Trudy Gold and Dr David Rich
Trudy Gold Interviews Dave Rich, Author of ‘The Left’s Jewish Problem’ and ‘Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World’
Trudy Gold - An Interview with Dr Dave Rich, Author of “The Left’s Jewish Problem and Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built”
- Well, good evening, everyone. It’s my great pleasure to reintroduce Dr. David Rich. He’s got, not only is he just produced two books that are so important today. He’s also the director of policy at CST, and every bit of any every anti-Semitic incident will pass his desk. Of course, he’s written two very important books. The first is on the left Jewish problem, and his last book, and I really advise you all to buy these books not only are they terribly important, and scholarly they’re written with a very easy style. And it’s full of all the information you need to know. So, his second book is “Everyday Hate.” So, those are the books. Welcome, David. Now, we plan to do this before October the 7th. We were just going to talk about your books. To what extent will October the 7th go down in your view as a very important day in that long history of the Jews?
Firstly, good evening, everyone, or good morning or afternoon depending on where you are. I think October the 7th has already left its mark in Jewish history, and it feels like a date we will be commemorating potentially forever. You know, we know in the Jewish calendar, there are terrible events in our history, going back centuries or even more, that we still remember every year. It’s something we do as a people. And it’s part of what keeps us together in a way, remembering that history. And I think one of the reasons why the attack on Israel on 7th of October had such a profound impact on the Jewish world as a whole is because we all instinctively felt right from the start that this was not just another round in the conflict in Israel, and Gaza of which we’ve seen every few years, it flares up. I think we all perceived immediately that this was different. This was of a different scale, a different character. And I think one reason why there has been so much shock and horror and grief, actually, across the Jewish world is because many of us felt it to be an attack on the Jewish people as a whole, and rather than something specifically within the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. And I think that will leave a permanent legacy in terms of what we remember and how we remember it.
And the hate that is being spewed out against Israel, and against the Jewish people from country to country to country, countries like Britain and Israel where they are, the governments are nominally supporting Israel. So, were you at all surprised by the level of the hatred that spewed out?
Well, let’s go back to the beginning.
[Trudy] Yeah.
When we woke up on the Shabbat morning, 7th of October, which was a festival, you know, supposed to be a happy weekend in the Jewish calendar. And we saw what was happening in Israel, we knew immediately there would be a spike in anti-Semitism because there is every time, you know, conflict flares up involving Israel, although this was of a different character, you could see where it was going to head. So, we knew there would be an increase in anti-Semitism. The numbers are higher and the rate is more than we’ve seen before. I mean, here in the UK, CST has logged over 1,200 anti-Semitic incidents across the UK since 7th of October. And to put that into perspective, we logged 803 incidents in the first six months of this year. So that just shows you the scale, it’s around five, 600% more than we would normally expect. And that’s more than previously. I think also what shocked a lot of people is the anti-Israel protests that we’ve seen that started within 24 hours of that attack on the 7th of October, when Israel had barely got going in terms of its response in Gaza, they were still trying to get all the Hamas terrorists out of Israel at that stage. There was nothing really that Israel had done to protest against. These were demonstrations to celebrate what Hamas had done. Let’s be clear about that. And they were smaller than the ones we’re seeing now, but that was the hardcore. And that’s their mushrooms. And so again, what we see every time Israel is at war, we get these big demonstrations against Israel of a kind that we never ever see for any other foreign conflict. And that in itself is just weird and not normal. And it that scares the community. And again, those have been bigger than ever before. So, I think there are, but I think the fact that this is all in response to, you know, how it started. It started with that Hamas terror attack, and we’ve seen a lot of denial of that. I think a lot of people going out protesting against Israel don’t believe that Hamas did anything or did anything wrong. So, there’s a lot of elements of it that are really quite shocking, I think, and that force us to re-evaluate this kind of cycle of activism that we’ve just got used to over the years.
I think in a way, somebody like you, who’s so on top of it, has been acutely aware, but I think a lot of people, we sleep, I can say that myself, I think we knew all about it, but somehow, we’ve been sleepwalking. Now, in terms of the kind of anti-Israel rhetoric that you’re getting, we know obviously about Hamas. To what extent do you think this, they’re using this palpable hatred is part of the Muslim community in Britain. Is there any way of breaking down figures on this?
Well, I think it’s more diffuse and diverse than some people think. And I think, you know, if you look at the marches and the rallies, it’s not a case of it’s just Muslims.
Oh no, I know that. I just wanted to see if you could break down the Muslims part first.
So, there is quite a lot of opinion polling about attitudes, anti-Semitic attitudes across different communities in Britain. And what they show is, anti-Semitism is more prevalent in Muslim communities, but even they’re not a majority position. You know, it’s not something most Muslims go along with, but it is more common in those communities. But it’s also very common across the whole of society. And one of the things that the opinion polling shows is that the extent of belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes and so on, it’s in the sort of, it’s bedded in the mainstream of society.
Yeah.
That’s where it is. It’s more obvious and perhaps a bit more vicious at the extremes, the extreme right and the extreme left and so on. But if you removed kind of Muslims from the equation, the amount of anti-Semitism in day-to-day life in British society would not shift very much. It wouldn’t really change that very much because it’s there just in the centre ground in a way. And that is of course, because anti-Semitism has always been around. It’s these assumptions and stereotypes have always been part of mainstream society. It’s not something that has come in with different minority communities. It’s got a much longer history.
And I think this is one of the reasons people must buy your book, because you really, really start at the beginning. You talk about the anti-Judaism; you talk brilliantly about the development of anti-Semitism. And you also say very strongly that we we fare best in a liberal society. When society becomes illiberal, as it certainly is at the moment, all the old canals come to the surface. Now, this notion of conspiracy theory is one that I’ve always found absolutely fascinating. Jews are communist, Jews are capitalists, Jews are everything you don’t want to be really. Now, it is the demonization of the Jew and so what you’re, are you saying that you don’t think it’s lessened at all?
No, it’s definitely lessened.
[Trudy] In fact, Israel’s given it another reason.
