Last week, I got skunk sprayed outside the entrance to King’s College London. I was standing, as I have done more than half a dozen times in the last 16 months, in the middle of a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
The only difference this time was that I had decided to take the chance of engaging with the protestors openly and in good faith, telling them I was writing for the Jewish Chronicle – taking the risk, I thought, that not unintelligent students at a prestigious university might be inclined to return the favour.
I wasn’t doing anything to antagonise the crowd before being blindsided from behind. I was just watching as keffiyeh-clad orators shrieked through a megaphone, accusing Israel, my country of birth, of being guilty of carrying out genocide with intent. Before I clocked what had happened a few seconds later, the perpetrator had run away. I’m absolutely fine, by the way.
Not long before, I had listened to an organiser of the protest – whose eye-rolling lasted so long after I told them I was from the JC, I thought they might be having an aneurysm – explain to me that Gazans “can’t be blamed” for October 7 because the coastal enclave before the war was akin to “a concentration camp”.
Looking as I do, not identifiably Jewish, with long hair, and, if not anti-capitalist, then, at least, passably socialist, I like to think that I blend into these anti-Israel crowds to a degree. I volunteer to attend and report on them because I quite like to be where the action is, and to observe them and their participants with a masochistic fascination.
Even if I do not disclose the paper I write for, being there just to report on the imagery I see and the speeches I hear, to be in the midst of such a mob without an intifada placard or joining in on the chants is enough to be treated with distrust, enmity and abuse.
I have become recognisable – whether by face or by publication – to at least one of the pro-Palestine volunteers, a man who attends every march, commanding an army of grunts in hi-vis, who seem to be at his beck and call.
He has now, on multiple occasions, after spotting me in the crowd or standing off to the side, walked straight up to me and snapped my picture. He then proceeds, I’m sure, to circulate that photo to the volunteer group chat because, thereafter, I’m treated as suspect by them all.
An underling is often assigned to follow me closely wherever I go during the rally. They don’t respond if I try to talk to them, but they will record me if I try to record others and will use their body or flags to obstruct my view.
Once, a particularly venomous man, whose entire identity was conveyed via the many pins on his jacket lapel, shouted at me: “Are you a f***ing Zio?”, while trying to goad those in his proximity to band together against me.
Another time, when I politely declined to assist in holding a giant banner that was being unfurled next to me, a posse of girls relentlessly demanded to know who I was and why I was there. When I provided an answer that they deemed insufficient – that I was a free citizen in a public space – they pointed me out to their male counterparts.
I’ve overheard remarks between two men as they objected to a Jewish speaker at a rally, rolled out on stage, as they are, as a credibility prop, who was explaining that in Judaism, all life was sacred. “That’s not true. They don’t really believe that,” one said. “Their book says they can do whatever they want.”
But returning as I did last week to the JC offices after getting sprayed, smelling like rotting cheese and other smells I’ll do you the favour of not expanding on, I was quickly surrounded by a phalanx of concerned Jewish mothers. Such is the other, more agreeable, side to being a reporter at the JC.
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