Jewish Voice for Labour was created at the Labour Conference of 2017, a revamp of the group Free Speech on Israel, but with the new and specific purpose of defending Jeremy Corbyn against charges of antisemitism. Ken Loach and Len McCluskey attended the inaugural meeting and Ken Loach was subsequently on a sticky wicket, being interviewed on Politics Live. Jo Coburn challenged him about some leaflets including Holocaust revisionist content handed out at Conference and Loach replied ‘I think history is for us all to discuss.’

Although JVL was boosted by non Jewish supporters such as Loach and McCluskey as well as Jeremy Corbyn and Chris Williamson, their Jewish membership was not at all dissimilar from the Free Speech on Israel membership. Interviewed by the BBC when the channel wanted to give a two-sided account of Labour’s antisemitism issues, the JVL leadership were often on the box.

It soon became apparent that they would defend anyone accused of antisemitism, for example Jackie Walker, Pete Willsman and Chris Williamson. Later on they expressed solidarity with Professor David Miller when he was sacked by Bristol University and with many more: any Labour, Trade Union or student officer who was considered antisemitic became a protegé of JVL (Shaima Dallali is a recent case in point). They blamed Zionists but, mistakenly, they considered non-Zionists, such as Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, to be a Zionist, because he acknowledged the problem of antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn. This applied tenfold to David Baddiel, particularly in the wake of his book ‘Jews don’t Count’.

The spécialité de la maison of Jewish Voice for Labour is their claim to be Jewish while espousing the cause of anyone hostile to Israel and maligning anyone who speaks out against antisemitism on the Left. In common with all antisemites of the far right and far left, they deny being against Jews and make a convincing case compared to some. They hold Passover seders themed around freedom, as Passover seders generally are, but one has to suppose without the words, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Indeed, it’s hard to imagine which parts of the Passover Haggadah they do find acceptable.

Vigorously, JVL opposed Labour’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

In March 2018, there was a demonstration in Parliament Square, called by Jewish community leaders, to protest against the antisemitic ethos which now pervaded the Labour Party.

JVL organized a counter-demonstration and were present on the fringes of the crowd, holding up placards to show their support for Jeremy Corbyn and their contempt for the protestors.

Antisemitism was hitting the headlines and, over a period of time Simon Schama, Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Howard Jacobson, former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, Deborah Lipstadt, John Le Carré, John Mann, Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Margaret Hodge, Ian Austin, Louise Ellman, Tom Watson, Tracy Ann Oberman, Rachel Riley, Eddie Marsan, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Maureen Lipman, Baroness Deech, Lord Triesman, Baron Mitchell and, just before the General election of 2019, Chief Rabbi Mirvis spoke out against the spectre haunting the Labour Party. All these and many more were denounced and reviled by Corbyn loyalists, JVL among them.

As soon as I began to watch the JVL group on Facebook, I saw that they had attracted many non-Jewish supporters whose names were familiar to me due to their activism on anti-Zionist social media.

This is the mission statement on JVL’s Facebook page.

Jewish Voice for Labour is a new organisation for members of the Party who believe that the Party must listen to a range of Jewish voices including those that support Palestinian rights and oppose witch hunts.

Who could object to listening to a range of Jewish voices? I have heard Jews arguing about Israel more times than I could possibly remember: about the borders, the wars, the way wars are prosecuted, about the Israeli right, the Israeli left and the religious parties which often hold sway when there is a hung parliament. I haven’t heard any of them express a wish for Israel to be destroyed. Given the broadest possible range of Jewish voices, that wish comes only from the outermost fringes.

Most problematic is a dynamic in their Facebook group, now with fourteen thousand followers, where JVL will post, usually twice or three times a day, an article or information which puts Israel or opponents of antisemitism in a bad light. The replies are always somewhat more extreme than the original posts, often including old tropes and conspiracy theories about Jews. It is at such times that I would expect the JVL administrators to intervene; to explain that being anti Israel need not involve anti Jewish prejudice.

They never do.

It occurred to me that they might be overly relaxed in their administrative role, perhaps not bothering to read many of the comments on their page.

Apparently this is not the case. Friends of mine who argued back had their comments deleted. Others were blocked. If someone pushed back against an allegation against Israel by providing an article or information inconsistent with the JVL assertion, it would rarely, if ever, be left in situ. The admins are stringent in removing comments which are not explicitly anti Israel or which support their adversaries: Keir Starmer and his supporters, David Baddiel – a non-Zionist whom they call a Zionist – and the personnel of Jewish communal organizations.