It’s definitely, look, if we look at the broad sweep of Jewish history and we look at our lives in Britain, the community that we’ve built, the freedoms and protections we have, things have definitely improved. I know there’s a lot of worry in the community right now and quite understandably so about the amount of anti-Semitism we’re seeing, it seems to kind of come out of nowhere. And it makes you worry, is this what everyone thinks? They just don’t say the rest of the time. And the reality is, this isn’t what everyone thinks. But the people who think it, right now, feel emboldened to say it, because of everything that’s going on. But we live in a society, all said and done, we live in a society, where it is thought of as a bad thing to be anti-Semitic. Even the anti-Semites don’t admit they’re anti-Semitic. Right, they come up with different names for it and different excuses for it and all the rest of it, even when expressing ideas that we all know are anti-Semitic. So, it’s not thought of as, you know, there’ve been times in history where being anti-Jewish has been thought of as a positive moral good. That’s not the world we live in now, right? And look, my great-grandparents came to this country from Ukraine, what is now Ukraine and Poland, what was part of the Russian Empire, about 120 years ago. Britain today is less openly anti-Semitic than the Britain they arrived in 120 years ago, nevermind how anti-Semitic the Russia they left was at the time.
We’re not back in the land of the pogroms. We’re in a liberal, democratic, free, open society with the rule of law, where the government and the police see their role as protecting the Jewish community from hate crime and extremism, right? We can get into the detail of whether they fulfil that role as well as we would like, okay, that’s a different issue. But in theory at least, they’re not the ones who are doing the persecuting. And we’ve seen in the past in history, what happens to Jewish communities when it’s the government and the police who actually turn against us rather than being the ones on our side. So, we have a lot going for us. And I would also say that for all the 300,000 people on these marches and for all the anti-Semitism we’re reading about and hearing about, the great mass of British people out there, the silent majority, still are on our side. I think anti-Semitism is appalling. You know, these are the people who rejected Jeremy Corbyn four years ago, partly because of anti-Semitism. And so, we have a lot going for us. And I think it’s not about downplaying the anti-Semitism is there because it’s there. And it’s my job to research it and highlight it and talk about it all the time. But I think we should never lose sight of everything we have going for us, all the friends and supporters we have. And the challenge for us is how do we harness all of that.
Okay, it’s what I’m interested in is how the conspiracy theories that Jews are still seen, almost as the pillars of the strings behind all the evils of the world by certain sections of the society. How, when you think of the powerlessness of the show because we have there was an example of policy in history. It’s the shower. So, what has happened is that many anti-Semites will go as far as to say, well, and this comes from the extreme left and certain sections of extreme Islam, or the Jews collect. Design is collaborated in the shower. I mean, Mahmoud Abbas, who many people hope will be able to sort things out, didn’t he do his PhD in that subject at Patrice Lumumba University? So even the, look, anti-Semitism is totally illogical. We both know that. But what I’m saying to you is what weapons do we have to fight the conspiracy theories? I was in a baker shop in Cornwall sympathising with the guy price of bread and he said yes, it’s the Rothschild conspiracy. I mean you can smile
Price of bread and cornwall around the last thing that I’ve ever things to do,
I mean, you know, om one level, you can give a Mel Brooks answer, but it’s-
Yeah look it this is the heart of it, right? Anti-semitism is all about conspiracy theories. I mean on one level it operates as just a general prejudice, people don’t like Jews. What gives it its its unique character and really distinguishes it from other types of prejudice is this conspiracy theory, this idea that it’s Jews pulling the strings, and Jews have all the power and all the rest of it, and we see it in the most ludicrous examples. I think the one you’ve just given, you know, typifies it. And the allegation that, you know, the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust is an example of this. It’s something, of course, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, came out with a few years ago, and there was massive controversy over that, because the idea that the Zionist movement in the 1930s and the early 1940s had anything like the power to influence what Nazi Germany did is itself a conspiracy trope, and a complete misreading of history. And I take I see it as a form of Holocaust revisionism.
Yes, we do.
Because it essentially removes some of the culpability for the Holocaust. It takes it off the shoulders of the Nazis and puts it onto the Zionists for a very obvious political reason, which is to try and delegitimize Zionism and Israel. And we see these conspiracy theories in all sorts of places. And it’s a real challenge because conspiracy theories are much more popular amongst younger people than amongst older people. And that is because they are so prevalent on social media. They are spread by social media. And there is a lot of polling that shows there’s a correlation between how young someone is, how much they rely on social media as their primary source of information and news, and whether they’re anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitic in terms of believing conspiracy theories. And whereas younger people are getting less racist in almost every other way, when it comes to Jews, they’re becoming more anti-Semitic than their elders because they’re more likely to believe Jews run the banks and the media and all the rest of it. Now, how do we deal with this? We, now we as Jews cannot solve that problem on our own because this is a problem of the pervasiveness of social media and the global spread of conspiracy theories, and misinformation. And it’s a challenge for governments. It’s something that affects everything across the whole of society. And we are one strand of that, but it’s not something we can, or should have to fix on our own.
Before we go further, I’d like you to explain a little how so many of the marchers would come from what you would consider themselves to be totally anti racist, who think of themselves as left wing. How come they are marching with Hamas supporters and people who want to destroy Israel, and people whose views in many other ways will be completely against anything they believe in?
So the-
This is what I find absolutely fascinating. We are we are the victim group that other victims find think of perpetrators.
I mean, not firstly, everyone thinks they’re anti racist nowadays. And this is what I mean, even racists think they’re anti racist. So that’s just, it’s just such a dominant moral value in our society not to be racist, that people, everyone feels they can’t deviate from that. And a lot of people on these marches will be there because they hate seeing the images of people getting killed every day and children being dug out of rubble in Gaza, and they wanted to stop, and they just think what’s more obvious than wanting a ceasefire and don’t complicate me with the politics of the conflicts, and that gets into the whole issue of just the amount of media coverage and why is that a war involving Israel is on the front pages and leading the nightly news every night for weeks when many more people die in other wars that never get a look in. But I think there is something deeper to it, which is why Israel attracts this amount of attention. This is the question never really gets answered satisfactorily by the people doing it, which is why is it that a war involving Israel can get 100,000 or 300,000 people on a demonstration when a foreign conflict, a different foreign conflict, would struggle to get 10,000?
