Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

A killer on the rampage in Sydney’s Bondi Westfield Shopping Mall murdered six people yesterday, and succumbed to the gunshot of a policewoman who fired from close range. This was naturally headline news in the UK, resulting in prompt speculation about the killer, whose name was withheld by the Australian authorities. There was some blurred footage of a thin, dark haired man walking swiftly through the mall, as well as an image of his lifeless body.

The Australian police said they did not believe the attack was terror related, but there was speculation on social media and from some, a presumption that this was an instance of Islamist terror. While the killer had not been identified, this could not be known and later, when he was named as Joel Cauchi with a history of mental illness, it was shown to be false.

Before the killer was named, I saw that the column on an X/Twitter page which shows trending topics, displayed the trend ‘Benjamin Cohen’. I assumed this was a participant in one of the TV reality shows which I never watch, but which account for certain social media trends which, as far as I am concerned, are an undiscovered country. Through various chat groups, I soon saw that ‘The Jew Benjamin Cohen’ was also a significant trend and that a person of this name was being identified as the Bondi mall killer. I did not find any authoritative source for this and saw that a photo of a dark-haired young man, Ben Cohen of Sydney, was being used to assert identity with the man who turned out to be Joel Cauchi.

A baby had been stabbed in the mall and afterwards received surgery and I saw this kind of tweet proliferating on X.

I saw that the identification of the man as Benjamin Cohen was being promoted by anti Israel or anti Jewish activist accounts and thought it was likely to be false but could not know for sure. Why did I care? Answer: the rumour was already being used to abuse Jewish people in general.

Late last night, Australian police divulged the name of the deceased attacker, Joel Cauchi. So far and, as far as I know, this has not been used to libel any particular demographic. The real Benjamin Cohen has made a brief and dignified video in which he regrets the rumour mongering of social media.

Those who yesterday were asserting his guilt have today moved on to Iran’s overnight attacks on Israel, with drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted before they could do harm. They are celebrating this as a great victory for Iran.

Social media puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes. It has the speed of a ballistic missile, powered remotely and intended to cause maximum damage. Intercepting a lie or an error is not always possible, but one must try.

Sometimes – often, to be honest – if I’m appalled by some garishly antisemitic tweet which grabs my attention, I make a screen shot and post it, as an exposé of the platform X, and the author of the offensive tweet. I screen shot rather than repost as I know I’m likely to block them before long or they will block me and I want to keep the evidence.

It then happens sometimes – often, if I’m honest – that a sympathetic person replies along the lines broadly speaking of ‘Your tweet is antisemitic. You are disgusting.’ I look twice, to see if their words are addressed to me and, seeing that they are meant for the tweet’s author, I point out that the word ‘You’ seems to refer to myself, the actual offender being absent. I understand their meaning but if someone tells me ‘You are disgusting,’ I feel as if they mean me, or as if a third party will think they are speaking to me.

This is when the second person singular is misdirected, as if GPS had found a street with a similar name but in the wrong county.

In English the second person plural, ‘Ye,’ is archaic and we neither tutoyer nor vousvoyer. When someone tells me ‘You are a genocidal maniac. You have killed 30,000 innocent people, most of them children,’ do they mean you singular, that I personally and alone have done the deed, or you plural, that all Jews/some Jews/ all Zionists/ some Zionists are the perpetrators? Yesterday an imaginative lady insisted that I have suborned King Charles and the UK government with my ‘filthy blood money’. How many Waterstones booksellers, retired, have the wherewithal to bribe a King? Not I, certainly.

A well known actor tweeted to a well known Jewish actor, demanding that she give some answer regarding the awful killing of seven aid workers in Gaza. There was, I am pleased to say, a backlash from many who thought that Tracy Ann in the UK should not be answerable to Samantha for IDF errors in Gaza. But we know how it goes: we are all expected to answer, unless we slip under the barrier like John Glazer or, restaurant critic Jay Rayner, to show we are not part of that you plural on which the ‘anti Zionists’ fix their sights.

In the Hebrew bible, the author[s] of the Psalms use the first person singular, ‘I’ rather than ‘We’, the latter being more common in liturgy unless the liturgy is taken from the psalms. ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ asks David in Psalm 22, famously repeated, in Aramaic, by Jesus on the cross. In congregational prayer, the kehilah prays as one, the quorum of ten persons ensuring that we are engaged in communal worship and yet, in the Shema, the central prayer of all services, the imperative second person singular is used. Hebrew, like French has you singular and plural: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.’

