Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

Like most people in this country, the United Kingdom, I watch television and I watch films. I marvel at the ability of actors to convey, with a blink of the eye or a single word, an entire narrative of inner life. I used to think such skills must run on a motor of wisdom and intelligence, but then I heard Vanessa Redgrave ranting at the 1978 Academy Awards about ‘Zionist hoodlums’ and thought she had performed better speeches when they were penned by more profound authors than herself.

Now that it is almost mandatory for actors to express themselves forcibly against Zionists, there are further disappointments, most notably seeing the sublime Ralph Fiennes and Benedict Cumberbatch add their names to a letter signed by many of their colleagues, expressing their opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. I can hardly blame them. They have watched and heard BBC and Sky News, informing them that Israel lures Gazan innocents with promises of food and safety to gather them together and fire on them. The broadcasters know this, or think they know it, or decide to say it, because Hamas – the Gazan Health Authority, as they like to be called – has told them so.

National treasures and less cherished public personalities find their voices against Israel, in the case of Piers Morgan to shout ‘Bullshit’ at a lawyer, Natasha Hausdorff whom he had invited on to his show, ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored.’ So many times did he stop her answering questions by bellowing ‘Bullshit’ that it seemed to be he who was doing the censoring. When viewers expressed surprise at his adamantine refusal to let his guest finish a sentence, he replied that Israel had gone too far, see above, and threw in a few more ‘bullshits’ on his X account.

Today, I find that Dawn French – unlike Piers Morgan, an actual National Treasure – has made a hideously hurtful video in which she mocks those who refer to 7 October 2023 as the reason Israel went to war. Grimacing and deploying a whiny infantile voice, she says ‘Yes but they did a bad thing to us,’ and then, by way of counterpoint, utters a deep and resonant ‘No!’ Again putting on the baby voice, she says something about history, which I suppose is meant to be us Jews talking about persecutions in our history and again, the emphatic ‘No!’ I think I understand what she wants to say. The predicament of the Gazans is so catastrophic that no rationale of the war or of the longer conflict can justify what is happening now. That is how Dawn, presumably, wants us to interpret her comic video. The faces and the silly voices she puts on to represent Israeli and Jewish perspectives – they are badly judged. Or are they? Will she find, like the band Kneecap, that the more seriously you oppose Israel, the better the audience likes it?

Yesterday, a neighbour joined me for coffee. She is a nice lady even older than me but equally as vigorous. She spoke about a nasty landlord who owned her first marital home: ‘A Jewish man,’ she said, ‘a big fat Jewish man so of course he…’ I went temporarily deaf at that point so didn’t hear her account of his machinations. We were in my flat with mezuzot on all the doorposts, a menorah on the cabinet and a Star of David visible round my neck. How could she not know? Is it possible that she did know but still thought her words would be acceptable, that it was common knowledge that Jews did this or that and I could hardly be offended? Within seconds I realized I would not say ‘Do you know that I’m Jewish?’ It would be too awkward, too much like bad manners. Our conversation continued smoothly and amicably. I thought of Kim Philby, always having to guard his reactions, and of the spy I most admire, Eli Cohen who posed as Kamel Amin Thabet among the upper echelons of the Syrian Ba’ath Party.

A spy is like an actor. The raised eyebrows, the eye rolls, the half smile can only appear in character. My neighbour’s remark was the kind of relatively mild, commonplace antisemitism which one heard occasionally before ‘anti Zionism’ became de rigueur for aspirational entertainers, academics and Members of Parliament. Now one expects to be called ‘baby killer’ every day, not by our neighbours I hope but by the online activists who have sight of our posts against antisemitism.

Why do I say ‘one’ and ‘our’ instead of ‘I’ and ‘mine’? It is because I have seen it happens to all of us. On Wednesday, Lord Ian Austin was abused and jostled by pro Palestinian demonstrators outside Parliament because he said, ‘Free the hostages.’ I can imagine Dawn French repeating ‘Free the hostages’ in the mocking, baby voice she used in her video.

Really, it is a miracle that anyone, public figure, online activist, teacher, doctor, journalist, clergy or politician dares to speak out against the Zionist-exclusionary mania for the Palestinian cause.

But we have always relied on miracles.