And I’ve heard all the answers for this, all the explanations. You know that it’s about the occupation, it’s because Western governments support Israel, it’s because we sell them arms, it’s because we have a colonial history there, and all these answers also apply to other conflicts that no one else will march for. They apply to the Turkish suppression of Kurdish national ambitions; they apply to the war in Yemen and so on and so on. So, I don’t buy, I don’t think any of those explanations really add up. But I think if you look at the politics of what’s going on, what’s really interesting and alarming, but I think explains something, is this dominant narrative that has come through in that, in the anti-Israel movement, that Israel itself is a settler colonial entity, it’s a colony, it’s not-
An apartheid state.
Not just that it’s apartheid, but that it is not an authentic or legitimate nation state, that Jewish national identity is not authentic and legitimate, or even if it is, it’s kind of uniquely malevolent, and toxic, and therefore can’t be tolerated. And this is all about the narrative that it is a settler colonial entity, and that Israelis are colonisers, even if they’re born there, so however many generations, they’re colonisers and therefore they have no rights. And therefore, if Hamas go and kill them or kidnap them, well, you know, they’re on their land, what do you expect? And of course, remember that the kibbutzim and the towns in southern Israel that Hamas attacks were all on territory that has been part of Israel since 1948, that are recognised as part of Israel by every government and by the United Nations, that is not disputed land, unless you dispute the entire existence of Israel. You know, they’re not settlements in the way the West Bank settlements and so on and so on. And I think that the fact that people there are still people who will justify what Hamas did by saying, well, they’re on their land, says it all, it reveals a great deal about the just the sheer rejection of Israel’s existence by some people in that movement. Now, probably the 300,000 people on the big demo in London last Saturday, you know, if a two-state solution happens, probably most of them would, you know, accept it and move on. It’s not we’re not talking about all of them being really committed ideologues. A lot of people, a lot of them are there just because it’s fashionable. It’s the fashionable cause to go on a walk for on Saturday afternoon. But the people organising those rallies, they are hardcore ideologues, whether from the far left, from kind of Muslim Brotherhood aligned groups. And for them, Israel’s existence really is a problem. And that’s where the ideological framing of the this movement really comes from.
And I think also the hard left, I mean you’re-
Yes.
And can you can quite quickly explain how it comes from Russia because I think that’s absolutely fascinating, Because the way it infiltrated into broader thinking now.
I mean, look, it is very much from the left. Of the six groups organising these big rallies in London, two are from the far left, and four are kind of Muslim brotherhood groups, it’s a combination. And the left, as we know, traditionally up until the time of Israel’s creation, most of the left supported Zionism, the Soviet bloc in a very important way supported Zionism, supported the creation of the state of Israel and that left-wing sympathy for Israel continued, until the 1960s and people often look at the Six-Day War as the pivotal moment, when Israel went from the gallant underdog to kind of the military, the dominant military power, and the occupier and so on and so on. But there were other deeper trends going on, it wasn’t just that that war happened, and everyone flipped. Is that a new generation was emerging on the left who didn’t remember the fight against fascism in the 30s, and 40s and who had been brought up instead on decolonization and anti-imperialism as their animating cause in the 1960s, and into the 1970s, and the fight against apartheid and the Vietnam War, and so on and so on. And this is the generation that produced Jeremy Corbyn, and produced Roger Waters and produced Ken Livingstone, and people and Ken Loach and people of that ilk, and those kind of politics. And that was, as I say, that was a left-wing world dominated by anti-colonialism. And the Soviet Union was constantly trying to push its propaganda in there.
You know, there were big conferences of all these liberation movements across, you know, what was then called the Third World and now called the Global South, and also newly, you know, decolonized states and the Soviet Union would be there. And anti-Zionism and a real conspiracist anti-Semitic anti-Zionism was a really central part of Soviet propaganda pushed out to the Western left in English and other non-Russian languages from the 1960s onwards. And there was a real concerted effort to do it because they knew it was a way to recruit people. They knew it was very divisive, in particular in terms of the East German campaign against West Germany. It was very important. And it became really common on part of the left. And of course, it was the Soviet Union that inspired the United Nations resolution in 1975, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. And so, all of that framing we see in left-wing thought today, including in the liberal left, in other parts of the left, never followed the Moscow line in a direct way, was all influenced by a lot of that Soviet propaganda. And that Soviet propaganda was always very anti-Semitic in its anti-Zionism, not just in rejecting Israel and calling Israel apartheid and so on, but in constructing this idea of a global Zionist conspiracy against not just the Palestinians but against the left as well.
I mean, so you’ve got 2000 years of Jew hatred in the Christian world with certain amelioration, you now have this other issue. Howard Jacobson said something very interesting, he said “They can’t forgive us the Holocaust,” because your question, why do 300,000 people come out marching for against Israel, after one of the most appalling programmes that anyone could imagine. Isn’t it also to do with the fact that on one level they expect us to be their moral arbiters, at some deep psychological level? Why are we so central? I mean there are 15 million of us in the world, I mean how many Muslims are there? You know, look at the size of Israel, if you use any logic, Dave it’s just crazy.
I know, I mean this is also, you know, the Jewish world is a tiny world, Israel’s a tiny country, and we shouldn’t matter to other people as much as we do. On the other hand, we, you know, the Jewish people set ourselves up as moral arbiters in our, you know, foundational myths to be a light unto the nations and all the rest of it. So that is part of our moral code, to try and live to certain moral standards. And that’s something I think to embrace that we try and meet a certain moral standard ourselves. But I think the, you know, if you look at a lot of left-wing politics today, a lot of the identity politics that has really elevated the status of victimhood. And of course, this has very powerful Christian antecedent of martyrdom and victimhood in Christian theology. And then the Holocaust happens. And so much of the post war settlement in Europe was built around the rejection of the political ideas that led to Nazism and led to the Holocaust. And Holocaust commemoration has become a very central part of our national calendar and our national mythology of modern, tolerant, diverse societies, not specifically in a Jewish way, but in the countries, we live in. And so, the idea that the Jews are the ultimate victims, is a challenge for some people, especially if it interferes with their political, with their politics around Israel.