The King James Version deployed ‘Ye’ and ‘Thou’ to translate Hebrew atem and atah which is an advantage of the Authorized Version over subsequent translations. It does make a difference.

When the social media trolls tell me ‘You killed children’ (and, believe me, they do), do they mean ye of thou?

I will not say ‘Not I,’ because I will not concede that ‘We’ are guilty of the charges they like to confront us/me with. These accusations come to anyone overtly Jewish on social media or in the public eye, unless they slip under the barrier, exchanging we for ‘they’ and joining in the anathemas.

If you belong to a community, you get accused as a community and you answer on behalf of the community. Likewise, you are created as a community, for example at Sinai:

אַתֶּ֨ם נִצָּבִ֤ים הַיּוֹם֙ כֻּלְּכֶ֔ם לִפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם רָאשֵׁיכֶ֣ם שִׁבְטֵיכֶ֗ם זִקְנֵיכֶם֙ וְשֹׁ֣טְרֵיכֶ֔ם כֹּ֖ל אִ֥ישׁ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

You stand this day, all of you, before your God יהוה —your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel.

Deuteronomy 29:9

Rabbi Tanhuma said ‘You are pledges, one for another,’ which is a bit like John Donne’s ‘No man is an island.’ The paradox is that each one of us really is an island and, at the same time, the multitude at Sinai, or in the ghetto or in the increasingly edgy and hostile streets and campuses of the United Kingdom.

׃

When I watch BBC news, which I watch more than any other channel, I know that compassionate people all over the UK are absorbing images of suffering from Gaza and hearing about the children, women, doctors and journalists who seem to be paying the price of war. The viewers are told of imminent starvation, due to Israel withholding humanitarian aid. As I follow COGAT, the  Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, I have reason to believe that Israel is not withholding aid but that the presence of Hamas and UN agencies delay or impede the distribution of goods. I know that this is not generally believed, the reason being that a country which is said to be starving people, primarily children, women, doctors and journalists, is not likely to be believed when it denies the proposition already in circulation.

The findings of the BBC, Amnesty, the UN and their special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories are cited time and again by progressives and classically conservative antisemites alike to apostrophize diaspora Jews, bound up with concern for Israel’s survival, for our families sheltering from the endless rockets, thoughts of the hostages and whether they are still alive and the need to prevail over Hamas and the Islamic Palestinian Jihad. How can we explain this to the social media belligerents, who post photos of dead children, often holding me personally responsible which, to be fair, is because I generally voice support for Israel and defence against the usual calumnies.

I understand that they believe they are witnessing – via BBC, Sky, CNN and the Guardian – barbaric violence against a defenceless people and they are irritated to be called antisemites, which they strenuously deny. And they wonder if all that persecution of Jews over the centuries, which some of them studied for Key Stage 4 History, was not after all for some good reason. When Roald Dahl said that Hitler did not ‘pick on Jews for no reason’ he was not quite such an outlier as one would hope. The number 109 is attached to so much social media that one recognizes it on sight, like a swastika or the lightening flash of the British fascists. What is 109? They say we were expelled from 109 countries and that, if a child were expelled from so many schools, one would have to suppose that there was something wrong with the child’s behaviour. As shown in the link below, the number 109 is ‘white supremacist numeric shorthand ‘ but white supremacism reaches beyond its own borders and is deployed in the argument against Israel and Zionism by some in the middle ground, who find themselves charged with antisemitism.

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/109110

When those driven by righteous fury against Israel are called antisemites, they point out that anti Zionism is not antisemitism; that certain men wearing streimels and peyot are photographed burning Israeli flags; that Palestinians are actually semites while – and here they are stepping inadvertently into the antisemitic quicksand – while Jews are a Turkic people called Khazars. QED, they are not antisemites, and at this point they may remember to post the meme of Shulamit Aloni saying ‘It’s a trick, we always use it.’ If you google these words alone, Shulamit Aloni will come up, mentioned in many articles which set forth our trickiness, our use of the ‘victim card’ to carry out acts of barbarity.

Unfortunately, it has been impossible for me to be unacquainted with the myriad clichés of online antisemitism. If you are on social media, they will come to you.

How does one explain to an apparently well-meaning and conscientious person who makes use of all these clichés, memes and biased agencies that they have strayed on to the road more travelled, where jackboots marched and, before them, the Black Hundreds, the Holy Inquisition, the Crusaders and more. Their alibi is the so called ‘Jewish bloc’ on the Palestinian demos, who hate Zionism even more than they do.

