Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

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.

Through much of August, the present month, a neonazi whom I’ve assumed to be one person has been a feature of my daily experience on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Excuse me if I don’t screenshot their work for you to see. Their posts are mainly cartoons of the ‘happy merchant’ a cartoon figure on social media representing Jews according to Nazi iconography: a bearded man wearing a kippah, always rubbing his hands while wearing a cunning yet fearful expression. As with the illustrations of Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany and its forerunners elsewhere in Europe and America, the Jewish character is always shown engaged in some act of deception or exploitation. These cartoons, along with idealized photos of Hitler, pictures of gas canisters and references to what he calls the ‘Shoax’ – elision of Shoah and hoax, obviously – appear regularly in my notifications and those of other Jewish people active on X as we must now call Twitter.

It has become a grotesque game in which I call for the neonazi account to be reported; it gets reported; after a day or several days, it gets locked or suspended by Twitter Support; within a few hours it reappears with a new user name, sometimes just a minimally tweaked version of the previous name. For their user name, they opt usually for a letter of the alphabet followed by a string of digits. Being created anew so to speak every day, they have zero followers, sometimes acquiring one or two followers during the ephemeral Twitter life of each of their accounts. Clearly, they are present not to win friends and influence people but to show individual Jews, eg myself, that they can express open and violent racism and neither I not Twitter can stop them doing so. I have likened their tweets to me as the jump scare moment in horror films: they appear when I think they have gone.

Of course I no longer think they are gone. I know they will be back every day.

When Twitter locks an account, the tweets remain visible, unless the person complies with Twitter requirements by deleting the offensive posts. An account may be locked and kept on the back burner, so to speak. If suspension occurs, the account will be gone, except that, in the present case, they have a new one ready to go, with a new user name. As far as I understand it, they would need to create a new email address for each new account. As for IP numbers by which a user theoretically might be identified, there are ways of getting round this which I can’t get my head round.

I imagine that it should not be beyond the wit of Twitter or X to have a system less hospitable to aggressive neonazis and racists. I am always hoping that someone might work out how Twitter could manage this and that Twitter/X itself would be willing to invest in a support system which would act more stringently against hate speech. Some say it is in the interests of social media to promote adversarial content. I am inclined to think it would just be too difficult and time consuming for them to attempt to contain it.

Otherwise I shall have to look at Julius Streicher type cartoons and fan pics of Hitler whenever I click on my notifications or alternatively, to Jexit at last from the platform.

Post script

Since I wrote the piece above, the person has been suspended and returned many times. I say ‘the person’ because of the modus operandi, the linked Twitter handles, adjusted by a sequential letter or a change of digits, but of course it may be several persons, unconnected by anything other than their steadfast Hitlerphilia. The person who tweeted to me ‘Don’t forget to die Kike,’ did not go against Twitter’s safety rules I was informed and yet, minutes later, I was pleased to see the account has been suspended. Minutes after that, the Hitlerphile returned with an adjustment to their user name, to assure me that there is no seeing them off of the Twitter platform.

They have left their calling card again. They must consider it a win that they can carry on tweeting to Jews, with their Holocaust denial and Holocaust threats.

One year later, August 2024, they tweet to me as follows:

To another Jewish woman, they send these messages:

Are they a danger to their community in Colorado? I don’t know. I don’t know who they are.

Walking the mile to the local M&S, I had an annoying earworm of ‘Second Hand Rose,’ as sung by Barbra Streisand channeling Fanny Brice:

Everyone knows I’m just
Second hand Rose
From Second Avenue

I could not imagine why this song was so persistent in my head and, only on the return, as I approached my front door, did I recall that I had received this tweet, in regard to Israel uncovering arms caches in Jenin and killing ten young Palestinian men in gunfights.

This is not unusual, and even the intensifying ‘Everyone knows’ is not unusual, but I do tend to hover doubtfully over this assertion of universal knowledge, which I believe occurs when the speaker wants to amass notional support for their personal point of view. I would be inclined to say that everyone knows a triangle has three sides, a tautological truth, but one might find some rogue individual who does not know the meaning of triangle, or reasons that its meaning is other than a three sided, two dimensional shape. And ‘Everyone knows’ is often used of non-tautological statements.

