Archive for October 2024
Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want no police state.
One, two, three, four, something something something war.
The chants on marches and demonstrations are always pretty much the same – not the words, but the tune which passes from generation to generation. When young, a teenager, I chanted with the rest of them: ‘We don’t want a nuclear war,’ and all I can remember from the innumerable demos outside the US embassy in London is ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ One could also hear ‘Hey, hey, Ho Chi Minh, how many kids have you done in?’ but this would not have been far left orthodoxy.
I watch news footage of the ‘pro Palestinian’ marches. The marchers have a soft spot for the Houthis whose flag is emblazoned with the words, ‘Curse the Jews.’ One wonders how many Yiddisher people the Houthis encounter in present day Yemen. ‘Operation Magic Carpet’ rescued 49,000 Yemenite Jews from persecution in 1949 -1950 and most went to live in Israel.
The staple chants of the current marches are of course ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – a favourite as it marries a call for the genocide of Israeli Jews with plausible deniability – and ‘We don’t want no two state, we want 1948.’ In point of fact, the United Nations voted in favour of the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Israel and Jordan in November 1947 so one assumes the marchers really want to return to 1947 but the rhymes for seven are limited.
Such is the audio of the marches. Visually, there is the constant comparison of Jews with Nazis, an image of the Israeli flag with a swastika instead of a six pointed star or a drawing of Netanyahu feasting on children while blood drips from his mouth. You truly don’t have to like Netanyahu to see this as the objectionable antisemitic trope which it is.
JW3 is a Jewish Cultural Centre on Finchley Road, a large modern building opened in 2013, a project of the Clore Duffield Foundation. Classes are held there, films are shown, lectures and conferences take place. There is a cafe/restaurant. Last time I was there, I had a beer and a tuna sandwich, before entering an auditorium to hear four illustrious speakers discuss the reawakening of western antisemitism after 7 October.
The name JW3 is an allusion to the postcode, NW3 and the fact that it is a Jewish cultural centre.
Yesterday, the demonstrators came to JW3. The stood in front of the entrance, yelling ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.’ Some, who were over-excited, made grotesque, contemptuous gestures at people arriving for a conference. One elderly woman was seen crying as she struggled past them to get into the building; another had her hands over her ears. Ironically, the conference was put on by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper so critical of the the government that it is often cited on anti Israel social media. Among the speakers were Palestinians, including a former Member of the Knesset. Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, was also a speaker.
It made no difference to the demonstrators that the conference was substantially critical of Israel. Whatever the politics, JW3 is a Jewish centre and there were Israelis inside the building. We have seen similar demonstrations when Israelis, however left leaning, are invited to speak at UK universities. The presence of progressive Hen Mazzig at a London college provoked rage no less than events addressed by the undoubtedly right wing Israeli ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely.
Thanks to Alex Hearn for this video where the demonstrators screech ‘In our thousands, in our millions, We are all Palestinians’ while people run the gauntlet past them to enter the building.
‘Intifada, revolution,’ was also shouted but it is the second half of a couplet, usually, ‘We don’t want no Two State Solution, Intifada revolution.’
There are many snippets of film showing bestial abuse from the demonstrators but a feature present in all of them is the excitement of roaring in the street as if the volume could carry the day – and, in a close second place to the volume, the rhymes. Just south of Swiss Cottage, outside a centre for Jewish culture, discussion and learning, they shout ‘Yemen, Yemen make us proud; Turn another ship around.’ The shouting is climactic, accompanied by the bodily movements which accompany the production of maximum decibels.
The chanting drowns out reflection as the person loses themself in the crowd, like a Heideggerian Das Man who reassures himself by being one of a consensual many, freed from the burdens of individuality.
The video below was something I filmed outside Wood Green Library, earlier this year. It was not connected with the JW3 demo, but I noticed the intensity and the way the woman moved her body to help her produce the loudest possible shrieks as she cried ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud…’
George Orwell said that the point of the goosestep used by the armies of authoritarian regimes was to communicate, ‘We look absurd but you dare not laugh.’ So it is with the chanting.