They have very close mindsets, haven’t they? I mean, nobody-
Well, it leads to this idea that, you know, Zionists and Nazis and all the rest of it, it’s a way to square that circle.
And never any mention of the fate of the Jews of the Arab world. Yeah, that gets missed. And that gets missed in the narrative that Israel is a white supremacist state and European colonisers, and so on. And the fact that, you know, half the Israeli population is not from Europe, is Mizrahi Jews and Ethiopian Jews and others, and that all gets just all those nuances get flattened out in this very simplistic narrative.
So, it’s a simplistic narrative, it’s an ideology. I’d now come on to Holocaust memorialization because somehow, and I’ve been involved in Holocaust education for 40 years, but my analysis now is that it’s been de-Judaized.
I mean this is the, yeah, this is the way.
I mean, look the it’s commemorated along with other genocides and I’m not in any way decrying anyone else’s tragedy because that been so many, but the point is, people don’t somehow understand they don’t know anything about Jewish history, they don’t understand why it happens so you I, and I remember looking at the GCSE syllabus a few years ago, Jews appear on it, either in the Holocaust or the Arab Israeli conflict. And at that time, it was taught 1948 to 67. You know, you have always been quite optimistic, and I suppose the big question, what on earth is that anything because we’re talking rationality really are we, we’re looking at the situation through a rational prism. Is there anything we can do about it? I mean there’s that great quote of Isaiah Berlin on the subject of anti-Semitism. Of course, we’re paranoid with our history. We need to be. And I’m having very rational friends of mine thinking, well, maybe we should emigrate. And the question is where to this time? So, what can we do?
Yeah, I mean, there’s always things we can do. There’s always things we can do. I mean, the issue of Holocaust commemoration is a really interesting one because, you know, as I was saying, lots of countries, you know, across Europe and the United States and others have taken on Holocaust commemoration as an expression of our nation’s core values of diversity, and tolerance and rule of law and rejection of racism, and rejection of dictatorship and all the rest of it. And in some ways, that’s good, and that’s something Jewish communities have pushed for. But like you say, there is always this balance between teaching about the Holocaust in a very particularist way, that this is about Jews and it’s about anti-Semitism. And we want people to remember that and to understand that there is a very long history of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, and it was not random chance that it was the Jews that the Nazis picked on as their scapegoat to target for extermination. There was no other minority that really would have fitted exactly that bill. I mean, we were not the only minority persecuted by the Nazis. There was genocide of Roma and Sinti, and of gay people, and so on. But the Nazi ideological kind of clothing that they put on to the Jews could only have been put on to Jews. Now, on the other hand, you have this universalist way of trying to get everyone to embrace the memory of the Holocaust and remember it and absorb its lessons in the hope that therefore it won’t happen again. And there’s always this balance, and if you over-universalise it and you miss the Jewish aspect, you don’t teach about the whole history of anti-Semitism. Sometimes I think the Holocaust, people think the Holocaust just drops out of a clear blue sky.
Yeah, if you look at the syllabus in most schools, that’s exactly what happens. Yeah, or they think it’s, you know, it was part of war, and it happens in war. And it’s not really that either. So, I think there are things for us to learn in that respect for how better to teach, not just about the Holocaust, but about the history of anti-Semitism. And if you teach it as part of a much longer story, then it’s much easier to explain. And by the way, anti-Semitism didn’t end with the Holocaust, because that’s the danger, is that people think it’s something in history. And for young people, it’s so far back in history now, you know, it may as well be teaching about the tutors. So, it didn’t end with the Holocaust. And it isn’t only Nazis who are anti-Semitic. And those are really important things to teach about. But I do think-
How are we going to do it? No, you see, it’s not, it’s the schools, it’s the universities. And I hate to say it, the majority of our own kids aren’t taught the history of the Jews, let alone the history of anti-Semitism. And I think that’s why so many of them are very bewildered. I think there is much more appetite out there to learn about Jewish life today, Jewish culture, and Jewish history than there was even five years ago. I feel this in my work, the amount of interest we get and requests we get at CST, the amount of stuff going out, all out there to revive the history of Jews in mediaeval England, which is a whole other story that is completely forgotten about and needs to be remembered. And you’re starting to get more and more towns, and cities around the country, looking to try and revive that history as part of a celebration of their own diversity, and multiculturalism and so on. So, I think there are some really positive sort of green shoots going on there that we could add to, and we could really encourage.
I think it’s got to go on the curriculum. Yeah, because I think it’s because it enough. It’s that, and you asked what’s the new anti semitism. I mean, Jonathan sack said it beautifully. First, they hate our religion, then they hate our race now they hate our nation, because the kind of appropriate as you said, Israel gets is like nothing anywhere else in the world. And I’ve actually mentioned this to a couple of left-wing Jewish from less left-wing non-Jewish friends. There aren’t many of them left in my life anymore. I’m fine. It’s very painful for me. I’m going to say that. But then they say, oh, this is what about to read. We expect you to understand. And it’s so on one level, as I said before, they put us up on this high moral pedestal. And on the other level, they want to push us over. So, when Israel in inverted commas, steps out of line, and honestly, anyone who looks at the pictures coming out of Gaza is going to feel screened. It’s horrible. Anytime a baby’s killed, it’s horrible. But they’re not in any way thinking, well, Hamas did this. So, there’s no leeway for them.
I do think, you know, if every other war in the world got the same amount of media coverage and scrutiny as Israel’s wars do, there’d be a lot less war going on. And this comes with that, you know, if people want to pay attention to Israel you know, to Israel and demonstrate against Israel, fine, whatever, that’s up to them. What I want explaining is the gap between that and the lack of interest in everything else. It’s that gap, that difference that I think unnerves people in the Jewish community and makes people ask, well, what is actually going on there? You know, I do think in answer to your point, you know, we have Holocaust education on the curriculum in Britain. It’s been there for over 30 years, and it’s done a good job in teaching about the Holocaust. But I think what we’ve learned is it doesn’t actually necessarily help teach in a broader sense about anti-Semitism and about Jewish life, both in history and today, and I do think there is a piece of work to be done to improve in both of those areas in terms of teaching.