Such is their range of Jewish voices.

There are JVL members who have long had mutual bonds of friendship and affection with Jeremy Corbyn. Confident in his esteem, they cannot believe he ever entertains an antisemitic thought and they share his antipathy to Zionism, and to Israel, which is anathema to their diasporic vision. As their friend rose from backbench obscurity to national and possibly global celebrity, they too rose in public visibility. In this new limelight, anti Zionism became the unique selling point for JVL while, for Corbyn, it was a magnet to all kinds of enemies of Israel in larger numbers than before. I do not think JVL want to give up all this, even if it means making room in their bed for the people whose comments are shown in the screen shots below.

These are not in chronological order. Some relate to recent events, the Ukrainian war for example and others date back to previous years. The Forde Report has made its appearance, and is commented on. The JVL admins exhort their supporters to greater excesses, and even the comrade who calls Judaism ‘a violently xenophobic ideology’ encounters no word of dissent.

I

Tisha b’Av always appears to me as a blot of the landscape, the black fast, commemorating something remote, a cause relinquished by many. Why mourn for a Temple, the restoration of which would land us in as much trouble as the destruction of the first, in 587 BCE and the second in 70 CE?

As a fast, it is very different from the Day of Atonement.

On Yom Kippur, the community gathers. The scrolls and many of the congregants are dressed in white, we pray together, fast together and together we hear the tekiah gedolah, the long note of the ram’s horn, which signifies the day’s end. By contrast, on the fast of 9^th Av, a few diehards come together to sit on the floor and read the Book of Lamentations, then continue the fast in solitary through a dog day morning and afternoon until sunset at around 9pm.

There is an atmosphere before Tisha b’Av, and the name for it is Bein ha Metzarim, between the straits. Some people fast on 17 Tammuz, usually in July, commemorating the day when the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem. Three weeks later, the Temple fell, hence the fast of 9^th Av.  During the three week period, the orthodox will abstain from shaving, haircuts,  celebrations and listening to music. Marriages are not solemnized at this time, a rule which, generally speaking,  is not confined to orthodoxy.

During the three weeks of mourning, culminating in the twenty-five hour fast on Tisha b’Av, there are many sorrows to be remembered, besides the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I in July 1290 and the expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in August 1492 are said to have occurred on 9 Av, although a Hebrew calendar converter estimates these events as falling a few days short of or following the ninth.

During the more recent catastrophe of the Shoah, destruction and death were present on every day of the year, but certain events occurred on Tisha b’Av, the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto being one, while the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto in 1944 began a few days after the 9^th.

There is no baleful magic in the day, to make it a time of foreboding more than any other, but anniversaries are meaningful to us, not just the birthdays and silver weddings, but the anniversaries of the death of a loved one, the date of a battle, a book, a coronation, a discovery. Those who are bereaved often find that the birthday of the departed has particular poignancy in the first year after their death, or perhaps the first few years, or sometimes forever.

The randomness of time and chance are overlaid with meanings which come from personal and communal experience. This day for mourning the destruction of the Temple gathers to itself the threnody of our lives, a stockpiling of grief. Now we have Yom Hashoah and Holocaust Memorial Day to bear some of the weight of remembering the Holocaust. Yom Hashoah was established on its present date of 27 Nisan by David Ben Gurion’s government in 1959. Holocaust Memorial Day, launched in 2001, remembers the Shoah and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur.  The chosen date is the anniversary of the liberation of  Auschwitz by the Soviet Union in January 1945.

Tisha B’Av is our ancient day of mourning. It is mentioned in the Mishnah, tractate Taanit  (days of fasting).

When Av comes in, gladness must be diminished.

Taanit 4:6.

It is by no means singular to Judaism to put aside days in the calendar and special places for remembering sorrows ancient and modern. It is not even specific to religion.  Calendars can regulate grief,  provide a time for mourning and a time for comfort.

Tisha B’Av has its silver linings. The day ends and the fast ends;  we eat, drink and do what we want. On the following shabbat, a passage from the book of Isaiah is read in the synagogue:

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended.

It is called Shabbat Nachamu, the sabbath of comfort, from the first word of Isaiah 40, the set prophetic reading.

Every winter, I find out where Handel’s Messiah is being performed in London and buy a ticket. The beautiful opening aria after the overture is ‘Comfort ye,’ from the King James Version of Isaiah 40 and, when I hear it, I always think of Shabbat Nachamu.