Some insist that we can never explain sufficiently and that this is why Israel has to be strong, against the day when the nations of the world decide, like Roald Dahl, that if we are outliers, outsiders indeed, there must be some good reason.

I know the forms of antisemitism but not the answers to it. I also believe that Israel has to be strong against the day when the nations rise up against us. I believe that some people will risk everything to stand with us, to prevent that happening, but I also know that adversaries are being created day by day. The market for biased reporting is self-perpetuating: the viewers expect it now and may not accept anything else.

Baron Jacob Rothschild has died, baruch Dayan ha emet. He was eighty-seven, a financier and patron of the arts, not a person whose career I followed closely or someone whose circles – royalty, millionaires and business magnates – would ever intersect with mine.

I’m very sorry to say that his death has trended on X, formerly Twitter, with an explosion of gloating, ill will and cursing. Something similar happened when Henry Kissinger died a short time ago but Kissinger was a statesman with responsibilities on the world stage. I have even seen one of the gloaters remark that these are good times as first Kissinger and now Baron Rothschild has died.

If I were not familiar with the mythology surrounding the Rothschild family on social media, I would not understand the reaction but for a long time I observed the fandom of Jeremy Corbyn on social media, and I saw how ‘the Rothschilds’ were for many of them a malevolent folkloric entity, as represented in the theories of David Icke, who is dissimilar from Mr Corbyn but with an overlap in the support base.

Two years ago and at intervals since then, there was an outbreak of malice on Twitter concerning the untimely death of my friend Dr Pete Newbon, an activist against antisemitism and author and lecturer on the subject of Romanticism in English Literature. It was very painful to see strangers on a social media platform rejoicing in the suffering of this young man and taunting his friends with their graphic imaginings.

Well, I did not know Baron Rothschild so the abuse won’t hit me so hard but it is certainly disagreeable and even alarming.

Here are some examples from Corbynist groups on Facebook of the demonization of the Rothschild family. Needless to say, these are just comments I saw and caught in screen shots, a fraction of those which were posted.

All the above screen shots are from Facebook groups. As for Twitter, such is the glee expressed over the death of Jacob Rothschild, you would think he was Attila the Hun, or worse. This shows a very small sample of messages I personally received, since yesterday, when there were many more.

This is going to be a short post, the story shown in screen shots. The point is that so called anti Zionists reply abusively to a Shabbat greeting on Twitter. We know that Jewish institutions and organizations and individuals in the UK and the USA are coming under attack, and that an overt connection with Israel is not necessary for a person or building to be vulnerable in the present climate.

On Twitter, the proliferation of anti Jewish hate is alarming.

On Friday evening, I posted this tweet which I didn’t think was controversial or provocative.

There were hundreds of appropriate and civil replies but the hostile replies were numerous, that evening and the next morning.

The following morning, I found these in my notifications.

Those who think the rise in antisemitism is about Israel are not entirely wrong. Any Jew hater who wants a voice knows to put Israel on the charge sheet, along with world domination, wealth, capitalism and communism. Nick Griffin, who was leader of the racist BNP, declares his support for Palestine in his Twitter account.

Antisemites are opportunists, accusing us of whatever is hateful in society: whether deicide, child murder, treason, apartheid or genocide but I hope you will believe me when I tell you that while ‘genocidal maniac’, ‘baby killer’ and ‘apartheid lover’ are almost daily terms of abuse fired at me and other Jews on social media, I have also been accused of personally killing Jesus – as have we all.

I did wonder if there would have been less hostility if I’d said ‘Good shabbes’ rather than the Hebrew ‘Shabbat shalom’. Were the words ‘Don’t be afraid’ a provocation to those who want us to be afraid?

Am I afraid? Not yet.

And still they come, replying to the same ‘Shabbat shalom’…

Imagine if I’d said something controversial?

All these abusive replies were in my notifications, the day after I posted ‘Shabbat shalom’. There will be more but I think I need not add them. These are difficult times, which I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime.

Like most people on Twitter/X, I follow some accounts of public persons , especially journalists, politicians, activists, academics and writers, if I tend to agree with them or if I can learn from them. I make a point of reading their tweets because it’s comforting to see sense and reason persist, even on a platform like X. It never happens that I agree with the entire output of any one of them. It strikes me that some are to my left and some are to my right, but the habit of viewing opinions as positioned latitudinally, left and right, is probably a simplification or a distortion.

Those to the left are outspoken in their opposition to the settlements on the West Bank and to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Those to the right have an enhanced sense of danger and are willing to restrict the movements of anyone posing a likely threat. For myself, I can see both cases.

