Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

Every eight weeks, give or take, I gild my hair, presumed white, with L’Oreal Golden Blonde, which does the trick, such as it is. Nothing will ever make me look young again, or even middle-aged, but I don’t want to resemble my near contemporaries, the white haired, puffa-jacketed women who assemble in public places to sing a capella home made songs about the evils of Israeli produce Zionism.

One imagines they might have devoted themselves to the Women’s Institute before the awakening of their anti Zionist militancy after October 7 2023 but now they have moved on from ‘jam and Jerusalem’ to quinoa and Al Quds.

Wearing their puffa jackets like a uniform, knitted hats pulled down until they touch the rim of the spectacles, seven such ladies gathered on the steps of a public building in Sheffield to sing the following lyrics:

‘Don’t conflate Zionism with Judaism

They’re two very different things

Very different from each other

Conflating them is in itself antisemitic.’

As for the tune, I cannot begin to convey the lame, atonal pulse, and I speak, regrettably, as someone who has never been able to carry a recognizaable melody.

In the centre of the group is a woman who bears a resemblance to Joan Newell in Fawlty Towers, without the grooming perhaps, but with a comparable self-confident certitude. My eyes return to this woman every time I watch the video, which I must admit to doing more than twice. I try to imagine what possesses them to put on this display in a public place and feel it is something they have been told which chimes with a set of earlier, well-established beliefs.

If I have been alive about the same time as them, I’ve also been Jewish for as long as they’ve been alive and I don’t think they know much about Zionism, Judasim or antisemitism – probably less than they know about musical composition or the lyrical arts.

Another video appeared of elderly ladies with some apparent overlap of personnel, singing at the check out of a Waitrose in Sheffield:

‘Don’t buy dates, don’t buy avocados

There’s a boycott going on;

You have the power each time you shop:

Israel’s apartheid has got to stop.’

This was an altogether jazzier melody, less offensive to the ear than ‘It’s antisemitic in itself to conflate Zionism with Judaism’ set to – for want of a better word – music.

Another old woman appeared on the horizon, refined and well-spoken, no puffa jacket and this time in Brighton. Interviewed by the more than heroic Heidi Bachram who asked why she thought Zionists were racists, the lady replied, her eyes looking above and beyond with concentration as she assembled her words: ‘Anybody who is trying to get rid of another race because they believe that race shouldn’t exist, are Zionists’ [sic].

I was reminded of a local CND meeting I attended when I was fifteen or sixteen. We were being coached in how to answer problematic questions if we were doing door to door canvasing, for example how to respond to the argument for nuclear deterrence. The answer – along the lines that deterrence having worked so far might cease to work and then what? – was illustrated by an example along the lines of ‘If I leave a milk bottle outside the door and there’s no thunderstorm, it doesn’t mean that there will never be a thunderstorm as long as a leave a milk bottle outside my door.’ We got tested afterwards on the answers and you could see people struggling to remember about the milk bottle. Similarly, I see this woman groping for the lesson she has been taught, getting it a little mangled perhaps because does anyone really think that all racists are Zionists? Have they forgotten the Ku Klux Klan who call us Zios and complain of ‘ZOG: the Zionist Occupied Government’?

This cheerful looking woman was filmed, again in Sheffield I believe, saying ‘Jews are the most hated people on Earth. Why? Because they are killers and psychopaths.’ Someone queries her statement and, nodding sagely, she adds ‘Ninety per cent,’ repeating these words for emphasis. One cannot doubt her enjoyment which she exudes with every word. Why would it make her happy to announce her belief that ninety per cent of Jews are killers and psychpaths? For most of my life that would have marked someone out as an unconscionable racist – and these women see themselves as utterly opposed to racism, not the proponents of it.

I know what it is to be a senior citizen, retired with a pension, having adult children and granchildren on the cusp of being adults. I know what it’s like to be an activist – on the left in my youth and against antisemitism in my old age. In common with these women is the knowledge that there are not so many years now ‘To see the cherry hung with snow,’ or to make one’s voice heard. And perhaps what one wants most is to leave not a photo or a video but a voice because a voice seems to live after death more than an image.

Whatever has caused this mania among middle-class, tolerably well-educated old ladies to make a noise against the people of Israel, I can only speculate. I can’t know. They think they are fighting an evil never seen before by humanity and that their work is noble. Even saying that they watch the BBC does not explain the whole phenomenon.