Last Sunday, I received an email from Team Labour, in Jeremy Corbyn’s name, as follows:

The struggle for liberation of all people is never complete and must always be renewed. As a movement, we educate ourselves and each other to better stand in solidarity with and unite all those facing oppression and discrimination.

That’s why we are launching education materials for our members and supporters to help them confront bigotry, wherever it arises. Over the coming months, the party will produce educational materials on a number of specific forms of racism and bigotry. Our first materials are on antisemitism, recognising that anti-Jewish bigotry has reared its head in our movement.’

I was sceptical although the email looked quite praiseworthy. I read the educational materials and, without agreeing with every point, I thought that they were helpful, particularly this paragraph:

But opposition to the Israeli government must never use antisemitic ideas, such as attributing its injustices to Jewish identity, demanding that Jews in Britain or elsewhere answer for its conduct, or comparing Israel to the Nazis. Many Jews view calls for Israel to cease to exist as calls for expulsion or genocide. Arguing for one state with rights for all Israelis and Palestinians is not antisemitic, but calling for the removal of Jews from the region is. Anti-Zionism is not in itself antisemitic and some Jews are not Zionists. Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists. Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism is in itself racism.

If only these thoughts could be taken on board by Labour supporters, there would be hope  at least for a more peaceable time in the Labour movement.

Within a day or two, there was no missing the fact that Dame Margaret Hodge was once again a bête noire par excellence for many of Mr Corbyn’s supporters, inspired by an article in the Skwawkbox, headed thus:

HODGE SUBJECT OF FORMAL ANTISEMITISM COMPLAINT BY ORTHODOX JEWISH MEMBER

There had been a row, apparently between Dame Margaret and a Charedi man called Mr Stern, about the teaching of sex education, including LGBT topics, in schools. Mr Stern was firmly against this and, if I understand correctly, had penned complaints about Margaret Hodge and also The Jewish Chronicle. 

It was as if the ‘anti-Zionist’ Corbynists had found an ingenious way of turning around the promise of more stringent measures against antisemitism. They could accuse their Jewish adversaries of antisemitism and request their immediate expulsion from the Labour Party.  The narrative of JVL, for example is that all who accuse Labour of antisemitism do so in bad faith – the Livingstone Formulation, as coined by David Hirsh. *

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I’m aware that publications hostile to Israel have, for at least ten years, been publishing stories with the headline ‘Settler runs over Palestinian child.’ There are some variations. They may say ‘Jewish settler’ and occasionally the victim will be a woman but, several times a year, the headline will specify a child, boy or girl, age 5 or 8 or sometimes a teenager. Usually, the running over is described as deliberate and the consequence as fatal.

These stories then acquire a momentum of their own, appearing on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish social media. Reports of a road death in April will run for a couple of months before being replaced by a new story with the same headline but citing a different location in the disputed territories. The child may be a different gender from the previous victim and a year or two older or younger.

I became aware of the regularity of these reports by perusing online Corbyn-supporting forums. Once the report has been posted, members of the forum vie with each other in expressing the greatest possible outrage, which always involves imputing inhumanity to the Israeli settlers, Zionists and very often, Jews in general.

I googled on ‘Settler runs over Palestinian child,’ and copious items appeared, all originating from Middle Eastern sources and getting plentiful exposure on English-language forums. I selected one report for each year and made a collage of screen shots, shown below, which is how I usually display antisemitism on Corbynist forums. I then tweeted the image.

It wasn’t until today that I realized a tweet didn’t permit enough words for me to explain the significance of the collage. I deleted my tweet. I thought perhaps someone would take the reports at face value, and believe that settlers deliberately run over Palestinian children on at least a quarterly basis.

If we are not there, how can we know what’s happening? How can we know what isn’t happening? Nevertheless, for the members of, for example, ‘Truthers Against Zionists [sic] Lobbies,’ such reports confirm everything they already believe.

The report I saw yesterday was in fact on the Truthers Against Zionists Lobbies forum, alongside some gross examples of holocaust denial, so these are not people with any kind of credibility and the reports of regular infanticide by murderous drivers are extremely suspect.

A month later, there are new ‘Settler runs over child’ stories doing the rounds. Someone on  Twitter yesterday posted a photo of a child with fatal injuries, said to have been inflicted by a settler in a car. I also found an article debunking one of these accounts. Yet still they come.

I wrote this post a few years ago but obviously the reports continue. Here is a sample of the 2020 crop.

