The hated cannot cure the hate. That, dear reader, is down to you and I

Something urgent needs to be said today about a great crime here in the UK, where this magazine’s front cover will this week be visible on thousands of newsagents’ shelves. It is the alarming rise in British antisemitism.

Antisemitism has become uniquely exempt from the moral clarity that progressive Britain applies to every other form of racism. Every other minority group in Britain can rely on an instinctive coalition of support when it faces racist violence. When mosques are attacked, when black men suffer at the hands of the police, when asylum seekers are targeted, the liberal-progressive response is immediate, vocal and unconditional. 

Jews do not receive this. They receive hesitation. They receive “yes, but”. They receive silence from people who are otherwise constitutionally incapable of silence on questions of racial justice.

Suggested Reading

Why are all Jews held accountable for Gaza?

Peter Bradley

Yet it’s really not that hard. Blaming British Jews for the policies of the Israeli government is as logical as blaming me, a Roman Catholic, for the plight of children born HIV positive in sub-Saharan Africa because of the Vatican’s policies on condoms.

The attribution of institutional guilt to individuals on the basis of their religious identity is obviously absurd, and makes all the caveats, the “yes, buts” and the sheer silence of those who are otherwise so quick to speak about racism and injustice towards minorities inexplicable. 

Unless, of course, there’s a deeper problem. That what we are dealing with is a deep-seated hatred, pre-dating the war in Gaza, or Israel. How else can one explain the obtuse unwillingness to hold distinct the community of Jews in Britain and the actions of the state of Israel?

Equally insidious is the failure to see the connection between perception and reality when it comes to the threat against our Jewish community. Set aside the objective reality that Jews are the most targeted faith community per capita in this country: the fear of attack is every bit as much an assault on them as a physical attack itself. Under UK law, the crime of common assault is committed by placing someone in fear of violence just as much as by committing it. On that basis, all Jews are being assaulted here in the UK today.

So what is it about that great British sense of decency, compassion and solidarity with the oppressed that feels so difficult to enact when it comes to our Jewish neighbours? 

Suggested Reading

The Jewish suitcase is back in the hall

Matthew d’Ancona

In the Guardian last weekend, Jonathan Freedland asked “Where are those who are usually so vocal in their opposition to racism, now that one of Britain’s oldest minorities is facing a violent, murderous threat on the streets?” 

It’s absolutely the right question. It’s not only the far right who are infected with this irrational hatred. It’s endemic on the left, too. The semantics of explanation may become more tortuous the further left one moves on the political spectrum, but the net result is the same – British Jews are othered and made to feel fear here, in the UK, their home.

So that’s why our story about Gaza is not on the front page. That timing, given the events of the last few days, could communicate that the targeting of Jews here requires geopolitical qualification before it earns our concern: “Yes, but…” Our conviction is the precise opposite: “Yes, but… nothing.”

The New World’s conviction is that the rise of antisemitism here in the UK must be called out with the absolute clarity such a crime deserves: there is no mitigation for it, there is no wider context that can justify it, there is absolutely no excuse for it.

Suggested Reading

Gary Lineker: ‘I’m not antisemitic. I’m anti the killing of children’

Matt Kelly

That a small (fewer than 300,000 Jews live in the UK) and historically persecuted community is once more fearful to walk the streets is surely everything liberal progressives should reject, loudly, clearly and without caveat. Do we really need to spell out the circumstances in which so many of their near ancestors arrived here?

As the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. It would be the greatest mistake for Jews to believe that they can fight it alone. The only people who can successfully combat antisemitism are those active in the cultures that harbour it.”

And that, dear reader, is you and I.

Matt Kelly is the founder and editor-in-chief of The New World