shows precisely what it has bought us. The case for ourselves costs nothing to make, and we have barely begun to tell it.
We have spent two years telling Britain what we are not. It is time to remind Britain, and ourselves, what we are.
Max Royston is a co-founder and primary spokesperson of StopTheHateUK