As a young married woman, I liked getting newspapers delivered, especially as I was at home with the baby for most of the day. I got the Guardian, the Radio Times, the Jewish Chronicle and the Observer. My parents used to get the Daily Herald, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Jewish Chronicle.

Later on, the Guardian’s animus towards Israel donned its high-visibility jacket and I switched first to the Independent, then The Times.

For a while in the 1990s, I stopped getting the Jewish Chronicle because it reported with depressing regularity on antisemitic incidents and the fervent anti-Zionism making an appearance in universities and trade unions.

I got a computer in about 1994, because I needed a word processor and Hebrew software (Dagesh. Anyone remember it?)  for my master’s thesis.

Newspapers were expensive and I gave up hard copies but I worked for WH Smith and saw all the newspapers at work. In the canteen on my lunchbreak, I’d spread them out, tabloids and broadsheets, and compare front pages. The tabloids had headlines about celebrities and royal personages and sometimes they had news about people whose names I didn’t recognize:  chauffeurs and butlers of the royals, footballers’ wives, celebrities’ other halves.

At some point there was the transition to getting news from online sources. I also began to use online dictionaries, English and other, rather than balancing a large tome on my knees. There was something called My Space which seemed to be hard work and Friends Reunited where people aired grievances about unkind teachers of years gone by.

Then there was Facebook, as we all know, and Twitter, recommended by Stephen Fry as being good fun, so I joined it in 2009.

I didn’t encounter the term MSM, meaning Mainstream Media until the resistible rise of Jeremy Corbyn, although the online alternative media appeared mostly before 2015. Some of these alternative sources of news saw the light of day in the period of the Conservative/LibDem Coalition and came into their own in the age of Corbynism.

Another Angry Voice was established in 2010 as an alternative to the mainstream press. Steve Walker’s The Skwawkbox first appeared in 2012  and Kerry-Anne Mendoza’s The Canary in 2015, with Evolve Politics created the same year. Aaron Bastani’s Novara Media goes back as far as 2011.

Meanwhile, some Corbynist ‘brocialists’ – the angry not-so-young men of the left – contribute regularly to the Guardian, Owen Jones foremost  among them, even though the consensus on Facebook Labour forums is that The Guardian is a Zionist rag.

The BBC is denounced daily by both right and left. At the present time, the Corbynist left are infuriated by BBC1’s Panorama, which showed John Ware’s film about interference in defence of alleged antisemites from the Labour leader’s office. Infuriated is an understatement. They are organizing against the BBC, John Ware and the whistleblowers who appeared in the programme. There are petitions on the go and a forum called The Prole Star has posted a request for Corbynist Jews to testify in an alternative film, defending Corbyn. It should not be difficult to find volunteers. Jewish Voice for Labour, Free Speech on Israel and Just Jews exist only to defend Corbyn from charges of antisemitism and to attack those who accuse him. There is a discernible overlap of members so it is possible that the total membership of all three groups does not exceed the membership of any one of them.

It seems that all sides have a beef with the BBC. My own is as follows. When Southern Israel comes under attack from Hamas rockets, I hear about it from Israelis, tweeting from their shelters. The BBC does not report it until Israel fires back, generally after a day or two of rocket fire from Gaza; then the BBC runs a headline along the lines of ‘Israel has attacked Gaza.’

There is such a stigma attached to tabloid newspapers that one is reluctant to cite them as a source for a story, yet it was the Daily Mail which did much of the legwork on the ‘Wreathgate’ story. The culpable history of the Mail is mentioned very often by Corbynists: the Mail’s support for fascism in the 1930s and, more recently, their absurd attack on Ralph Miliband as part of their offensive against Ed Miliband but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I’ve become accustomed to being asked ‘Did you read that in the Fail?’ (a derogatory nickname for The Mail) when I refer to Labour antisemitism, although only very rarely did I read it in The Mail.

I used to watch Channel 4 News regularly as I liked Cathy Newman and Krishnan Guru-Murthy, but was put off by seeing Jon Snow shouting ‘Fuck the Tories’ at the Glastonbury Festival of 2017, the year of Oh Jeremy Corbyn.

Speaking to HuffPost UK about the report, Jon Snow said in a statement: “After a day at Glastonbury, I can honestly say I have no recollection of what was chanted, sung or who I took over 1000 selfies with”. (from NME, 28 June 2017)

I admire hugely the well-informed, intelligent television journalists who are despised by Corbynists: Laura Kuenssberg, Andrew Neil, Jo Coburn, Emily Maitlis, Robert Peston, Andrew Marr, Emma Barnett.

