Snapshot. I am at Labour Party conference on 9 October 2023. I check X to catch up on the latest political news, but every post is about what has happened in Israel two days previously. I try to scroll past the gruesome images, but I’m not fast enough. I see a video of a young woman with her hands tied being strong-armed into the back of a vehicle. Her tracksuit bottoms are stained with something dark. It takes a second to realise what’s happening. I am hit by a wave of nausea so intense that, when I open my eyes, I find myself on the floor of the conference centre.
That was the weekend things shifted. I have spent my life never thinking too hard about being Jewish, about anti-Semitism, about Israel and Palestine – beyond the fact that it is one of the thorniest geopolitical quagmires on the planet. That weekend, around 1,200 Israelis are killed and 251 are taken hostage by terrorists. On family WhatsApp groups and Jewish forums, shock and horror are laced with a grim resolve. Pick a side. If you don’t, it will be picked for you. Everyone knows the response from the Israeli government will be severe, but before it even starts – while news of the full extent of the massacre is still coming in – pro-Palestinian activists in London organise a demonstration against Israel. In the following weeks and months, the protests continue; the image of paragliders, used by Hamas to storm the Nova music festival a few miles away from Gaza, becomes a symbol of resistance.
Quickly, the distinction between “Israel” and “the Jews” starts to blur. Synagogues are vandalised, Jewish businesses targeted, Jewish schools increase their security. A London council announces it is cancelling its Chanukah celebrations to avoid “inflaming tensions”. What does lighting candles have to do with Gaza? Posters of the hostages are torn down in cities across the West, no doubt by people who believe they are waging a moral crusade. To be unsettled by this is to stand with the Israeli government. There is nothing in between.
Snapshot. I have had to log off X for good. It just isn’t worth the anti-Semitic abuse. I’m used to robust pushback, but this is different. Now it’s not my politics I’m being attacked for. I don’t write about Israel; I don’t defend Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet I am accused of harbouring genocidal hatred, of having the blood of Palestinian children on my hands. I receive threats, references to gas chambers, accompanied by photos I can’t unsee, of decapitated bodies and dying children. I find myself described in terms I can barely comprehend. Disgusting hasbara propagandist. Repulsive Hitlerite. Zionist supremacist c**t.
The news coming out of Gaza is horrific. What begins as a targeted operation to wipe out Hamas becomes something else, an impossible mission to eliminate all threat, no matter the human cost. I listen as news reports document the slaughter, staggered by the numbers, sickened by the killing, but noticing too how the cause of this conflict is mentioned less and less often. A narrative builds on the left that the response of the Israel Defence Forces somehow excuses the initial massacre. The right takes up the Israeli cause, with a crusade against anti-Semitism that feels more like an excuse to attack Muslims than an effort to protect Jews. I don’t want to be spoken for by people whose illiberalism on immigration and multiculturalism I find not just unsettling but actively hostile. But the situation in Gaza is so bleak, no one else is speaking up for us. Pick a side.
Snapshot. I am in Berlin, standing on the platform from which my great-grandmother was deported to a concentration camp in 1942, where she was murdered. Her children escaped to British-occupied Palestine, the only place that would take them. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t exist. My great-uncle was 15 when they sent him, on his own, across the sea. In today’s discourse, he would be branded a colonist, a settler, a white-supremist land-grabber. I wonder about the people demanding that Israel cedes the region in its entirety to the Palestinians, that Israelis “go home”. What home do they think Israelis have? How do they think they came to be there in the first place?
Back in the UK, revulsion at the mass loss of human life in Gaza consumes me. The liberal, progressive Israel where my schoolfriends and family worked on kibbutzim is gone. Something darker has replaced it, a country hardened by the knowledge that the rest of the world despises its existence. The images from Gaza are unbearable. Emaciated children. Bodies in rubble. There is no justification, as there was no justification for 7 October. And yet, over the past two years many have decided that that massacre was justified, if only in retrospect. No one remembers Naama Levy, the teenager in bloodstained sweatpants. I hear again and again that the Israelis – the Jews – had it coming. Knowing allusions to Jewish influence, Jewish power. Stereotypes of Jewish cruelty. On 2 October, as Jews are observing Yom Kippur, a car and stabbing attack outside a synagogue in north Manchester leaves at least two people dead and three others in serious condition; the police treat it as a terrorism attack. Bubbling to the surface, a level of anti-Semitism I didn’t realise was there.
Where did it come from? The actions of a country 3,000 miles away of which I am not a citizen have left me feeling unwelcome in the place I was born. Pick a side. The isolating irony is that I can’t. Two years ago, I was blissfully ambivalent about the need for a Jewish state, a haven of last resort for a diaspora persecuted through the centuries. Now that I’ve seen how a significant portion of the country I think of as home really feels about the Jews, it seems more necessary than ever, even as that haven descends into darkness.
[Further reading: The fantasy of Trump’s “eternal peace”]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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