If someone argued ‘Everyone knows that Boris Johnson is a liar,’ they might be ascribing universal knowledge on the basis of the findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee against Johnson, in tandem with a popular perception. ‘Everyone knows that Corbyn is a terrorist sympathizer’ could be said by someone who is is so sure this is self-evident that they think there can be no disagreement on the matter.

But we know that there is always disagreement, especially about political judgments.

It is many years since I first read Descartes and was convinced by him that the beginning of certain knowledge is Cogito ergo sum; Sum res cogitans, ‘I think therefore I am; I am a thinking thing.’ He did not generalize this so far as to pluralize it into ‘We think therefore we are,’ which was beyond his direct experience, although Descartes did untangle himself from solipsism by reasoning the reality of a benevolent Creator.

Everyone knows solipsism is false – that I am not the only sentient being – or maybe not everyone. I am inclined to suppose that ‘Everyone knows’ is psychological rather than epistemological – not a view about knowledge so much as a need to identify with a group, the larger the better. In a political statement, one may want to marshall a hypothetical crowd, marching in step behind the speaker.

Shelley’s ‘We are many, they are few,’ was adapted as a tagline to suggest multitudes of Labour supporters during election campaigns resulting, as it happened, in Conservative governments. Those who believed the literal truth of the tagline claimed that the elections were rigged, similarly to Donald Trump’s judgment on losing a Presidential election to Joe Biden.

How many are ‘the Many’? Are they outnumbered by ‘the Few’?

‘Everyone knows’ may mean ‘everyone I know’. In the General Election campaign of 2015, I began to think that Labour would see off the Lib-Con Coalition and that Ed Miliband would be Prime Minister. This was my hope, but my growing confidence in the outcome was informed by the fact that I didn’t know anyone who admitted to voting Conservative, in real life or in social media circles. The Lib-Dems support was scattered and depleted. Everyone I knew wanted Ed for PM.

Everyone knows it didn’t happen. I put the words ‘Everyone knows’ into Twitter search and see it is widely employed on a variety of subjects. It signifies ‘I know and most people agree with me’ or ‘This information is available to the majority of people.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 1

Did Jane Austen mean that it was universally acknowledged or was she speaking as Mrs Bennet, for whom this was the guiding principle during the course of Pride and Prejudice? I think she was introducing us to Mrs Bennet’s world, where wealthy bachelors signified the chance of advantageous marriages for her five daughters.

I knew someone who favoured the first person plural when recounting any personal anecdote from the past. He was neither monarch nor Pope, and I thought the reasoning was that he liked to present himself as being a member of a group, justified by consensus.

There is indeed such a thing as consensus, although it falls short of unanimity. When I was a child, the consensus was belief in God, admiring Winston Churchill and standing up for the National Anthem. These now seem more particular than consensual.

The biblical psalms are mostly written in the first person, the psalmist alone with his thoughts and with God. Even kingship does not encroach on David’s solitude and, on the cross, Jesus invokes the loneliness of King David in Psalm 22: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’

The desire to identify as a group was noted by Martin Heidegger who, in Sein und Seit coined the expression ‘Das Man’ – usually translated as ‘The They’. The individual is tempted to flee from his solitary condition and become one among others, as in ‘…they say’ – an undefined plurality, not bounded by finitude and whose mortality is nothing other than the mortality of the species.

‘Everyone knows’ is too all-encompassing for my taste although there are certainly verified facts widely known, eg the approximately spherical shape of the planet Earth. Nevertheless Flat Earthers still exist. One might adopt Nigel Molesworth’s phraseology in his accounts of life at Saint Custard’s School.

The earth is round, as any fule kno.

The current situation regarding the Corbynist groups on Facebook from which I have not been expelled:

Understandably, their wrath is turned against the Conservative Party, expressed predominantly through memes, but if any comrade should call for a General Election, the replies come thick and fast, asserting that Starmer’s Labour is worse than the Conservatives. Sir Keir is spoken of as being affiliated to the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and as a ‘puppet’ of the State of Israel. There are several memes which communicate the association of Starmer and the PLP with Israel, usually displaying the donations they have received from British Jewish supporters. The only way to assuage the anger of these comrades is to post a photo of Jeremy Corbyn, either en famille as a benevolent husband and father, or in a photoshop, where the former leader is gussied up as a lion, a superhero or a boxing champion.

There was a time when nearly every post in these groups concerned Israel or some kind of Jewish malfeasance, but I am glad to say, this seems to have abated. Offensive comments about Israel are usually in connection with Israel’s supposed influence over Keir Starmer. Obviously, if Margaret Hodge’s name is in the news, there is a great outpouring of disgust as Dame Margaret was always a favourite topic, producing some of the longest threads, with hundreds of replies (whereas a post about Afghanistan might get no replies, except for the brief assertion that Israel was worse).

Groups which define themselves by opposition to Israel and Jewish community organizations in the UK progress along a slightly different track. In this sense, JVL bears some resemblance to Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies and its sister group, Friends of the Middle East Against Israel. In these groups, negative reportage about Israel is meat and drink and, with some very right wing members in the current Israeli government, they have a wealth of material. There is a preference for drawing on reports from Jewish authors who are either reasonably critical of Israel or unambiguously hostile.

JVL naturally have great animus towards UK Jewish organizations who regard them as a sham group set up to defend antisemitism on the left, and many of their posts defend individuals or groups who have been perceived as antisemitic. Recently they strongly defended Roger Waters after his controversially politicized concerts and, only yesterday, attacked the Campaign Against Antisemitism who successfully dissuaded some venues from showing the film called Oh Jeremy Corbyn – the Big Lie. Today, they take issue with the EHRC report of three years ago, for faulting Ken Livingstone.

The result of this monomania (excuse the word – I am quite monomaniacal myself) is that comments on the JVL page very often dwell on the perceived duplicity and dictatorial nature of Jewish organizations in the UK, including the Jewish press. I long ago gave up expecting that the JVL administrators would remonstrate with their supporters whose enthusiasm became a bit too Sturmabteilung but this does not happen. Sometimes a person from outside the group takes issue with an error or a classical antisemitic trope but in the milieu of such groups, any outsider is always the Few and soon dismissed as a ‘hasbara troll’.

The group called PAIS, Palestinian and Irish Solidarity, where much happiness was expressed whenever Israelis were killed, went from public to private on Facebook. I tried to get back in, but they did not accept my application. I was not using my own name but, had somehow allowed suspicion to fall on my alias.

Engaging verbally in any of these groups is not a viable option. If you intend to look at them, stay shtumm, shtumm wie a shteyn.

Gifs and memes are very much part of online altercations, the more bitter the disagreement, the more insouciant the gif. Typically a gif shows a good looking person, often a celebrity, behind a brief quotation from one of their performances. Sometimes they merely shrug, wink or laugh. They may be intended as a projection of the person who posts the gif. Some gifs are amusing but others are triumphalist. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, there was a gif which displayed a winning boxer, fist raised to show ascendancy, Corbyn’s head photoshopped on the body. This was deployed whenever Labour gained a point in the polls but, as far as I know, they have not made a similar gif for Keir Starmer.

Some memes perform the same work as gifs, for example, the image below, from an account who tweets disobligingly about Jews, essaying an appearance of enjoyment. The meme depicts an attractive woman, partying, while the superimposed words intend to justify the account’s negative statements about Jewish people and Israel.

Another meme shows a confident looking man with the appearance of a 1950s model advertising shaving cream and the words, ‘Imagine if you will a group so disgusting, they have to make laws making it illegal to hate them.’ I have seen this innumerable times from hardcore antisemites. I say hardcore but perhaps it is the meme itself which testifies to them being hardcore.

In antisemitic groups online, some members participate with nothing but memes, even posting the same meme every day. There are many ready-made memes available for antisemitic uses: groups of people in or close to government with the Star of David superimposed on each of them, to denote powerful Jewish influence and, from Holocaust deniers, images of Anne Frank or the entrance to Auschwitz, inscribed with a Shoah denying message.

I’m not altogether averse to using gifs on Twitter and have often posted an image of a sea lion if I believe someone is trying to waste my time with questions, the answers to which they will always reject. I have also used Claude Rains as Captain Renault saying ‘I’m shocked!’ and Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, saying ‘…they pull me back in.’

The word gif, I learn, stands for Graphics Interchange Format and was coined in the 1980s. The coinage of the word meme is attributed to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, writing about cultural imitation, the spreading of an idea by mimesis. I was fond of the Doge memes which abounded some years ago, depicting a Shiba Inu expressing thoughts by means of limited literacy, in brightly coloured comic sans font.

Certain phrases are copied like memes and become ubiquitous in confrontational language. The screenwriter Lee Kern referred to the ubiquity of ‘Rent-free in your head,’ as a riposte to someone making a deleterious comment about a public figure. ‘Toys out of pram’ and ‘Spitting out your dummy’ have been similarly overworked.

There is no harm essentially in the shorthand communication of gifs and memes, the pictogrammar of our age, except when used to convey a thought which would appear intolerable if written down in words, or to confuse the torpid censors of social media platforms.

No doubt I will see many more before the day ends, some friendly, some not.

Just when I think I’m out…they pull me back in.

I got into a spot of bother on Twitter – nothing new there; it happens every day. What made this different is that it was a subject in which I had never invested much interest: the recently deceased Rolf Harris.

I replied to a minor celebrity I hadn’t heard of and my reply got viewed by more people than usual as he has a large following. He had tweeted that he was glad Rolf Harris had died – fair enough, I thought – and added that he hoped Harris suffered pain and anguish at the end of his life. I replied that I thought this wish was rather sadistic: an act of folly on my part as I am now being called ‘imbecile,’ ‘crone’ and ‘nonce’ by a whole new set of Twitter accounts.

‘Would you not want him to suffer if you (or someone close to you) was his victim?’ I am asked. I expect I would. This is why the victims of an accused criminal do not sit on the bench or on the jury.

One gentleman tells me that he would gladly watch paedophiles burn and I wonder, are there any othe people he would want burned? How about those who annoy him on Twitter?

I do understand that people hate those who cause suffering. I do too. I hate numerous individuals, sorry to say, not that I know any of them personally: they have public voices which they use to spread hatred and, the more effective they are, the more I dislike them. But of course I am perceived as spreading hatred, on the grounds of my Zionism, often informed by some Tweeter Furioso that I have a racist antipathy to Palestinians or worse, that I am a killer of Palestinian children. This is how Twitter works: hyperbole, rage, incomprehension. What is the good of it, I often wonder.

‘I said paedophiles not people, learn to read,’ is the brusque reply of an interlocutor this afternoon.

The fact is, it’s unpleasant to be abused, even for an opinion one does not hold strongly. I never watched Animal Hospital or much else in the way of Rolf Harris entertainment. I may have seen him paint, asking his audience, ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ as I, when painting, often ask this question.

Some years ago, I tweeted something sympathetic about Kevin Spacey when he fell from grace but I deleted it because of the volume of rancour which came my way, sometimes from reasonable people. Another time, I got into trouble for sending an amicable tweet to someone who happened to be a friend of Amber Heard. I had known nothing about the ex wife of Johnny Depp or the court case which came to dominate the news in the following weeks. Protesting my neutrality or, still worse, ignorance, about conjugal matters chez the Depps did not excuse me.

‘What kind of person are you?’ asked a pro Johnny partisan. It was a rhetorical question. No answer I could give would have cut any ice.

The royal wars of attrition between the Waleses and Sussexes continue from year to year but I have the sense not to express an opinion about them. One can almost imagine a civil war caused by online disputes concerning celebrities.

‘To him Pudel,’ cry the royalists to their cavalier poodle in a cartoon from the English Civil War while the Parliamentarians urge ‘Bite him Pepper,’ to their roundhead dog.

Perhaps we should be grateful for online wars, if they keep people off of the battlefield.

Those who want to see painful punishments, would they really watch them with enjoyment, as one imagines the crowds jostling for the best view of a public execution? Or are they simply making a virtue of their righteous indignation?

Someone else tells me that I’m the troll which is not unreasonable as I got myself into this argument and should have seen how it would develop. Less reasonable is their ‘concern’ that an opinion in favour of leniency is some kind of deviation or even an endorsement of child abuse.

Who knows if this spat will be over in a few hours or drag on for days? Next time, I won’t express a controversial view unless it’s a matter of significance to me but, after all, it is of some significance that we should talk with moderation about the fate of our enemies, whether public or personal.

Finally, I just got this. It’s a point of view.

It’s standard on discursive social media to be contemptuous of religious belief and I’ve been told, ‘It doesn’t matter what sky fairy you believe in; it doesn’t give you the right to do x, y or z.’ When mention of the ‘sky fairy’ comes my way, the antagonist tends to be referring to the God of Judaism, who has seventy-two names, none of which is ‘sky fairy’.

The number seventy-two has special but disputed significance in Islam also: the reward of seventy-two virgins for righteous men in Paradise, a concept sometimes mocked by unbelievers.

Seventy-two is the number of putative translators of the Hebrew bible into the Greek Septuagint, commissioned by Ptolemy II of Egypt in the third century BCE. The number, being divisible by twelve, allows for equal representation from each of the tribes of Israel. According to The Letter of Aristeas, cited by Josephus, the translators arrived independently at word for word identical translations, a miracle which conferred authority on the Septuagint.

Miracles no longer impress non-believers and, when one reads of the apostasy with the golden calf, it seems that miracles did not even make a lasting impression on those who witnessed them, during the Exodus from Egypt.

The belittling of religion does not always come from confirmed atheists. I have recently had sightings online of anti Jewish posts expressing an archaic Christian view, calling Jews ‘Christ killers’ and ‘the Devil’s spawn’. Someone replied that Pope Benedict XVI repudiated the concept of Jewish guilt for deicide. They received a surprisingly sectarian response asserting that Pope Benedict had no authority and was presently in hell.

The Coronation looms of King Charles III, an Anglican Christian who has expressed determination to be the defender of the diverse faiths of the British Isles.

It is our duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for Faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals.

King Charles, September 2022

Ten years earlier, in 2012, Queen Elizabeth addressed a gathering at Lambeth Palace, saying that Anglicanism ‘has a duty to protect the free practice of all other faiths in this country’.

It was not inevitable that a monarch would take this enlightened view, which brought the UK into the twenty-first century with the toleration of diversity as an ideal, incorporated into the status quo. For centuries, people were executed by the State for religious differences and, in parts of the world, are still condemned as heretics against the prevailing secularity or religion. The particularity and exclusivity of each religion appalls the others, who find themselves written off as diabolical, unsaved or unchosen.

A midrash in the Babylonian Talmud tells that Moses saw God adding tagim – a calligraphic flourish used by Torah scribes – to letters of scripture.

When Moses ascended on High, he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah.

Menachot 29b

Anthropomorphisms occur frequently in midrash and regularly even in Tanakh. In this instance, God is engaged in the meticulous work of a scribe, writing in the Hebrew language. It is said, also in the Talmud Bavli, that God puts on tefilin, like an orthodox Jewish man.

Rabbi Avin bar Rav Adda said that Rabbi Yitzḥak said: From where is it derived that the Holy One, Blessed be He, wears phylacteries? As it is stated: “The Lord has sworn by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength” (Isaiah 62:8). Since it is customary to swear upon holy objects, it is understood that His right hand and the arm of His strength are the holy objects upon which God swore.

Berakhot 6a

Imitatio Dei, the imitation of God, is a precept in both Christianity and Judaism. The Sermon on the Mount includes the words:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Matthew 5:48

and from Saint Luke:

Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

Luke 6:36

The imitation of God tends to involve postulating something about God which is often imitatio hominum. In the second paragraph of the daily Hebrew prayer, the Amidah, we say of God:

You support the falling and heal the sick. You free prisoners and keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.

Seder Ha T’filot, Reform Judaism

This can work as a to do list to inspire ethical behaviour, but it is behaviour we are fortunate enough to witness, among other people.

Consensuses – of religious authorities or of a crowd – can determine the nature of belief and the language of prayer but still each person has a lone voice. Particularism can have more appeal than universalism because the person at prayer sometimes wants to be alone with God, for God to hear their voice and attend to their particular needs.

This is seen in the Psalms where the first person singular predominates, in I – Thou discourse, the authorship of which is attributed to King David and, in the later psalms, the Levites of the Second Temple.

The Hebrew hymn Adon Olam, which is often the concluding song of a service, begins by citing the ineffable and infinite nature of the Master of the Universe but pivots from transcendence to immanence in the penultimate verse:

This is my God, who saves my life,

The Rock I grasp in deep despair,

The flag I wave, the place I hide,

Who shares my cup, the day I call.

Seder HaT’filot, Reform Judasim

I am struck by the intimacy of the Almighty sharing my cup, drinking from the same cup as any of us, even when the brew is bitter, which is when we need God most.

I avoided saying ‘Him’ in the previous sentence, to get out of capitalizing the word or ascribing gender.

Tomorrow the coronation takes place and I am looking forward to seeing the participation of various faith leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others. It is an important development, to value the way faiths other than our own bring the faithful into a relationship with heaven and to value our own, where the situating of our lives has placed us.

Arbitrarily, I called this post ‘Seventy-two’ but alas, that it not my age. At the time of writing, I am seventy-three and not that for very much longer.

I had a couple of run-ins with neonazis on Twitter. One of them got his account closed down; the rest continue to post their anti Jewish, anti black, anti LGBT opinions. Some are Holocaust deniers; others celebrate the gas chambers and hope to see us Jews exterminated. One would think that Twitter would get the lot of them off of their platform but that isn’t how it works out.

When I see these keyboard warriors of the far, far right, I can hardly imagine that anyone who wasn’t of their persuasion would strike me with quite so much horror. Yet, when I turn from them to the assailants of the left, the thrust of their attack, while different, is not experienced as more tolerable.

In the intersection of Ramadan and Passover, Israel’s Iron Dome is deployed again against rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza. Mr Corbyn does one of his anti Israel tweets, as familiar to his supporters as ‘The Little Red Hen’ to an infant who joins in with the words.

Videos are posted on Twitter showing riotous young men setting off fireworks in the Al Aqsa Mosque. Israeli police dragged them out, an action reported as ‘beating peaceful worshipers’.

Does the antagonistic left feel more menacing than the homicidal, racist neonazis? They seldom claim an intention to kill us but the reverse: stating that we, being Zionists, are the killers. Those who call us nazis – are they more reachable, more amenable  to reason, than those who proudly declare themselves as neonazis and Hitler fan accounts?

The danger of the antisemitic left and right intensifies when they encroach upon the centre, gaining influence by repetition, familiarizing their audience with the names they call us, for example ‘apartheid lovers’.

Occasionally, one is tempted to reply to abusers of the left but seldom to those on the right. Replying to Twitter trolls is a performance art. The right-wingers convict themselves with their own words and find support only from like minded racists. The left use more judicious phrases.

Today, some prominent activists against antisemitism are themselves being called antisemites by Corbynist Twitter accounts,  due to criticism, overt or implied, of a prominent and much admired Jewish Corbynist. Subjectively, such tweets are as shocking to read as the far right obscenities, in the sense that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is not less dangerous than a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Mercifully, it isn’t feasible to remember and keep track of all hostile accounts.

Today is Good Friday and the second day of Passover; Ramadan is also underway. Feelings run high, in the real world and in the online world. It was TS Eliot who said ‘April is the cruelest month’ and I don’t think he was wrong but being the same Eliot whose poetry included overt, classic antisemitism, I wouldn’t consider him reliable.

The toxicity of diverse Corbynist groups on Facebook, in terms of antisemitism and hate speech, is fluid rather than static, depending often on personnel: the moderators and the frequent contributors. A group called Supporting Active Socialism displayed many antisemitic posts by a contributor who wrote as John Bernard or John Spannyard Indaworks. When Keir Starmer became Labour leader, the founder and moderator of the group, a Mr Smith, stated that the forum would now support the new leader rather than Jeremy Corbyn. The ambience changed and Mr Indaworks was no longer seen in that group. I had some exchanges with Mr Smith about what counted as antisemitism, which he seemed reasonably keen to avoid, although he must have had some suspicions of me as a Zionist infiltrator.