I search out newspaper articles by Corbynsceptic journalists such as Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Raphael Behr, Jonathan Freedland, Jessica Elgot, Janice Turner, Nicole Lampert and many others.

I listen to radio or television news most of my waking hours now and, while I listen, I read news online. Twitter is very often the first source of breaking news.

I exercise self-discipline to turn away from news. There are books to be read, good television to watch, pictures to paint and, even more importantly, I have a family.

I tend to switch off news items about the suffering of children: items about illness, statelessness, child abuse, murder. One does not have to know about everything.

The most offensive thing said to me by hostile Twitterati is ‘child murderer.’ Anyone Jewish will be called this name, unless they denounce Israel. It can happen if one posts about antisemitism, even when the Israel-Palestinian conflict has not been mentioned. I get sent pictures of mortally injured children, accompanied by tweets, telling me that Israel has done it and often they add considerately that they hope I can sleep at night.

Antisemitism is not about what Jews want it to be about. It is the antisemites as always who choose the parameters and they have made it about Israel.

There is no getting away from the fact that the news makes me sad. My children and friends often say they wish I would look less and be less sad, but I don’t think it can be done.

It is Friday and the sun is in the west.

Shabbat shalom.

 

 

If someone calls me stupid or old or quips about the name Lazarus (a valued gift from my ex-husband), I can shrug it off.

If they use pejorative language from the modern lexicon for abusing Jews, I get angry.

The modern lexicon, as opposed to the traditional dictionary, includes ‘supporter of apartheid’ and ‘apologist for child murder’ which references their perception of Israel and attributes to me or like-minded people the features they believe they discern in the State of Israel.

There are at least two possible answers here. One is that I don’t control events in Israel. Another is that they have a false perception of it as uniquely racist and murderous. If I go with the first, I allow them to get away with the usual calumnies. If I go with the second, I allow them to set the parameters of the conversation as being about Israel.

When the suspension of Chris Williamson, MP for Derby North, was discussed on BBC Question time, a gentleman in the audience said:

The Jewish community is very vociferous and obviously they feel they’re being hurt but what’s happening with the Palestinians – the siege, the torture, the kidnappings? I’ve never heard a Jewish community complain about that.

Members of the panel responded to the attempted tainting of ‘the Jewish community,’ but not to the damaging hyperbole about Israel. I don’t blame them. It isn’t easy to extemporize a brief response to both points.

Tweets about the iniquity of Jews depress me. Before Corbyn, they tended to come from the far right; now from both right and left.

Tweets about the iniquity of Israel depress me and are harder to answer, as I am in what Judah Halevi called the edge of the west. (He meant Spain and I’m in London but the expression serves.) If they show an image of an injured child and claim that it illustrates Israeli cruelty, I can query the provenance of the photo, the context and even the authenticity but I can’t swear that it isn’t from Israel unless, as has occurred before, the soldiers are in Guatemalan uniform.

If someone tweets to me that I’ve judged them unfairly, that they didn’t mean what I thought, or understand the implications of their words, I try to listen and give them credit for their serious answer. Any transition from bitterness to civility is both valuable and rare.

I aroused ire by tweeting sympathetically about Kevin Spacey and was persuaded by the responses that I’d been wrong, but didn’t delete my tweet. I’ve tweeted my pro-Remain opinions and been rebuked by Brexiteers whose opinions I value. It doesn’t bother me.

I’ve been called an antisemite by antisemites. That does bother me, because I know it’s a ploy, which can confuse the innocent bystander reading the conversation. It is like a Monty Python sketch set in a psychiatrist’s room where two men wrangle over which one is the psychiatrist and which one the patient. Of course, both claim to be the psychiatrist.

I dislike formulations such as ‘weaponising antisemitism,’ ‘hasn’t an antisemitic bone in his body,’ ‘just because he supports the Palestinians.’ I dislike the term Khazar which is used by both far right and far left. Presumably someone in the world really is a Khazar, and good luck to them.

I don’t tolerate islamophobia from any side. The tweeter will pick out some disreputable deed and attribute it to all Muslims: racism’s modus operandi since time immemorial. They will quote the Qur’an to imply bigotry in Islam. The bible can likewise be quoted, to the apparent detriment of Judaism and Christianity. Orwell can be quoted to his disadvantage and TS Eliot more so; Dostoevsky and Dickens and – not that one cares – Hilaire Belloc.

