Why Scottish Jews were right to boo John Swinney

He replied as any father would.

“Darling, I would do whatever I had to do.”

I don’t tell that story to glorify violence, support war, or to undermine the horrific human suffering in Gaza. I say it to make a point about shared humanity. Anger is human.

The first vehicle by which society dehumanises Jews is to strip us of our right to our grief and to our rage. We are expected to always modify our behaviour. To centre Palestinian pain in counterbalance to our own. To say “but I want the war to end,” “but I hate Bibi” “but the suffering in Gaza is appalling,” to pay the Good Jew Tax of respectability before we talk about our own pain, and we are certainly never, ever allowed to be angry. Look at any comments section on articles covering the October 7th memorials. “How dare they” is the constant mantra. How dare the Jews grieve their dead? What about what about what about. Dirty Zios.

When a hostage vigil was firebombed in Colorado, the response was “well, didn’t they understand how angry it would make people for them to be out talking about their own pain in public”. When Jews were murdered in Manchester on the holiest day of the year, the response was “We don’t give a **** about the Jews, what about the flotilla?”.

I grew up in Manchester, and I have several friends who attend Heaton Park Synagogue. Since Yom Kippur, people keep saying to me, “Leah, are you ok?” And I don’t know what to say to them. Because I’m not sad, I’m not grieving. I’m not shocked. I’m not anxious. All I am is angry. I burn with white hot rage. Rage because for two years Jews have been warning, warning what “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” mean. Warning that the accusation of genocide is nothing but the latest iteration of the two-thousand-year-old blood libel that has taken so many Jewish lives, and has now claimed two more. We have been respectable. We have asked. We have sat in meetings and been polite while those who want to kill us scream in the streets unchecked. We have written letters and made videos while the campaign for a second holocaust has murdered, vandalised, destroyed, intimidated and harassed Jews all over the world. We have been ignored.

So when John Swinney had the incalculable chutzpah to say “I have heard the fears of the Jewish community,” my scream of “AND COMPLETELY IGNORED US” was righteous anger. When I stood in that crowd and yelled “our children aren’t safe in their schools because of you!” I may not have been respectable, but I took back my pure, human rage.

The antisemitism in Scotland is at fever pitch. We’ve had children attacked in schools, death threats, people groomed on dating apps and assaulted, university-backed organisations glorifying martyrdom, and attempts to discredit the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “Zionist free zones” are popping up all over the country, announcing Scottish towns as judenfrei. We’ve seen allegations of doctors intimidating patients and teachers engaged in eliminationist rhetoric. 

At Scotland Against Antisemitism, we receive almost daily reports of abuse, aggression, and harassment, sometimes from the very institutions that most champion diversity and inclusion.

John Swinney is fully aware of all of this. We at SAA wrote a widely publicised letter to him on the 4th September, warning him that his use of the genocide accusation in parliament would do nothing to protect Palestinians but would embolden antisemites in Scotland, and before us the Jewish Council of Scotland has worked tirelessly to highlight these issues to the government. Absolutely nothing has been done.

It was against this backdrop of weaponised indifference that the First Minister chose to invite himself to the October 7th memorial in Edinburgh. For context, there has been a hostage vigil outside parliament in Edinburgh every Thursday for almost two years. This man has never come out to speak to us, never acknowledged our presence, but now Jewish blood stains British streets, John Swinney smelled a photo op.

After his empty words about caring about us and our pain, he chose to cynically use our moment of grief and remembrance to defend his position on Palestine. This choice, completely inappropriate and unnecessary, was made with one audience in mind, and it was not the Jews in front of him. John Swinney knew his intifada demanding voter base would be furious about him attending a Jewish event. So he framed himself carefully as bravely defending Palestine to a hostile crowd, to try and avoid the inevitable accusations of being bought by the Zionists. The crowd drowned him out with cries of “Bring Them Home”. Once again, our anger was entirely righteous and human.

After his speech, Swinney grabbed an opportunity to have a photo taken with Irene Cowan, the elderly mother of Bernard Cowan, brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7th, and then made a swift exit before Alon Penzel, author and former IDF soldier, took the stage. The moment there wasa  risk of being seen near someone who might be considered controversial, he was gone. He didn’t stay to hear Alon’s harrowing testimony of October 7th, of the things he’d seen, of how those images don’t leave him. He didn’t bear witness. He performed, and he left.

What occurred to me as I gathered my thoughts to write this piece was that it’s not just the Jews that John Swinney’s behaviour dehumanises, it’s also the Palestinians.

As we pointed out in our letter to him, none of the Scottish government’s announced measures will have a single ounce of effect on the lives of Palestinians; they are intended only for the benefit of capturing the votes of Scottish antisemites. The lives and deaths of Palestinians nothing more than a rhetorical tool to distract voters from the reality of a country where 10,360 children are homeless, where we have the highest child poverty since the ’90’s, where waits for child mental health services can be as much as 5 years, where local councils are unable to meet their statutory duty to house the homeless, and where 1 in 5 people live in poverty. The blood of Middle Eastern children is simply useful. Convenient. Disposable.

When he posed two weeks ago with the Palestinian ambassador in front of a map of Israel entirely filled with Arabic, a visual representation of the destruction of the Jewish state, shaking hands with the man who has that image hanging in his office, he was engaging in that worst of paternalistic racism, that says “you don’t really mean what you say, we know better, we know what you really want”. The great Scottish champion of the Palestinian cause doesn’t even respect them enough to listen to the words they say, and in doing so denies them agency, reducing them to a prop in a script written by white politicians for white voters.

What John Swinney has done in recent weeks has dehumanised all of us, Jews and Palestinians. For us, he cynically abused our natural, human pain for an opportunity to be photographed with a grieving mother while still signalling just enough allegiance to those who believe her son's murder was just. For the Palestinians, he offered empty words, meaningless gestures, and the role of irrational children, incapable of knowing their own minds or having agency in their own actions. Both sides of this brutal conflict reduced to manageable props in a game of vote share.

There are those even in the Jewish community who will feel that we should have been more restrained, more dignified perhaps, than to shout down this man the way we did. But we are not pawns. We are human. And our anger, our pain, is not a photo opportunity. This week, the Scottish Jewish community demanded their humanity and I was proud to be part of it.

Leah Benoz is the founder of Scotland Against Antisemitism.