I also see the pushback on social media against these celebrities or scholars who are committed unambiguously to the survival of Jews in the diaspora and, in most cases, to the survival of Israel. Remarkably, it comes in a one-size-fits-all formulation. All are called genocidal; all are called baby killers; all are called colonialists. Some of the individuals who receive such replies are uninterested – even notoriously so – in the State of Israel. It makes no difference. Stephen Fry was called a ‘genocidal thug’ by many after broadcasting about the rise of antisemitism, although he has in the past signed public letters critical of Israel and, as far as I’m aware, never those in solidarity.

There are variations in the accessories to the standard abuse. Fry’s homosexuality was invoked as a signifier of decadence. In the case of David Baddiel, it is always the Jason Lee impersonations. To Simon Schama, who is perhaps less familiar to authors of abusive tweets than Fry or Baddiel, they tend to post very generalized accusations of mendacity and ignorance. This was a reply I just received respecting my retweet of Simon Schama’s post:

In my own case, not in any way a distinguished or public person but nevertheless voluminously abused on Twitter, the accessory to ‘genocidal maniac’ is that I am old and, as my surname is Lazarus, a really angry adversary will tell me that I am already deceased. Perhaps each one imagines they are the first to have thought of it.

Moderate expressions of sympathy with Israel often produce the most intense ire. If the speaker is reactionary and unreasonable, their words can be used as an indictment against them and against all of us. That is how it is with Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Any level-headed Zionist on social media is likely to be the recipient of memes invoking these government ministers’ most bigoted utterances. Is this to tell us that our moderation is a mask, cunningly concealing our genocidal intentions? 

In London, the Saturday marches chant for intifada and revolution. Not for them the two state solution, yet they were quick to condemn Netanyahu when he said that the two state solution is not right now a viable aim. The cardboard placards displaying childlike writing and running paint often liken Israelis to Nazis, thereby laying the ground for the refusal of any kind of accommodation with a State of nine million citizens, while selecting offensive words and phrases calculated to arouse horror in their targets. My experiences on social media lead me to think that there is significant enjoyment for ‘anti Zionists’ in calling for the elimination of Israel from the river to the sea. They may be unsure of the geography but the radicalism fulfils the desire to dehumanize the other while basking in an uncomplicated sense of virtue. They are radicalized by the sound of their own voices, in union with others.

Sometimes in a Twitter dispute, the other person may make some small step towards consensus, if for example they condemn the Hamas atrocities of 7 October or if I, on my side, agree that the settlements in the West bank were an impediment to the late, lamented peace process. Such conversations can end with a degree of civility as everyone is grateful not to be on the receiving end of hate.

Nevertheless, incivility prevails in the majority of cases and, whether they stand to my left or my right, all overt Zionists on Twitter get to be called murderers and white supremacists, even when they are not remotely white, just as black MPs in the UK parliament are considered not black by some opponents coming from their left.

A video is posted of Howard Jacobson, wisely never a participant on Twitter. ‘I’m flabbergasted to see what’s out there now,’ says the author, referring to a resurgence in antisemitism beyond anything seen in the UK in our lifetimes and the victim blaming which followed in some quarters, after 7 October. He speaks mildly and reflectively yet with surprise, almost as if disappointed in our humane and enlightened century. And the reply comes back, in response to the video:

And this:

And these:

These were among the replies to Times Radio’s clip from a video of an interview with Howard Jacobson.

It shocks me that the hakhamim and hakhamot (wise men and women) of our age are spoken to thus. Did Jacobson even mention Israel? You might say he did, by referring to 7 October but, in point of fact, it makes no difference. The trolls are levellers who think they can bring down the wise with the less wise.

There is a reason why many of us dread Holocaust Memorial Day. If you post a picture of your lighted memorial candle on social media, someone will tell you that you are a baby killer and send you photos purporting to be from Gaza of the dead and injured, or they will tweet to you the meme of Shulamit Aloni saying ‘It [antisemitism] is a trick; we always use it.’ I imagine an endless line of Shulamit Alonis, like the descendants of Banquo, stretching out to the crack of doom.

One of the most striking features of the drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which reflected the real life experience of the victimised sub-postmasters, was the insistence from the Post Office helpline that each of them was alone in their predicament with the Horizon software. To be alone is not a sin or a crime, but it introduces fault if you are the only one not to make a system work.

The sense of being alone is psychologically oppressive and weakening but being outnumbered is something all minorities live with, by definition.