Nobody likes being on the end of sarcasm but I do produce sarcastic tweets, probably daily. It’s something to bring up when the Selichot season gets underway.

Twitter can be our friend. We can discuss films, books, music, TV, sport, philosophy, languages, recipes, if we find an amenable account. I have made friends. Soup has changed hands and drinks have been consumed.

’The whole world is a very narrow bridge,’ as Nachman of Bratslav pointed out.

כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד.  והעיקר לא לפחד כלל.

The whole world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to have no fear at all.

If Rabbi Nachman had tweeted this, he would have garnered so many likes, but there still would have been somebody calling him a Khazar.

This is too long to tweet but perhaps too short to blog.

Scene: Sainsbury’s, Winchmore Hill

Gillian, standing by the newspaper rack, reaches up for the Jewish Chronicle on the top shelf. She usually reads it online but wants a hard copy of an article of particular interest. Noticing a headline about kashrut, she realizes that this is last Friday’s edition.

‘Not very good for animal rights, is it?’

Gillian turns to see a small, fifty-something woman, smiling with her teeth but not her eyes.

Gillian (face has frozen into G-d knows what expression): Why do you say that?

Woman: You know they cut their throats and hang them upside down?

Pinteresque pause

Woman: Like with halal.

Gillian: Would you want to prevent halal slaughter?

Woman: (no longer smiling) No…you can’t stop people doing what they want, can you?’

Gillian: No

Resume first person. I swept past her, without taking the Jewish Chronicle, walking quickly. I did not linger by the grapefruit to see if they had pink or only red and yellow; I felt for some reason a need to put distance between myself and that woman. In fact, I felt a wish to complete the shopping and leave the store, to go home.

Even in  the car, my foot went down harder than usual, bearing in mind that I’m a senior citizen who has only once been done for speeding.

On the way to Sainsbury’s, I’d been thinking about my cousin who, at the age of seventy-five, has decided to make  aliyah, ‘to live my remaining years in Israel,’ were his words.

When I reached for the Jewish Chronicle, the thought was in my subconscious that a stranger would comment, yet when I heard the woman speaking to me, I half expected her to say ‘Price of a kosher fowl is something shocking these days.’

But no. It was ‘They cut their throats and hang them upside down.’

Look. I eat meat once, maybe twice a year so I’m de facto vegetarian most of the time. When I do eat meat, it does indeed have the hechsher of the London Board for Shechita.

Maybe the woman was being friendly. If I’d reached for today’s Financial Times, would she have said ‘Private equity is going great guns today’? If it were the Radio Times, would she have commented ‘So Judi Dench is 84? Looks marvelous doesn’t she?’

I don’t know. I just know that if it had been the FT or Radio Times, it would have been a whole different scenario. I didn’t buy the JC today because I remembered that this week’s edition would be out tomorrow. Maybe I’ll buy it in Sainsbury’s in Winchmore Hill.  It seems to be a bit of an ice-breaker. Lol.

At the time of writing I am displeased but intrigued by the fact that someone on Twitter has created an unfriendly parody of me. The avatar is a cartoon of a thin faced blonde woman with enormous breasts radiating lasers. The tweets are sexualised with mildly pornographic imagery but, worse than this, they target other accounts which are friendly to me and which are active against online antisemitism.

This morning in my synagogue, my thoughts turned to the person – likely a woman – who runs the parody. I imagined myself reaching out to her via a tweet, along the lines of ‘I expect you’re motivated by loyalty to a friend who you think has been badly treated.’ The ‘friend’ in question is an equally aggressive account.

I then reflected further on the projected reaching out. It would be disloyal to my own friends who are also targeted by this account, which goes under the name of – I have to check – GillianRazorLaserBoobs. Furthermore it would be passive-aggressive virtue-signalling, which is not a good option.

For so long, the topics of this blog were biblical prophets, reflections on Kings Hezekiah and Josiah and three separate posts about the books of Enoch, categorized as Old Testament pseudepigrapha. It comes as a surprise to me, to find myself writing about a pop-up Twitter account called ‘Laser boobs’.  By contrast with my scribblings on Enoch, where there was not much likelihood that Enoch himself would be paying attention, these words may well be read by the author of ‘Laser Boobs’ who may even parody this very blog post in her ribald Twitter account; again so unlike Enoch.

Home from synagogue, I read her tweets of today and was struck again by the malice towards people I esteem, so any thoughts I had of reaching out dissolved in her steamy ill will.

Do I feel personally threatened? Not at all. Do I feel that the Laser Boobs account is threatening? Yes. I think her intention is to threaten and to intimidate.

