My nephew got married yesterday. With the hindsight of last night’s Golders Green attack, it feels like a bittersweet occasion – although the simcha itself was, of course, entirely sweet.
But I know that the conversations I had yesterday were the same that the rest of us have every time we gather: is it still safe for us here?
It’s a damning commentary on where we now are as a nation that such a thought should even occur to us. But it’s occurring with ever greater frequency as antisemitism becomes increasingly normalised, Jew hate is increasingly tolerated and the politicians with the power to affect things content themselves with platitudes about antisemitism having no place on our streets, when the evidence is that it has a very welcome place on the streets – and some of those politicians are the worst facilitators of it.
We do not know the full details behind the attack on the Hatzola Northwest ambulances, parked outside a synagogue, but the Iranian-associated terror group Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya has already said it was behind the arson – the same organisation which claimed responsibility for similar attacks in Liege, Rotterdam and Amsterdam over the past fortnight.
Already the loons have started their conspiracy theories. One former British ambassador has written, “Could they make the false flag any more obvious?” and there have been any number of social media posts decrying the very existence of Hatzola, on the basis that it shows how Jews look after only themselves with our own fleet of ambulances. Like all antisemitic assertions, this demonstrates only the stupidity and malignity of those making it: Hatzola is run by Jewish volunteers and funded by the Jewish community, but is – as JC readers will be well aware – there for the entire community, Jews and gentiles alike. And the fact that four of its ambulances have been destroyed means that waiting times across north west London will now suffer – for everyone.
If Iran is the most likely culprit, it is operating in the climate of rising Jew hate in which we are now living and which is proving so – to put it mildly – destabilising for our community. We are not living through 1930s Germany. But that should not be the only measure of concern. Living through a repeat of the Nazi era is not the only definition of an existential threat to our way of life and security. The evidence may be anecdotal, but I know that many of you reading this will have had and will continue to have the conversation I referred to above: whether it is safe for us to stay here.
Increasingly it feels as if we are beginning to return to the times of our ancestors, where the Jews were turned on and scapegoated. I have long argued that the period after Second World War until around the turn of the century, in which antisemitism was present but was shunned and frowned on in polite circles, and when it was not an issue that was of real concern to Jews – the period in which I lived the first 40 or so years of my life, for example – was an aberration. But because the majority of Jews have grown up in that period, it was our norm.
What is now happening, I believe, is a sort of reversion to the mean: for centuries open Jew hate and antisemitic attacks were the norm, and that is what we are now returning to. It is only because so many of have grown up in the aberration of the post-war period, that we are so shocked by what is now returning.
Whoever is responsible for last night’s attack, that, surely, is the real context.
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