I actually think it’s even, as I said, I think I’ve got the right to say it because I’ve been involved for 40 years, I sat on IRA. I’ve even got to the stage now where I think it’s counterproductive, but I really think that if there’s any way that we can get Jewish history on the syllabus. And then you’ve got the issue of the universities and the how so many academics have become entrenched in their anti-Zionism anti-Semitism. So, I don’t know if grandparents, other grandparents, parents, friends of mine are being alarmist, but the talk now is not what university can our kid go to study this subject or that, but which one’s safe? Is that alarmist?
I mean, look, it’s understandable people feel that way, but all the universities are safe in a physical sense, you know, right? But what university students are facing at the moment is anti-Semitic comments, anti-Semitic graffiti, threats on social media, it’s horrible stuff, and it is alarming and it is very upsetting for the students and look at CST we have a full-time team, campus team, who go around the country the whole time supporting students and helping them with this so we know what’s going on.
Yeah, of course-
I also know that generations of Jewish students have put up with this stuff. And like everything in anti-Semitism, one of it’s new. That doesn’t mean it’s okay. It doesn’t mean we have to just shrug and put up with it. We shouldn’t have to put up with this. But it does mean we have experience of dealing with it. And the answer is not to hide away. You know, the answer, especially with campus, I think, is what can we give our students to make sure they have the strength and the resilience and the resources to deal with this, to deal with this kind of ignorance in a lot of cases, sheer ignorance, and some hatred and nastiness, and to firstly, know how to argue back, to know how to stand up not just for themselves, but for each other, because the strength in numbers and this is where Jewish societies and the Union of Jewish students can play a really important role in Jewish students supporting each other. And I know that’s easier at some campuses than others because some campuses there really are not many Jewish students, I know that, and that’s where we and UJS’s external bodies can help and really give that extra support but, you know, and that applies across the Jewish community at the moment. There’s a lot of fear in the community a lot of anxiety about what the future holds, and I get that that it’s as totally understandable. But, you know, there’s also a lot of strength, and there’s a lot of resilience. And for every story I hear about people, I do know, Yamaka, and wearing a baseball cap instead. I also hear stories about people who’ve gone out and bought a Magna David necklace for the first time, because they’re proud of their identity. And they want to show it and both responses are completely legitimate and understandable. I would never criticise anyone either way.
Well, I would.
We do have to, you know, as a community. You know, it looks like this conflict is going to go on for a while and it looks like things are going to go back to normal for a while. And however fearful we all are, we need to find it within ourselves to be a bit stronger than wherever we are at the moment, and find that resilience, and support each other and have that strength together as a community to get through this. Because I do think we have it within us to get through this.
And we are pulling together as a community far more, I think, than I’ve seen for a long time. And I think my last question before we turn it over. We know that in some of the mosques and in some of the schools, children are taught to hate Israel. We live in a liberal society, that wonderful, that we have freedom of speech, is this kind of event, going to curtail freedom of speech to make people feel safer? Are we at that terrible crossroads for any liberal society where we have to curtail certain freedoms to protect the majority?
I mean, it’s a really interesting question, it’s a really difficult challenge as you say because the whole point is to have those freedoms, and we all benefit from those, and we all enjoy them, but I think we’ve probably all seen some language, and some behaviours on some of the protests, and so on that are quite obviously quite harmful, and quite damaging but maybe slip through one, or two loopholes in the law that could do with being tightened. You know there’s been a lot of talk about the police aren’t arresting people and so on, actually the police are arresting and charging people for a whole range of stuff that even two years ago during the last conflict they weren’t doing. So, we have seen progress there. We are getting more and more people arrested and charged for stuff they’re saying and carrying on the demos, which is good. It’s progress. But still, there are things happening that aren’t getting people aren’t getting arrested for. And it may be that that’s because actually there isn’t quite a law written in the right way to deal with it. And we could do with tightening that up to deal with, you know, what’s been labelled hateful extremism. And it’s the kind of stuff, it’s not about things that are offensive or upsetting, because in an open society, we have to put up with a certain amount of things being upsetting and offensive. It’s about language that is dangerous and harmful because it incites hatred. And that’s where I think it’s really important to make sure that the law will act to protect the freedoms ultimately that we all enjoy.
David, I can see about 50 questions. So, I’m going to start. Let me open them month, please. I’m going to go off. Sorry, I’ve done this wrong. Yeah, that’s better. Now, let’s have a look at questions now.
Q&A and Comments:
This is from Stuart Seidel. Right now there’s a huge rally, March for Israel, March to Free Hostages, and March against anti-Semitism on the National Mall in Washington. Members of Congress, the administration, and the residents of Israel via satellite, as well as many performers from all over the US and Israel have spoken. Hundreds of thousands from all over America has shown up. And this is from David. CNN is reporting 60,000. So, that’s something interesting. Oh, this is from, yeah, no, this is in America. And then Dr. Phillips is saying here in North London, some Uber drivers are refusing to pick up Jewish passengers.
- I mean, if you get, it’s something like that. I saw that Matt Chorley, who writes for the Times, tweeted last night about an anti-Semitic comments made to him by an Uber driver. If you do experience anything like that, any anti-Semitism, whether from an Uber driver or anyone else, please report it to CST if you’re in the UK, or to equivalent organisations if you’re in other countries, because we can get action taken if it’s criminal, we can report it to the police. If it’s something like this, we can get a complaint to Uber and get the driver disciplined for it. We’ve had examples of I mean, everyone saw the video of the or a lot of people have seen the video of the tube driver leading a chant of free Palestine on the weekend of one of the demos, and he got suspended. There’s other cases with other examples on transport of things like that where we’ve taken action and people have been suspended. So, please do report it to CST.
