Mick Hartley

Hugo Rifkind at Jewish News – We expected sympathy to vanish but not this constant hate:

I certainly remember knowing what was about to happen. I think everybody did. The day after, I was at the Cheltenham Festival on a panel and I said it out loud: that the wave of global sympathy Israel was at that point receiving would last, precisely, only until Israel retaliated. And then, such would be the scale and nature of that retaliation, it would disappear. This wasn’t a particularly insightful thought. Everybody knew it. I did, and you did, and Hamas did, and Benjamin Netanyahu did. It’s what always happens.

Did I, though, expect that within days, posters of Israeli hostages would be being torn down, in every western city? No. That was new, and the experience of being a Diaspora Jew in lands where that occurs is new, too. And did I expect, when that experience began to change, how few people would care?

Indeed, how many people would make a point of not caring? Again, no. I can remember, going back really not so far, how earnestly I tried to explain to people, for example, what that Hamas phrase – “from the river to the sea” – meant to most Jews. Honestly and truly, naively and stupidly, I really did think this might make them think twice about saying it. Instead, the opposite happened. It made them all love saying it even more.

It’s at this point in a column, I know, that I should set out my stall. Make a declaration about my Zionism, my feelings about the Netanyahu government, my condemnation of Hamas, my despair about the slaughter of the inhabitants of Gaza, my preferred technicalities of some theoretical solution for peace in the Middle East. I’ve been asked about all of that quite a lot over the last year though, and I think I’ve perfected my response.

Ready? It is “fuck off”.

It doesn’t matter what I think. Even I don’t much care what I think. I can’t solve this. Why must I pretend I can?

That’s the main thing that feels new. For a Jew to be expected to have all the answers, and to exhibit absolute moral perfection, before he or she is allowed to say anything at all.

Linked to this is the low-level, constant, burning sense that quite a lot of people now hate me….

It has become impossible, over this past year, to be irrelevantly Jewish. Impossible not to feel it, and be seen as it, by friends and foes, whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever the circumstances, whatever you’d otherwise prefer. Is it worse than being in Gaza? Of course not. Neither is it worse than being in Israel.

Ask yourself, though, why I feel compelled to say that, when I’m here in Crouch End. I do, though, don’t I? Somehow, our society has decided that I have lost the right not to just be.

And no, I did not expect that, at all.

To be honest there wasn't even that much sympathy straight after October 7th, before any Israeli retaliation. Already many were taking the line – just as with the US after 9/11 – that Israel, the Jews, had it coming. Even, for some on the left, that this was something to be celebrated: the oppressed at last rising up against the colonisers.