Television news showed a demo in Trafalgar Square marking a hundred days that Israeli hostages have been in Hamas captivity. Jewish News reported it thus: ‘Thousands flock to Trafalgar Square, united by one cry: Bring them home now.’ As with our march against antisemitism – which was larger, estimated at more than 100,000 – the atmosphere was sombre and although this was publicised as ‘Stand With Israel’, there was nothing martial about any aspect of the gathering. The Chief Rabbi quoted Psalm 121, ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills,’ and there were speeches from family members of the kidnapped.

On Twitter, photos of the rally taken from the air were mocked by anti Zionists who denied that thousands had gathered, indeed, insisted that there were fewer than a hundred. I was there and know this is nonsense but perhaps they know it too; they just like to insist that our numbers are so few that we are virtually alone.

The popularity of ‘Everyone hates you,’ or ‘So many countries expelled you,’ as a message sent to Jewish people on Twitter shows the impulse to isolate a notional enemy or a potential trouble maker. ‘The whole world knows…’ is also a popular phrase. Sometimes this progresses to ‘You’re lying and you know it,‘ which advances the view that the solitary interlocutor is not only alone but shares in the knowledge of ‘the whole world’, to their detriment. Isolate the person and then negate their reality.

I am often told by sympathetic, thoughtful and determined non Jewish allies that we Jews are not alone at all, and they will not allow us to be on our own. I believe it and am indescribably grateful for it.

It is nearly forty years since I saw Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour film Shoah, which comprised interviews with survivors as well as some nazi perpetrators, alongside footage of the camps. One interview stayed with me more than any other. A man spoke of hiding in the sewer when the ghetto was liquidated. Those hiding alongside him were somehow discovered; they were shot dead and he was on his own. He said, ‘I thought I was the last Jew in the world.’

I remember this when it seems that we are few and isolated; how I had imagined his loneliness, even while knowing with the hindsight of the late twentieth century that we would, as Eylon Levy put it in his speech in Trafalgar Square, rise from the ashes and live.

…as Jason Lee, that is to say. Full disclosure, I didn’t know Jason Lee was a footballer or that he started his professional career at Charlton Athletic, until David Baddiel became active publicly against antisemitism. Then one absolutely could not miss the back story.

Yesterday and today, a hostile tweeter demands to know my opinion of blackface, as I too may be called a hypocrite for opposing antisemitism, if I do not consider it racist. I tell him I do consider blackface racist but somehow he misses my reply and puts the question again, this morning. So it goes on. Someone calls the person an antisemite, based on his timeline and he replies with a meme showing the late Hajo Meyer, accompanied by a text likening Zionists to Nazis, these being Meyer’s own words.

Hajo Meyer, unfortunately deeply anti Israel in his old age, became a meme and leads a busy posthumous life; likewise Shulamit Aloni who was not anti Israel so much as against the right wing,specifically Ariel Sharon. I wish I had a shekel for every time that I have been sent the Shulamit Aloni meme, this one:

I can’t do better than to insert a link to Steve Cooke’s article, where he explains the background, but it is not intuitively clear to those who know nothing about Jewish history that she was not saying the thing that antisemites believe.

https://medium.com/@Steve_Cooke/is-antisemitism-a-trick-a-closer-look-at-that-shulamit-aloni-meme-295fde27b0a8

Even more often than the Shulamit Aloni and Hajo Meyer memes, I am sent photos of bestreimeled men from the Neturei Karta cult, burning Israeli flags or – perhaps worse – lining up with Jew haters to make the threatening quenelle gesture. I am not going to use this space to explain the nature of Neturei Karta and why they are outliers to every kind of Judaism. My point is how often I am sent pictures of them, to assure me, I assume, that truly orthodox Jews hate Israel to the same degree as Islamic jihadists or French fascists.

Another picture which sometimes comes my way depicts an unattractive Israeli, designated a settler by those posting the image, saying ‘If I don’t steal it, somebody else will.’ I am sent this to tell me that I am complicit with theft.

I am often advised to block instantly but social media is performative, bystanders are not always well-informed, and there is an impulse to defend oneself, myself, from accusations of racism, theft, lying or genocide, speaking of which, if I had an agora (one hundredth of a shekel) for every time I am called genocidal, I could afford to take out a subscription to the Times Online.

It is not worth pursuing a self-defensive strategy in the face of pictorial memes. In most cases, several tweets would be required. It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words, possibly because they are more easily consumed by a reader who may be averse to reading a thousand words.

‘Try living in a black skin,’ admonishes this tweeter, ‘Oh wait a minute’ Laughing emoji inserted.