Q - Stephen says, many in the anti-Israel demonstrations of white and young has Holocaust education in the UK failed?
A - I mean this is what we’ve been discussing-
That’s what we’ve discussed.
It’s Holocaust education, it teaches about the Holocaust and what we’ve learned is it won’t teach about other types of anti-Semitism and frankly if what you take away from Holocaust education is that the Holocaust is the anti-Semitism is something that is only done by Nazis and that was done you know nearly 100 years ago in the past and is part of history, then it isn’t necessarily going to help you understand what Hamas did, because that’s just in a totally different context.
And all you’ve got to do is read Dave’s book, or read Robert Wistrich’s book. There are so many good books on this now, and we’ve just got to get the information into the schools. This is from David Rubin on this same point, Dave. I live in Ontario. Recently, the government have mandated Holocaust education to be given to schoolchildren. You see, it’s a panacea, isn’t it?
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s mandated and it just, it can’t do what it can’t do, you know, and we have to think about other ways to deal with the anti-Semitism of today. One of those ways also to think about is, you know, we are a very small community and how many people in Britain actually know any Jews, have any Jewish friends? Most Jewish kids go to Jewish schools, so how many non-Jewish kids have Jewish friends at their schools’? And the answer is not many. And so, what do we have to do as a community to overcome those problems and encourage and generate the kind of human contact that does break down prejudice? That’s a challenge for us to think about.
This is a nice one for you. I’m afraid because we’ve got so many questions I’m having to pick and choose. What is it about anti Semites that they don’t accept Jews were the parents of Jesus and that Jesus himself was a Jew, such that they lack empathy for Jews and don’t value that lineage. Well, if you’re going back, if we’re going back that far, of course, the kind of anti-Jewish narratives that were developed in the early centuries of early Christian thought are in some ways the kind of bedrock and the precursors of the anti-Semitism we see today, precisely because Christianity was a breakaway from Judaism. And the early Christian writers and thinkers who kind of shaped this new religion. Because of that they did it in in relation to and rejection of the old faith that they were leaving behind, and a whole set of anti-Jewish discourses, and narratives were developed at that time, and you can see the lineage from all the way back there to now.
That’s what needs to be taught. This is an interesting question. How can you harness the goodwill of the silent majority to speak out against anti-Semitism and join the peace rally?
I mean, that is the million-dollar question, basically. You know, we saw during the Jeremy Corbyn years that once the message, once people had to really think seriously about who Jeremy Corbyn was because he wanted to be their prime minister and they were going to have to vote for or against, and they started to look in more detail at his views and at things he’d said and done, then you had people who had never thought about Jews or anti-Semitism before, for the very first time, starting to think about it, and basically came to the conclusion that anti-Semitism was just not British. It wasn’t how the British people like to think of themselves. Now, put to one side whether historically, you know, how much anti-Semitism has been part of this country, whatever, it’s not how British people wanted to think of themselves or as their country, and they thought it went against their values. And they just saw the anti-Semitism of Corbyn as one of several reasons why they just didn’t like him. They thought he was basically a wrong-un. He was not a good guy. And that only really happened because it affected them, because they had to vote in a general election. It’s very hard to get people, the vast majority of people, who don’t pay that much attention to the news, who don’t care about Jews or about Israel. And we think in our bubble, everyone cares deeply about it for or against. Actually, most people don’t care at all. And the challenge is to try and reach those people, you know, and make them realise that this is something that says something about Britain as a whole, as a country, that if they are forced to take an opinion they won’t like, they won’t like the anti-Semitism.
But there is another side to this because I know a lot of English people are being deeply offended by these rallies. For some I think it’s just a horror of extremism, and for others it might bring out another strain which we would also not like. That’s true, I mean it does, you get the kind of, like you say, there is a rejection of extremism, there’s also very much a strand that we’ve seen on the streets recently of kind of Islamophobic intolerance towards these rallies, but mostly people don’t like these rallies because it’s just, so inconvenient because it clogs up the city centre every Saturday. I think people are getting fed up with it.
Q - And Monica asks the question, what can we do as individuals to counter it?
A - You know, I think as Jewish people, it’s about and there’s different answers for different people here. I think as Jewish people, there’s definitely things we can do. One of them is a lot. I’m obviously going to say this join CST volunteer for CST we can take. We’ve had over 1000 new volunteers come forward and join CST since 7th of October, which is fantastic.
That’s amazing.
It’s amazing. And you know what it shows just how much strength and resilience there is in our community.
Yes.
We’re all worried. And understandably, we’re all worried, but it’s a sign that people are actually determined to stand up for what we believe in, stand up for our rights. And I think that’s something we can do as Jewish people is is however worried we are, let’s try and all, you know, be as strong as we can be, basically, and let’s support each other and speak to each other. And for people who aren’t Jewish, I think the most important thing is to reach out to any Jewish people, you know, and ask them how they’re feeling and tell them you care. And I know from people I’ve spoken to that really makes a difference.
Q - Yeah. How is it there’s no swell of protest, no demand that Hamas release those to whom they’ve kidnapped women and children?
A - Yeah, I mean I totally agree, and I think it says everything about these big rallies that they are not full of people calling on Hamas to release the hostages. You know it’s a very one-sided call for ceasefire.
Q - This is from Helen. Do you think that Iran is behind the organisation of large numbers of marches in the anti-Israel demonstrations? Are they mustering the large numbers of Muslims in Western countries and also pulling in the anti-European anti-Semites? This whole notion, to what extent is Iran behind all of this?
A - Yeah, so probably not as much as they would like to be. I mean, there’s no doubt that Iran is trying to stir things up, both through its kind of proxy organisations in this country, and through media and through social media, and so on. But Iran does not have that much sway in the British Muslim community, because it’s a sheer power, the vast majority of British Muslims are Sunni, they are getting their kind of political influences from other places. So, it’s sort of, it’s there, it’s within this movement and these demonstrations, but it’s not the prime mover.
Q - And this is Roger Levy, should we be encouraged or not that John Lansman of Momentum has recently voiced concerns about anti-Semitism on the left? Perhaps you could explain what Momentum is.
