Let us begin with a brief exchange on GB News, confirmed this week as the TV arm of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Following an attack on a synagogue last week in Michigan, in which a gunman drove a car packed with explosives through the entrance to the building before opening fire, a pundit on the channel sought to clarify what the attacker actually meant by his actions. “This was an Israeli temple,” she explained. “It was aligned with Israel.”
By way of evidence, she cited the name of the synagogue – Temple Israel – apparently unaware that Jews have referred to themselves as “the people of Israel” for millennia, long before there was a state of that name, and that there are, for that reason, countless synagogues in the US called Temple Israel. No, for her, the Michigan house of worship, with its on-site school where more than a hundred children were in lessons that day, was a de facto embassy of the Israeli state and therefore an understandable, if not legitimate, target. Hold that episode in your mind.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s head of counter-terrorism strategy, Joe Kent, quit in protest at the ongoing war on Iran. Kent is a luminary of the US far right, a conspiracy theorist with ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. His resignation letter suggested that Trump had been tricked into war by Israel and – telling phrase – “its powerful American lobby”. What’s more, he said that this was “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war”. That last line was the giveaway. It’s long been a staple of antisemitic orthodoxy, though easily debunked: in fact, Israel counselled against the invasion of Iraq, fearing that it would strengthen Iran.
Still, conspiracy theories are impervious to facts and stubbornly persistent. Witness the ease with which we now know Farage was happy to parrot – for money – some of the hoariest antisemitic myths. This week, the Guardian revealed that, for a fee of £76 on the personalised video platform Cameo, the Reform leader cheerfully agreed to “talk about … how secret societies are controlling everything”. No mention of Jews in that prompt, but here’s what Farage volunteered: “Is it the Bilderbergers that are running the world? You know, there are many, many other theories … Some think it’s the Rothschilds. Maybe it’s George Soros. I don’t know. What I do know is actually I don’t think any of it is a conspiracy theory.” Bilderbergers, Rothschilds, Soros: it could have been antisemitic trope bingo.
If this were confined to theories and talk – albeit offered by a senior US government official and the man who could be Britain’s next prime minister – that would be one thing. But as the Jews of Michigan can testify, anti-Jewish hatred is now clear, present and mortally dangerous.
Consider this month alone. On 6 March, four men were arrested in London and Hertfordshire suspected of gathering information on potential targets: synagogues and individual Jews. Over the following days, gunmen opened fire on three synagogues in Toronto. The day after that, it was the turn of a synagogue in Liège, targeted by a bomb. On 12 March came the attack on Temple Israel in Michigan, followed the next day by the arrest of four youths on suspicion of exploding a device outside a synagogue in Rotterdam. The next day, a bomber struck a Jewish school in Amsterdam. The day after that, French prosecutors launched an investigation into two brothers said to be plotting a “lethal and antisemitic” attack. Inside their car were found a loaded semi-automatic weapon and a bottle of hydrochloric acid.
There are indications that at least some of these attacks may have been linked to Tehran, but that doesn’t change the threat posed to, and experienced by, Jews. Besides, the current wave of violence began long before 28 February, when US and Israel first struck Iran. Earlier this month, I was in Sydney, where I visited the site of the December massacre at Bondi beach. I saw the marks the bullets had left on palm trees, close to where 15 people, most of them Jews and including a 10-year-old girl, were gunned down as they lit candles for the festival of Chanukah. It came two months after Jews were killed at prayer on Yom Kippur, at Heaton Park in Manchester.
This is what we Jews live with now: incidents of antisemitism through the roof, borne out by both the statistics and our own daily experience, coupled with the knowledge that we face a murderous threat that can strike at any time and in any place we gather together. Coping with that is hard enough. But what has made it harder is the response among many we would once have looked to as allies, those we might have expected to show empathy for a besieged and threatened minority, who have instead offered a cold shoulder – or worse.
I am thinking of the self-styled “social justice advocate” who greeted the attack on the Michigan synagogue not with horror, but with a smirking online video, arguing that the police response to the incident revealed the “power & privilege” of the victims, and that the people who needed to “wake up” and change their ways were not antisemites but Jews.
I am thinking of those anti-war campaigners, including the deputy leader of the Green party, happy to stand at a rally, surrounded by the flags of the Iranian regime that killed tens of thousands of its own people just over two months ago, thereby putting themselves on the same side as a dictatorship accused of, and with a documented record of, directing attacks on Jewish targets, including synagogues. (Mothin Ali has denied supporting the Iranian regime.)
And I am thinking of the progressives who suggest attacks on Jews are not, in fact, antisemitism, but merely opposition to Israel. So that, say, a brick through a window of a London shop associated with Jews, blood-red graffiti painted on its walls, is something other than a threat to Jews and Jewish life. That it’s really about international capitalism or tangential associations with a country thousands of miles away.
Let’s give those making that kind of argument the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say the talking head on GB News had a fair point when she noted that the Michigan gunman had lost family members to the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, and that he was furious with Israel. That does not alter the fact that he directed that fury not at the government of Israel, but at diaspora Jews.
And that’s the move that keeps happening, when people said to be outraged by Israel’s conduct decide the address for their wrath should be the Jews of their own neighbourhood.
Every minority faces discrimination – note Tory frontbencher Nick Timothy’s appalling attack on Muslim prayer this week – but next to no other diaspora community goes through this. People can’t stand Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russian Orthodox churches don’t require round-the-clock protection. People loathe Donald Trump and his bombing of Iran, but US-branded stores on UK high streets are not smashed and daubed. As for British businesses with investment links to the US, including to US security firms, those remain untouched. Israel and Jews are the exception.
Nor does it make a difference if you label your attack on a synagogue or Jewish business as “anti-Zionist”. The Z-word’s meaning has been so distorted as to render it all but useless, but most Jews understand Zionism to mean a simple belief in the right of Israel to exist – if only as an ultimate refuge for Jews facing persecution. It does not denote support for this or that Israeli government or its actions. So a bomb outside a synagogue doesn’t suddenly become OK if there are “Zionists”, or Israelis, inside – just as we would never condone violence against a group of supporters or citizens of the US as a legitimate response to Trump’s war.
So forgive Jews for experiencing gunfire at a synagogue as an antisemitic attack. Forgive us for hearing in the broken glass of a shop window a terrifying echo. Maybe the person hurling that brick thought they were attacking a country far away. But the sound it made was of a deadly past, one we Jews thought we had left behind a long time ago.
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