Does he mean that there is no chance of me living in a black skin? I’d say he’s not wrong there. As I often remark, I am not just white but pallid. I used to joke that this was due to some Cossack input in my DNA, but that’s no longer a joking matter when ‘Khazar’ is one of the many contemporary go-to insults to aim at Jews. Besides, I have had my DNA tested and there are no Cossacks in the picture.

In further dialogue, the interlocutor tells me that he is black, so I consider it reasonable that he is appalled by blackface performance and cosplay. He objects to it from David Baddiel as he sees him as a person who makes moral pronouncements against antisemitism and, perhaps to show his workings out, he sends me a picture of marchers carrying a banner displaying the words ‘International Jewish Anti Zionist Network.’

The most disturbing photos I am sent are of injured or dead children, who the senders say are Palestinian. Sometimes the photos are revealed to have a Syrian provenance but there are enough children suffering in Gaza for deceit to be unnecessary. Why must I be shown the photos? It is because I am Jewish and a Zionist, not an ‘anti Zionist’ like Neturei Karta or that International Network which may comprise anything from six to a thousand persons.

If someone who had not, like me, been on Twitter since the ancient of days, asked me how to respond to these pictures which are worth a thousand words, I would say ‘Block, block, block.’ You never regret it.

The only problem is that if one wants an insight into how contemporary antisemitism works and justifies itself, one has to see the effluvia.

I get sent pictures of Hitler too, of Nuremberg rallies and of gas canisters, these from the far right who have made Twitter their home.

Some, especially my contemporaries ie old people, tell me to come off of social media away from the horrors, but one makes friends too, so the horrors are balanced out by friendships, alliances and by the exchange of information.

Rabbi Tarfon used to say, ‘It is not for us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.’

רבי טרפון אומר לא עליך המלאכה לגמור ולא אתה בן חורין ליבטל ממנה

Pirkei Avot 2:16

Post script

I forgot about this meme, very overtly antisemitic while denying the reality of antisemitism. I was sent it a minute ago, a riposte from someone on Twitter. Waste not, want not.

Talking to family and friends about this ongoing war in Israel and Gaza, I haven’t heard anyone express anything other than sympathy for the Gazans in their dire situation; neither have I heard anything other than contempt for Hamas apologism, especially when it comes from our own people, in the arts or in journalism, or in the Jewish anti Israel movements such as N’amod, Jewdas and JVL.

It’s been said that where other people are connected by six degrees of separation, Jews are connected to each other by fewer degrees, because we are few in number, so we all know someone affected by the Hamas massacre of 7 October and many of us know someone involved in anti Israel activism, marching today, as last Saturday, with the thousands chanting ‘From the river to the sea,’ and ‘Khaybar ya Yahud’. They will make an argument that ‘from the river to the sea’ is not a genocidal slogan. Not many Jewish people, however sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, will echo Chris Williamson’s words, ‘Israel has forfeited the right to exist,’ although one or two will do even that.

My thousands of tweets on the subject of antisemitism have caused hostile persons to identify me as a fanatical Zionist, ‘a Ben Gvir supporter’ is how a regular adversary described me. Although I have no time for the racist Ben Gvir and the highly compromised Prime Minister Netanyahu, my Zionism is more fanatical than it ever was. Bear in mind that I live in the diaspora, ‘Galut Anglia’ somebody called it, and never considered making aliyah until antisemitism took hold of my preferred political party, Labour. By then it was too late. I was already old and the generations of my family will not tear up their deep and tangled roots in this country.

As Jonathan Freedland pointed out in today’s Guardian, and as President Biden adumbrated in a televised conversation with Netanyahu, rage at the atrocities carried out by Hamas can cloud our judgment, as rage at 9/11 clouded the judgment of the Bush administration.

As I type this, a Jewish caller on Radio4’s ‘Any Answers’ is stating that he’s horrified by the actions of Hamas but condemns Israel which he thinks is going too far. He throws in his complaints about the occupation because, if you’re identifying as Jewish on public broadcasting, you don’t want to appear to support the settlements in the disputed territories. It may be easier for non Jewish people to condemn Hamas without adding the qualifying ‘but’.

When Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, there was fury from the eight thousand evicted Israelis living in the Gaza strip and those who supported them, while progressives like myself thought Israel would win international approval and goodwill from the Palestinians taking over in Gaza. Public perception seems to regard Israel as still occupying Gaza, despite the trauma of Ariel Sharon’s policy of withdrawal. Demographically, the continued Israeli settlement of Gaza would have been as much a tinder box as the disengagement which led to the advent of Hamas, ruling Gaza since the last election there in 2006, seventeen years ago.