The popularity of havoc
Posted on: October 14, 2024
In the years, the months, even the weeks after 9/11, I noticed how an anti-Americanism seemed to pervade popular consciousness, an opinion that they had it coming and that the villain of the piece was George W Bush. In a sense, 9/11 brought down Tony Blair who, until then, was not generally perceived as a lackey of the Washington administration. The global flare up of anti Jewish discourse and action since the massacres of 7 October has reminded me of this unexpected phenomenon, the lionisation of those who carry out political murder.
As if to compensate consciences for the cruelty of approving the murders, critics of the USA and of Israel express themselves in terms of compassion for the beleaguered people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. In the UK and the USA, many thousands took to the streets early in 2003, to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Since 7/10, there are huge marches every other Saturday across he cities of Europe, the UK and the USA, against Israel, often stridently supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
I do not recall Sadaam Hussein being admired, except by George Galloway; neither is the Ayatollah Khameini a role model for many, although there is certainly a degree of sympathy for the Islamic Republic of Iran in the anti Zionist clamour.
In the early 2000s, I worked in a bookshop which belonged to a well known chain of stores selling books, stationary and newspapers. By Christmas 2002, the shelves headed ‘Humour’ filled with new books satirizing the ‘special relationship’. One which I remember took the form of juvenile and misspelled letters purporting to be a correspondence between Bush and Blair, in which Tony was the acolyte of George, apparently a bigger, older boy.
Bush was known for his malapropisms and admitted ‘Sometimes I misspeak’. Small books of ‘Bushisms’ appeared, amusing verbal slip ups. ‘Misunderestimate’ was Bush’s own coinage, much mocked yet, compared to Donald Trump, Bush was indeed misunderestimated. Blair was less often the butt of jokes. His intellect and fluency meant he was portrayed by some as consciously evil, a Jaffar to Bush’s Sultan. His religiosity was held against him.
‘You don’t pray together?’ Paxman asked Blair, referring to the fact that Bush and Blair both identified as Christian believers, in the course of a hostile interview where Paxman emphasized the death of innocent civilians in Iraq. Blair, always a master of self control, was clearly irritated by the question, which he answered with a negative. What was behind the question? Was it that the western leaders used Christianity as a justification for wars against Muslim peoples; that they used it to indicate probity as a cover for warmongering; that they were crusaders? What put it into Paxman’s head to ask the question? It was likely already in popular discourse.
Any reproach against Blair and Bush has been magnified a thousandfold against Netanyahu since 7 October and he is often seen as encapsulating the people of Israel more than Bush was regarded as representing Americans, or Blair as representing British people. In the mix is the lightly somnolent virus of antisemitism, now fully awake and wanting breakfast. Opponents of Israel’s wars think they have not the slightest hostility to Jews but that Israel’s wars are monstrous and that Zionists the world over are the cause of all ills, even the vagaries of severe weather. The language born out of the Nuremberg trials, of war crimes and genocide, is applied to Israel so feverishly that, if one is not called a genocidal maniac, one feels the interlocutor is pulling their punches.
On the marches, they chant: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud; turn another ship around,’ ‘All Zionists are racists,’ ‘We don’t want no two state, we want 1948,’ ‘Khaybar,Khaybar ya Yahud,’ all chanted to – so to speak – the same tune.
Daily on X, formerly Twitter, I see people calling for the extermination of Jews while speaking compassionately of Palestinian suffering. The horror lies in the fact that they are not all the usual suspects, the neonazi right wing, but come also from the left and, still more disturbingly, the centre.
The question is this: if Israel had gone to war without the trigger of the 7 October pogroms, would the hatred be any greater? If America had made war on Iraq without the impetus of 9/11, would the vilification have been the same?
If Guy Fawkes had not been discovered in the cellars of Parliament and if King James and his government had been sent to kingdom come, would children still have said ‘Penny for the Guy’ and put Fawkes’s effigy on bonfires, almost to the present day?
A month after 9/11, I heard schoolboys chanting ‘Osama bin Laden’ on the streets of Edmonton in North London. They were expressing approval – of what? The glamour of terrorism? The win of wreaking havoc?
I could not say. I do not know.
Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus 