No, the UK will not abandon British Jews

This is a better country than we imagine

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I wrote a piece for the Jewish Chronicle in response to the panic the Hamas attack unleashed. Jewish commentators looked at what in effect were pro-Hamas demonstrations and despaired. Jews were back where they were in the 1940s. Nobody cared about them.

It may be excusable in the circumstances, but to my mind this is hyperbolic. One of the good sides to my country is that racist political parties fail. The foul whiff of antisemitism that hung over the British Labour party helped hasten its catastrophic defeat in 2019. For all its faults the Conservatives are not an Islamophobic party in the sense that Marine le Pen’s National rally most certainly is.

Here is how I tried to explain the situation to a largely Jewish readership.

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What did #bekind activists think “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” meant? That they were chanting for the creation of a multicultural democracy? And what did the post-colonial academics who praised the Palestinian “armed struggle” think that struggle consisted of? Romantic heroes in the Che Guevara mould, their keffiyehs streaming like banners in the wind, battling occupying forces?

Now they have the answers, and that knowledge will transform left-wing politics.
A new generation of activists is learning what their predecessors discovered: they must either accept that “From the river to the sea” means Hamas murdering every Jew it can find between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, or get out.

They must excuse an “armed struggle” that necessitates executing teenagers at music festivals, abducting grandmas, and murdering babies, or face the scorn of their contemporaries.

I understand the fears of JC readers, whose children’s schools have closed and whose synagogues are under guard. I share their contempt for supposed liberals who avert their eyes from the demonstrable fact that Hamas is an Islamo-fascist movement.