The callers on Radio 4 Any Answers want Israel to cease bombardment of Gaza. My Jewish friends also want this de-escalation and I want it too but meanwhile all but two hostages remain in captivity in Gaza and while they are in the forefront of minds in Israel, that is not the case on broadcast news in the UK.

I asked some of my friends ‘What did you think Israel should do after the massacre? Should they just sit on their hands and do nothing?’ Of course they said no. Nobody except the most extreme anti Zionists suggested that Israel should do nothing. Mr Corbyn thought a withdrawal from the disputed territories was the answer. Is he confident that Israelis would be safe within their own borders, not vulnerable to incursions from those who want Israel destroyed, from Syria and Lebanon in the north as well as Gaza in the south and the West Bank to the east? Does he mind if Israelis are not safe, which is the preference of his cohort Chris Williamson?

Another caller on Any Answers asserted ‘The Jews are not squeaky clean with regard to terrorism,’ and spoke of the Stern Gang, resorting to violent means to end the British presence in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

‘The Jews are not squeaky clean’ is a gateway drug. No nation is squeaky clean but when someone phones in to British Broadcasting to say ‘The Jews are not squeaky clean’, my heart cleaves to the one country where we are not the outsider.

עם ישראל חי

Victor Meldrewism is real, I believe; one does become grumpier with age. There is a selective misanthropy and some degree of Luddism. In my own case, I cannot bear parking apps, which seem to be in a state of constant flux, a different app every time I park my car.

Humility – the desire to learn, to be taught by wiser people – gives way in age to a kind of arrogance: one no longer submits readily to being taught.

For fifty years, I have been involved in a Reform Synagogue congregation and, for most of those years, I was grateful for that circumstance, arising almost randomly it seemed due to the absence of my in-laws’ ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate).They left Austria after the Anschluss and married on the fly in Paris, before my father-in-law, being an enemy national, was sent to a detention camp and my mother-in-law sailed to New York to join her siblings who were already finding refuge there.

The United Synagogue would not perform the marriage unless we produced ketubot for both sets of parents, so we were married under the auspices of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, in the cathedral-like West London Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, relying on the signed say so of friends of my in-laws who had witnessed their wedding, conducted by a rabbi in Paris.

Our marriage was not forever, but my membership of the Movement for Reform Judaism, as it is now called, is likely to be for ever, as there is a place for my burial next to my late second husband, in a Reform cemetery.

The feminism of Reform Judaism chimed with my beliefs and one year, on Yom Kippur, I put on a tallit, following the example of a handful of brave women in the community. I did a master’s degree at the UK Reform seminary, which trains rabbis, teachers and others and took exquisite pleasure in the library there. It was the 1990s and the library must be much changed by now, digitised in all the ways a library can be. In the synagogue, I was sometimes a shaliach tzibbur, leading a service or reading from a Torah scroll or producing a d’var Torah on the weekly parashah. I went to a conference of The Half Empty Bookcase, a feminist movement whose name alluded to a lacuna: the Jewish books not written by women across the centuries.

I was glad not to be one of the women of the more traditional United Synagogue, who sat up in a balcony or behind a mechitzah so as not to divert male worshippers from the business of prayer. They chattered and wore hats, I believed. I wore a kippah, like the men and, by this time, like many of the women in my community. Not all Reform congregations were so progressive and, when I realized that a woman in a tallit was an unusual sight in other Reform synagogues, I refrained from wearing mine if I was visiting there.

New prayer books appeared over the years with amended translations of the liturgy. The word Sovereign was preferred to King and the gender-specific term Lord no longer translated the tetragrammaton, yod hé vav hé. God was not called He or She but, ingeniously, You. The language was sensitively chosen so that it would not jar too much, it was hoped, on less progressive ears.

There is one bit of translation which has brought out my inner Victor Meldrew since it appeared in 2008, which is fifteen years ago now. The Hebrew in the Sim Shalom prayer of the Amidah is:

וטוב בעיניך לברך את עמך ישראל ברב עז ובשלום

And in Your eyes, it is good to bless Your people Israel with great strength and peace.

In point of fact, the 2008 translation is:

And in your eyes it is good to bless Your people Israel with the strength to make peace.

Forms of Prayer 2008

We are no longer requesting the gift of peace for ourselves but a peace which we initiate; which we make possible and palatable for a hypothetical enemy. We, the people Israel have all the agency in this set up and the enemy – not really hypothetical, sorry to say – has none, at least none that we or our God can affect.