There are problems arising from anonymity. I use my own name as, when I opened my Twitter account ten (is it really ten?) years ago, I expected to engage in conversations about Shakespeare, John Le Carré and the Pre-Raphaelites. If I were opening an account now, I would choose anonymity as a matter of security. However, anonymity causes speculation about true identity. There is guesswork and hubristic false identification. Gender is not revealed. The power of penetrating anonymity becomes an end in itself, in these Twitter wars of attrition.

Due to prolific reporting, the hostile account is likely, I hope, to be suspended by Twitter before long, but another will pop up, an ad hoc parody from the same stable of someone I know or of someone I don’t know.

Rarely, but sometimes, an intense argument on Twitter can be closed with civility. At such times, it seems to me, both parties want to be free, to walk away and resume their own affairs, put the kettle on, watch Line of Duty, compose an email about a council tax miscalculation, take the dog for a walk or maybe even – though less likely – phone a friend. Then one types the words ‘We aren’t going to agree on this.’ Occasionally one or other participant will say ‘Thanks for being civil.’ Once these words are exchanged, one feels a degree of goodwill towards the antagonist: gratitude that the altercation didn’t become worse and that they departed in peace. I have even had this resolution from time to time with people I considered antisemitic.

Yet still I don’t know, do we want our adversaries to go in peace, leaving us to pursue our work and our leisure, to give some attention to our families and our friends? One can be pacific or one can appease and there can be no doubt that Chamberlain gave appeasement a bad name.

One can hold out a conciliatory hand, but we only have two hands and I do not want to let go of the hands already holding mine.

 

June 2019

 

The name of a poor child killed this week is known to us here in the UK. She was Seba Abu Arar, a baby not yet two years. Some output from Palestine Islamic Jihad and Gaza News at first seemed to indicate that the death resulted from friendly fire, that a Hamas rocket, whose intended target was as many Israeli civilians as possible, exploded at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Here in the UK, suppporters of Mr Corbyn are dismissing this as Israeli propaganda. In the fog of war it may not be certain either way.

Supporters of Hamas in the UK will not doubt that it was an Israeli rocket and none more sure than Tommy Corbyn, son of the Labour leader. Such is his certainty that he has posted a picture of the dead child on Twitter and said that this is Israel’s doing. His timeline has been swamped with replies, some quoting sources from the PIJ and Gaza News to show that this was not, after all, Israel’s doing, but the argument can never end there. ‘These news sources are secret Israeli operations,  the hasbara machine’ explain those who want to stand up for Tommy.

So there is not much certainty. Meanwhile Tommy continues to fly his controversial tweet, although it has been reported in the news and criticized by many as a blood libel.

The nature of blood libels was always about usage, not criminal investigation. The purpose  was to disseminate an idea of Jews being other than human, diabolical, existing to do evil.

I’m sure Tommy would think his tweet is a long way away from blood libel. He would cite Jewish friends – because there must be a few young people in JVL or Jewdas who would be acceptable companions – who are as sure as he is that the reports of friendly fire can be discounted.

It is hard work insisting on a state of affairs of which one has no direct knowledge. Nevertheless Tommy had not taken down his tweet last time I looked, just before writing this post. I am not aware that he posts images of children killed in any other conflicts where, tragically, the numbers are so great that the names of victims never reach us. Without certainty, he accuses Israel and only Israel, a procedure which, it goes without saying, he will have learned from his father, the Leader of the Opposition.

In a still more recent tweet, the boy asks for contributions to a Palestinian  medical charity, using his forthcoming birthday as a fundraising opportunity. If the money he raises goes towards a new rocket launcher for Hamas, let us hope and pray that the rockets land in an empty field.

There are some who think Leon Uris punched above his literary weight with Exodus, his 1958 novel, recounting the journey to Mandate Palestine undertaken by a large group of Holocaust survivors.

The refugees sail to Haifa aboard a ship renamed Exodus and enter Israel illegally according to the terms of the British Mandate. Within a year, the United Nations vote for partition and the State of Israel is created. The book tells of the lives of the characters, in the ghettos and camps during the war, on the difficult voyage and after settlement in Israel. There is also a flashback story about two brothers who make their way from Tsarist Russia to Ottoman Palestine before World War One.

Otto Preminger made a film of Exodus in 1960. The book and film were enormously influential, depicting horrors of the Holocaust through the experiences of sympathetic characters, the significance of Israel as a place of refuge and the hostility of Israel’s neighbours to the Jewish State.