A - So, this was very interesting. So, Momentum is kind of a campaign group that was formed to support Jeremy Corbyn when he became Labour Party leader. It was like a shadow organisation to the Labour Party of the far left. And it was run by a guy called John Landsman, who has a long history on the far left of the Labour Party and is a Jewish guy. And he’s a very interesting character because he’s hung around, you know, and given his political support over the years to some very problematic people on the far left. But he himself, he does understand anti-Semitism, he’s not an anti-Zionist, he talks about his family, he’s got family in Israel. And he gave an interview very recently to the New Statesman, where he basically talks about how he thought the left had really lost its way when it came to Israel, and Zionism, and anti-Semitism, and had really fallen into some quite toxic positions. You know, if only everyone agreed with him in his political world, that would make life a lot easier.
Q - And this is from James, is it not obvious that the reason the Gaza war attracts large demonstrations is the fact there’s a huge minority of Muslims in this country?
A - Sorry, James, but that’s not it. That’s not it. There are a lot of Muslims on those protests, but there are also a lot of liberal, a lot of non-Muslims who are there because they’re from the liberal left, or they are young people for whom this is the latest fashionable cause after Me Too and Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter and so on and so on. It’s much broader than just saying this is all about Muslims. And that makes it a much deeper kind of challenge politically to try and deal with as well.
Q - This is from Mark, why do anti-Semites think that all Jews in the diaspora have control over the actions of Israel?
A - Yeah, exactly and this is something we see a lot is kind of holding Jewish people responsible for what Israel does and attacking us as like local Israel. And this doesn’t happen with any other foreign conflict. You know, after Russia invaded Ukraine, you didn’t get a big wave of anti-Russian hate crime in Britain, it just didn’t happen. But it happens to us every time. And it is part of this anti-semitic mindset that gets really, really angry about what they think Israel is doing and completely blurs any distinctions between Israel and Jews, and people who probably have anti-Semitic attitudes anyway, frankly, and just use this as an excuse.
This is very worrying from Phyllis. Here in Toronto, many people are frightened to be seen as Jews or supporting Israel and Jews. The supporters of Hamas and Gaza are far more vocal, but also physically aggressive. We’ve had bombings in Montreal, shootings at Montreal, Yeshiva and graffiti and threats against our politicians who support Israel and also at Jewish businesses.
Yeah, some of the incidents in Montreal have been really bad, really serious. Like Phyllis says, a couple of shootings, thankfully no one harmed, but obviously shooting at Jewish buildings and a firebombing of a synagogue. It’s a level of anti-Semitism we haven’t yet seen in Britain, but these things can spread, you know, when the protesters that we’re worried about call for, you know, global intifada and an intifada worldwide, this is what it looks like, this is the kind of thing that we’re talking about.
This is a long question from Professor Huberman. Is it not the case that Israel, the part of Israel say that support the current Prime Minister and the additional settlements are seen to be post-colonial oppressors. The colonials were the British who set up the seeds of potential conflict as they did in South Africa. The argument that makes a post-colonial oppressor argument understandable to some is that of a historically oppressed, of the historically oppressed becoming the oppressor by dint of protection and trauma inherited. I think this is something we’re going to have to have a lecture lecture on Lucy, I really think we’re going to have to get some locks and post-colonial theory and on this interesting point but that will take an hour. This is from Betty Abraham was taught about our need for self-esteem and I wonder how much Jewish ascendancy and success in so many spheres of life, out of all proportions, their numbers in the world creates an uncomfortable threat to an anti-Semites comfort level.
It’s an interesting argument, you know, there’s, you know, there’s an interesting line of thought that a lot of the anti-Semitic persecutions and kind of legal repressions in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were about economic competition, and envy of kind of the academic, and professional success of Jewish communities in countries. I think there’s always underlying prejudice, it’s not the economic competition argument is a bit too simplistic, but there’s definitely something in there of, especially if you look at Israel and the success that Israel has made of itself since 1948 in becoming economically, militarily so powerful and socially so successful for all its internal divisions. I do think it’s fascinating how all the internal divisions in the protest movement in Israel over the last year, which everyone thought were really, really profound and systemic divisions, of all basically everyone’s just come together right now. Even if they don’t, you know, people who still don’t like their government, but for when Israel is under attack, they all came together. I think that’s very admirable.
It is.
Yes. And this is from Adrian, perhaps the money for the Holocaust Memorial in the UK should be used for educational purposes. I think that’s very sensible. Yeah. Susan is saying you might enjoy this short BBC piece from October 2017. The headline reads, Canada forgot to mention Jewish people at Holocaust Memorial. Oh, well.
It does happen sometimes. It does, yeah, that’s the really extreme end of when it gets completely universalized.
Bobby says it seems that in the current maelstrom of violent hatred against Israel, Jews and Zionism, facts are irrelevant. Of course, that’s prevalent everywhere, but I think it’s rampant in the pro-Palestinian movement. How do we get the facts to matter again, a call for enlightenment and Russia-
It’s very difficult, but this is a really important because there is so much denial, so much misinformation, and so much denial that Hamas did anything wrong on the 7th of October. And a lot of the people marching against Israel, they simply don’t know or don’t believe that Israel had any right to attack Gaza or that Hamas did anything. And that is a really difficult thing to challenge because that is about misinformation online, it’s about how social media spreads things. And again, I come back to some of these things are… what we are facing is a symptom of much broader, and deeper challenges that operate across society, and across countries, and that we can’t fix on our own, and that needs to be fixed at governmental level, and at industry level.
And perhaps I might add, and we need a very high calibre of people in politics, don’t we? Well, that’s the talk for another day. That’s all.
I know, I hope you come back, Dave. You’ve got so much information. This is from Helen. I live in Prague; the Czech Republic is one of Israel’s staunchest allies. We’ve had two large peaceful demonstrations these last weeks, attended by the Prime Minister, the Chief Rabbi and Israel’s Ambassador. Yes, I read today that anti-Semitism is growing on student campuses here, it’s very disturbing.