Many of the Corbynist groups focus on the iniquities of the Conservative and Labour Parties,with particular animus against Keir Starmer. In the posts and threads about Sir Keir, the accusation of Zionism is usually raised, as well as speculation about the receipt of shekels. The individuals posting these comments do so again and again, revealing a level of obsession which may not be shared by other members of the group. In a group of 20,000, fewer than a hundred are likely ever to contribute to the discussion and perhaps half a dozen do so several times a day.

The private group ‘Just Socialism the Corbyn Way’ currently features daily, sometimes hourly, posts from Yunus Elias whose memes are usually taken from Middle Eastern presses and blogs hostile to Israel. Mr Elias’s name has been attached to overt Holocaust denial but this seems to predate his activism on left wing forums.

Another private group, ‘We Support Jeremy Corbyn,’ had moderators who were unusually alert to antisemitic comments which they often confronted, even banning at least one person when he responded with verbal aggression. Nevertheless, they were not able to contain all the antisemitism of their members. It was a pillar on which support for Mr Corbyn rested.

In some groups, ‘Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn’ for example, rage and sentimental devotion jostle for prominence. On some days, posts about evils of the UK, the USA and Israel predominate while a photo of Mr Corbyn produces a hundred or more declarations of love and loyalty, generally couched in repetitive terms such as ‘The greatest Prime Minister we never had,’ ‘They fear him because he cannot be bought,’ and ‘Ohhh Jeremy Corbyn!’ As I never tire of pointing out, parallels are often made with Corbyn and the life of Jesus, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Mr Corbyn’s initials are regarded as an uncanny indication of godliness although nobody has suggested that Jesus’s middle name was Bernard. Instead of the annunciation,we have Mrs Corbyn Senior’s presence at Cable Street in 1936.

One of the most offensively antisemitic groups, ‘PAIS: Palestinian and Irish Solidarity’ went from public to private after being reported frequently for hate speech. They posted a meme showing rats with an apology that ‘Zionist trolls’ were present. On going private, they clamped down on membership and I was not able to gain access. PAIS, founded by an activist in County Down, was not particularly in thrall to Jeremy Corbyn but their antisemitism was virulent, including some Holocaust denial and many expressions of joy when Israelis, civilian or otherwise, were killed.

‘Truthers Against Antisemitism’ has been run for several years by Marino Robles, Rita Allison and Mahmoud Tashvishi, all of whom are active in various other Corbynist groups on Facebook. Originally, their header photo displayed Mr Corbyn pointing with a baleful finger but there was some Facebook intervention and the group closed, reappearing after a few months with a new header, a mock up of the Israeli flag displaying the words ‘Israel has no history, only a criminal record.’ Marino Robles and Rita Allison are both cited in the ‘Leaked Report’ of April 2020, as being expelled from Labour for antisemitism while Jennie Formby was General Secretary.

The JVL group on Facebook posts almost exclusively about Israel or the raw deal JVL members receive from Keir Starmer’s Labour. For any given post, the supporters’ comments tend to be markedly and crassly anti Jewish, in excess of the original post. It is a mystery that the JVL moderators allow some of the material. I speculate they may understand that people with such opinions are a load bearing wall of their own organization, just as they are for Mr Corbyn.

Participants in Facebook political groups are likely to be older than those who post on TikTok and Instagram and this demographic is evident in the Corbyn groups, where participants declare themselves very often to be septuagenarians or octogenarians. One can infer this too from their phraseology, their photos and even their names.

The more static these groups, the more closed they are to differences of opinion but I have seen changes which have turned the ambience around, generally when a Labour supporting group has ceased to campaign for Corbyn and thrown in their lot with Keir Starmer’s Labour. From his first day as Labour leader, Starmer took a stand against antisemitism and many Corbyn loyalists left the party or were expelled from it.

Tony Benn used to say ‘Look at policies not personalities,’ and Corbyn has sometimes quoted this but politicians gain and lose power on the basis of personalities and this is even true in Facebook groups, in microcosm.

The screen shots below are representative of many more in similar vein.