I just watched the film again, in connection with this blog post which has the working title ‘Flags’. I wanted to see if a certain scene, memorable since 1960, was still affecting, given that the film is imbued with some of the sentiment and stereotype of its time.

The scene is set in 1947, before the United Nations voted for partition of the territory.  The Haganah – Israel Defence Force – has organized the escape of 611 Jewish survivors of the Shoah, being held in a detention camp in British Cyprus. They have acquired a down at heel ship called the Olympia and brought the refugees aboard with a view to sailing to Palestine – and the name Palestine is used by all in the film to designate the homeland to which Jews and Arabs both lay claim. When the British blockade the harbour to prevent the ship from sailing, the Haganah and the refugees  aboard the Olympia/ Exodus commence a hunger strike.

The flag of the Star of David is raised and flutters from the flagpole, while a non-diegetic orchestra plays Hatikvah. Within the narrative of  survivors of genocide struggling to reach a place of greater safety which they can call home, it is as affecting now as it was then in 1960. The film goes on to depict both amity and violent hostility between Jews and Arabs in post war Mandate Palestine. It does not gloss over the violence of the Irgun against British army personnel, killed when the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel. Characters are depicted with broad brush strokes: the saintly, the heroic, the well-meaning, the stupid, the broken and the adamantine.

The script of Exodus was written by Dalton Trumbo, towards the end of his years on the  Hollywood blacklist. The film appeared the same year as Trumbo’s other great epic, Spartacus. Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas all played a part in restoring Dalton Trumbo’s reputation under his own name in the American film industry

I set out in this blog post to write about the emotive potency of flag flying. I was going to mention the famous photo at Iwo Jima and the triumphant fluttering of the Seven Samurai’s banner in Kurosawa’s film.

The Star Spangled Banner depicts love of the flag as love of country.

Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight

O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?

Any questions you might want to raise about the displacement of the indigenous population, the global role of the United States or the incumbent President are legitimate but the human response to a flag is under the jurisdiction of the heart.

The office of the Communist Refoundation Party in the Castello district of Venice displays the words 7 Martiri, referring to seven hostages killed by the German occupiers in 1944, as a reprisal for the death of a German soldier. The hammer and sickle is displayed to this day on the door of the building as well as on the red flag – the Soviet flag – which flies from a flag pole to the left of the entrance. Just a metre to the right is an altar, depicting the Sacred Heart.

The juxtaposition of Communist flag and Catholic altar interested me and I painted it.

Flag waving is not restricted to nationality, politics and ideology. A flag is often above eye level, causing the raising of the eyes. In the Passover song Adir Hu, God is likened to a flag or banner, ‘Dagul hu,’ meaning to say ‘He is exalted’. In the book of Numbers, each of the tribes has their own banner, their degel.

We know – at the very least, from films we have watched – that enemy flags strike fear and detestation. Thus it is with the swastika.

It was reported in The Times today that a Labour party candidate posted on social media that she wanted to vomit on seeing the Israeli flag.

Indeed, Labour is so partisan at the present time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that a mass of Palestinian flags was unfurled at the Labour Party Conference in 2018. Did those present feel the exaltation of looking upwards at a symbol of their ardent beliefs and identification? Or were they just experiencing jouissance in showing us Jews that our time in Labour was done, unless we renounce the Star of David, our chosen symbol since – and this is the terminus ante quem – an eleventh century manuscript of the Hebrew bible, known as the Leningrad Codex.

When I was born, here in London, my aunt in Australia sent over a tiny gold Star of David for me to wear in due course, as a necklace. I wore it often, including under the wedding canopy, but later it was lost; I do not know how.

I have not so far said a word about the Union Jack, which I like to see on display at the Last Night of the Proms, or the England flag which I find inspirational at the time of international football fixtures, or the European flag, which is visible every day outside Parliament as long as this Brexit crisis persists.

One may be roused by many flags, including those of other countries, especially when we want to show solidarity with them. The impact is always visual but there is often an aural accompaniment such as a national or political anthem, a band or an orchestra.

I have sometimes posted images of flags of other countries when they come under terrorist attack: France, Belgium and possibly more.

There must be a roaring trade in enemy flags in those countries where public flag burnings are customary. It does seem a pity to obtain flags with a view to igniting and trampling.

As a general but not invariable rule, it is better for multiple flags to fly alongside each other. That way we can look up at our civic buildings and see the precious symbols of our own and other communities, flying side by side.