This is Britain now: the Greens embrace antisemitism as a Cable Street rally targets Jews

Pretending that targeting Jews for opprobrium has nothing to do with targeting Jews is a well-trodden form of sophistry. But Zionism is no more and no less than the notion that the Jewish people, like all other peoples, have the right to self-determination in their – our – historic homeland. That is the position of the vast majority of Jews, not least because the vast majority of Jews are unashamed of being Jewish. As for the fringe of so-called anti-Zionist Jews who are regularly wheeled out by the Jew haters to show that not all Jews are Zionists…well, I direct you to Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question and its fictional but oh-so-very-true group, “ASHamed Jews”.

Anti-Zionism is predicated on the idea that Jews, alone in the world, cannot be allowed self-determination and – oh, the irony - is thus itself fundamentally racist. So when a party adopts the position that Zionism is racist, it is impossible to argue that this is not an attack on Jews as Jews. Literally impossible. Green spokesmen and supporters may try to pretend otherwise, but they cannot. They are attacking Jews for being Jews.

But while it is indeed not an everyday occurrence for a party to make attacking Jews one of its key electoral platforms, we have seen versions of this in recent years. It is, however, now very much an everyday occurrence to see open Jew hate, albeit sometimes in the guise of anti-Zionism. As it happens, the Green Party’s vote came on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when Jews and others fought back against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. And the demonstration to mark that anniversary could hardly have provided a clearer example of this.

In the decades since 1936, Cable Street has become the launch pad of various myths (not least as the only occasion at which Jeremy Corbyn is said to have stood on the right side of a Jewish issue, and he wasn’t even born). But it is a sign of where we now are that yesterday’s anniversary marches were the precise inversion of what happened at Cable Street. Instead of the crowd standing proud with the Jews against the fascists, it was the fascists standing proud against the Jews, chanting their Jew hate: “Free, free Palestine, Zionism is a crime”, “Zionism, terrorism”, “Zionists not welcome here”.

While Mosley’s mob wore black, the 2026 version wore red and green – a mix of self-proclaimed progressives and anti-racists and Islamists, the modern fascists. (“Not welcome here” is a rather genteel way of describing what happened, with footage showing the man-handling and assault of those suspected of the crime of Zionism. )

We can see Sunday, October 4 in two ways. On the one hand, perhaps it really was extraordinary to see a mainstream party formally embrace antisemitism and to see a commemorative Cable Street rally focused on attacking Jews.

But on the other hand, how can anyone who has seen British politics develop in the years after the Corbyn takeover of the Labour Party – the open displays of Jew hate within Labour, the hate marches, the rise in antisemitic crimes, the Heaton Park murders, the Greens’ embrace of Jew hate, the rise of sectarian Muslim voting and the attacks on Israel as a kind of enemy state, and all that just for starters – be in any surprised by yesterday’s events. This is where we now are. This is Britain, now.

God help us all.