I have long looked to Rich as a voice of sanity amid the hysterics we sometimes whip ourselves up into. The Manchester-born academic, who started working at the CST more than 30 years ago when it was still in its infancy, and has seen off threats from the far right and a time when both Hamas and Hezbollah were legal here, offers no solace. As all the CST figures show: this higher level of antisemitism is our new normal and now we are going to have to get used to it.
“Politically, as a community, we have got very used to the idea that basically we have always had the sympathy of governments, whoever was in power, and we never really had much we were unhappy about, even in terms of Israel,” he says. “But now we are in a different situation.”
Working at the CST with people across government and the police, he sees there is a real drive to protect Jews. But also there is a disconnect with what is putting us in danger.
“We do have a government that is genuinely doing an awful lot to try and protect Jewish life,” he insists. “They are feeling their way into thinking they need to do something to stop the flow of extremism. But they don’t really know how to tackle it and they’re a bit nervous about it. So you get things like the Mann review into antisemitism in the NHS, you’ve got the Bell review into antisemitism in schools. You’ve got a whole lot of these policy things that aren’t about physical protection. They are about ideas and they need to be properly implemented.
“And then you have the whole foreign policy thing; the government’s relationship with Israel.
“And that’s not just about what they are doing but the way they are presenting it, the way its articulated and prioritised. For a lot of Jewish people that is really disconcerting.”
He continues, “I think the government feel they can keep these in two separate baskets and that’s naive.
“For most Jewish people, you can’t really separate Israel’s well-being for your own sense of safety and calmness.
“I think that’s because its blindingly obviously that some of this is being led by an extreme hatred of Israel and not just opposition to its government. There are a lot of people who don’t like this Israeli government in the Jewish community.
“But many of us can see that this antisemitism is being driven by the idea that Israel is a uniquely cruel, genocidal, child-killing entity that shouldn’t exist and that Zionism is basically Nazism. And the more fuel you throw on the fire, the more antisemitism rises.”
And while he understands criticism of the settler violence in the West Bank, we both saw in the standing ovation Miliband got as something deeply entrenched.
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“That emotional surge in the audience would not be there for anything else, would it? He could give a speech about the terrible things Russia’s done in Ukraine and it would get a lot of applause but the emotion wouldn’t be there. It gets people in the gut. And it’s hard to come up with solutions for this because ultimately we are dealing with something not rational.”
He gives a grim grin: “As Charlotte Church says: it’s a spiritual movement.”
We talk about how the two most high-profile Jewish politicians in the land, Zack Polanski and Ed Miliband, have been accused of pandering to an anti-Israel vote.
“I think for a lot of Jewish people, we have spent the last three years walking around with a target on our back and a bright, bright spotlight shining on our heads and for a lot of people the focus on Gaza and the West Bank is making that spotlight even brighter,” he says. “I don’t think it’s helpful when the foreign secretary introduced his sanctions policy with the line ‘As a proud Jew’. I think centring his Jewish identity, claiming it as his rationale, shines the spotlight even more on every other Jew.
“And I think what most people in the Jewish community want, more than anything else, is for that spotlight to be turned off and for us to be left in peace for a while. It is has been so intense and relentless.”
Rich doesn’t give many answers to how we fight this because there are few answers other than “be brave, be strong, be resilient”. And to learn how to do that, to learn what we are fighting, read his book.
From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism after October 7, by Dave Rich is published by Routledge. Dave Rich will be in conversation with Abigail Radnor, in Manchester, on October 25 when the book will be launched: eventbrite.co.uk
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