Be that as it may, it is a good thing, for sure, to have the strength to make peace, especially from a position of strength.

We saw the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and a swing to the political right in Israel in the years which followed. In 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ascended the Temple Mount and the Second Intifada followed with bloodshed on both sides. Subsequently, Netanyahu was the dominant force in the Knesset while the parliamentary left withered away. Since the last election of 2022, he appears to be dominated himself by the right-wingers whose cooperation made possible his return to power after the interregnum of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

In May 2018, the notorious Hamas Kaddish took place in Westminster outside the Houses of Parliament. Kaddish is the prayer for the dead, which, line for line, bears a resemblance to the Christian Pater Noster prayer. A few dozen progressive Jews prayed for the Gazan fatalities, some of whom were believed to be Hamas operatives. The Times of Israel reported the following:

“When Palestinians stand resolute on the Gazan border [for] their freedom and their right to return, they are not committing acts of terrorism, they are performing a mitzvah,” one of the speakers at the Kaddish for Gaza event said.

Times of Israel 17 May 2018

There was some backlash against this prayer service for the fallen of Gaza. The fact that a Hebrew prayer was spoken for Hamas struck many as inappropriate and one can hardly believe Hamas was grateful for the fraternal thought. Personally, I thought it was understandable that one might want to pray for a fallen enemy – especially if one did not regard them as an enemy – but I saw no reason to do this in Parliament Square, an unusual venue for a minyan, which could only have been chosen to enhance the publicity of the event.

After the Hamas Kaddish, representatives of Reform and Liberal Judaism distanced their denominations from the event.

However, there has also been criticism of the abuse the Kaddish attendees had subsequently received.

…Movement workers of LJY-Netzer, the youth movement of the Liberal synagogue, were present at the Kaddish recital, while RSY-Netzer, the youth movement of Reform Judaism, publicised the event on social media.

In a statement on Tuesday, Reform Judaism said: “When RSY-Netzer discovered that most of those killed in Gaza were claimed as Hamas operatives, they acknowledged that had they known, they would not have shared this [event] on Facebook.”

Jewish Chronicle 1 June 2018

The episode of the Hamas kaddish affected some congregants’ perception of the Reform and Liberal movements, some of whose rabbis and youth leaders had participated in it, although without the explicit approval of the MRJ and LJ leadership.

The Demokratiya movment which defends the status of the Supreme Court vis-a-vis the Knesset has such resonance in UK progressive Judaism that we are encouraged to join demos in the UK against visiting members of Netanyahu’s government. A yored, that is to say an Israeli émigré, came to my synagogue to talk about activism against the dangers imposed on Israeli democracy by the right wing policies, in which the Supreme Court representing the force of law would have no control over the enactments of the Knesset. He painted a depressing picture of an uncertain future. There was no one present to offer a contrasting view. He had greater knowledge of the personalities, the legislature and the unwritten constitution. Perhaps those who thought the government reforms were not so inimical to democracy simply stayed away.

At our shabbat morning services, we still say the prayer for the State of Israel, as well as the prayer for the monarch, now King Charles, and for the UK government. We ask for leaders to have wisdom and understanding, a prayer to which the congregation can readily say amen.

Last month, four hundred Jewish academics from Israel and the diaspora signed a letter titled ‘The Elephant in the Room’ which names Israel as an apartheid regime.

American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid. As Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it. 

The Elephant in the Room 6 August 2023

There are more than four hundred signatories, name after distinguished name. Among them are a few Reform and Liberal rabbis from the United Kingdom. As with the Hamas Kaddish, there is some backlash against them within progressive Jewish communities. According to the letter, ‘the elephant in the room’ is Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, including the Israeli presence in the disputed territories.

As I see it, with antisemitism on the rise again, when even liberal Zionists like myself are called ‘apartheid lovers’ as a matter of course on social media, signing such a document helps neither Jews nor Palestinians. One can agree to disagree. However, I am conscious that progressive Judaism, the only kind to which I have belonged, admits hostility to Israel as never before. Is it on the fringes of the congregations or in the mainstream? What will become of our kehilahs? When we say ‘Torah will come out of Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem,’ are we supposed to mean something else? When we say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ are we supposed to mean for another people, not ourselves?

Addendum

The number of signatories has grown to over two thousand. There are indeed a lot of people, academics and rabbis, who have chosen to sign this letter abjuring Israel in its present form. There are also many more who have not. We may be few, fourteen million in the world, but two thousand, however influential, are not the majority.