I mean look, that kind of support for communities is really important. Support for authorities. And in Britain, we’ve had similar, you know, really strong support from across politics and police and from the royal family and so on. And it means a lot. And it’s vital, I think. But that doesn’t mean there’s no anti-Semitism. It doesn’t mean anti-Semitism won’t grow. Even if the anti-Semitism is perpetrated by a minority of people, you know, it can still grow and it can still become more open, you know, and there’s a question as to whether what we’re seeing is more people becoming antisemitic or just people with antisemitic attitudes becoming more emboldened to express them, or both?
This is from Zafira, who’s one of our Israeli participants. Lucky me being born in Israel, actually in Palestine, just before we got out of state, and living in Israel. I’ve never encountered anti-Semitism in my country. I’ve been exposed to it only in America and in Europe. And then she says, School books in the Gaza Strip for years are preaching hatred for Israelis all the way from the kindergarten and presenting us as devils, Mein Kampf, translated to Arabic, is on the list of obligatory books to be studied in the schools. Again, facts.
Yeah, exactly. And again, what’s taught in schools being really important.
This is from Yona. I think this is very interesting the problem in teaching history is traditionally, we started the beginning and work forward to be effective, we need to start with where our society is today, and from there jump back and forth in time to show how events in the past have led to today. Now, that’s from a born educator.
Yeah, it really is. And I have to say, I have to, that’s exactly the model that I took in my book, “Everyday Hate,” is that it’s very much a book about the here, and now and why the world is the way it is in terms of anti-Semitism. But you have to go back into history to explain that and go back and forth in that way.
Oh, this is from Lucy again. I resigned at a university professor a year ago, it’s not only what you need to give the students is how to educate the faculty, even at a senate meeting to discuss the IHRA definition of anti-semitism that UK universities didn’t wish to sign up to. I found they wouldn’t even uphold the Angela Merkel work around with her cabinet. This was thrown out as being potentially anti Palestinian This is because the Palestine course has captured many institutions for many reasons, some of which are being discussed here, but over a long period of time, like the Stonewall capture of institutions, which became very visible after some time. That is a very serious point, isn’t it, David?
It is, and there is a real long-term problem with academia, with the spreading of, excuse, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionism, and the whole kind of settler colonial narrative about Israel in academia, which has done a huge amount of damage. And if you look at these marches, and if you look at the number of people willing to justify the most appalling atrocities by Hamas in the name of decolonization, I think academia has a lot to answer for probably more than any other sector of society.
There’s a wonderful quote of Einstein’s you know, after the First World War he’s saying, he said, “I blame those teachers who never taught properly for 50 years.” Yeah, it’s this is from this is a Monty saying, you know, we’ll she’s going to be on lockdown on Thursday has a brilliant take on people demonstrating about Israel, she calls it the Disneyland of hate. I urge you to ask her to explain what she means, or we have the ENAT coming in on Thursday. There are so many questions. Why are the people who have never met a Jew, and have no religion part of the anti-Semitism problem?
Well because anti-Semitism is not about how real Jews actually behave. It’s a set of kind of abstract beliefs, conspiracy theories and myths about this kind of fantasy image of the Jewish conspirator, the powerful, wealthy Jew who’s to blame for everything. So, that’s why you get anti-Semitism in countries where there aren’t any Jews. I mean, there are plenty of countries around the world. You look at, you know, post-Holocaust Poland, that persecuted its very few remaining Jews in 1968, who left. You look at modern day Pakistan, you look at lots of countries around the world where there aren’t any Jewish people. You look at Shakespeare’s England, for example. anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews around for it to thrive. In fact, in some ways, it works better if there aren’t any real Jews for people to realise the anti-Semites are saying is nonsense.
And this is an important point, I’m concerned that your discussion ignores the inevitable effects on the general population of the woeful nature of the television coverage, not least by the BBC. I mean, this is something we touched on earlier, which is the media coverage of the conflict, and it puts it, it makes it so present in people’s minds in a way that other conflicts aren’t. And that’s before you get to the whole issue of, you know, bias and the whole question about why wouldn’t they call Hamas terrorists, and other kind of examples of language used, not just by the BBC, I have to say, I mean, you know, there was the whole scandal about the way the explosion at the hospital, the Al-Ali Hospital was reported, which news organisations all around the world immediately reproduced the Hamas line that it was an Israeli attack, and it killed 500 people, neither of which was true. And that one news story generated riots in several cities across the Middle East, firebombing of two synagogues in Berlin and in Tunisia, the disruption of the US President’s diplomatic initiative, all for one story that went around the world that wasn’t even true. So, it just shows the impacts of misleading media stories. A couple more points this is from elder, she said it’s just come in a plane of marches flew from Detroit to Washington DC for the big pro-Israel march, the buses that were supposed to take the people to the area refused to take them because they were Jewish, yet another form of anti-Semitism that stings and makes me angry. Yeah, I would be very angry.
Wow, yeah, that’s awful.
And Zafira from Israel is saying, we in Israel are very concerned and very offended by the pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic demonstrations. Oh, and this is a nice one. A local shop in Hendon put a notice in its window that, contrary to rumour, Jewish customers are welcome here.
Yeah, no, that’s a really important story, because one of the things that’s happened in the last, well, five weeks now is the number of rumours that have gone around the Jewish community that simply haven’t been true and that have caused a lot of anxiety and a lot of upset. And this was one of them, there was a rumour went round in Hendon, which is in North London where our office is, that there was a particular shop there that was refusing to serve Jewish customers. And it wasn’t true, I think the shopkeeper had had an argument with a Jewish customer over something else, something different. And so, in the end to counter this, he put a sign in his window saying, you know, Jews welcome. And it’s really important not to simply believe, you know, whatever the latest rumour is that you get on a family WhatsApp, or that you see on social media. If something really serious has happened, or is going to happen, or there’s a serious and imminent threat, you’ll hear it from CST, or the police, or equivalent organisation in your own countries or on, know national media, it won’t be something in a kind of unattributed anonymous screenshot that goes around on social media.
A lot of people are saying you’re absolutely brilliant. Oh, this is from Eva Simmons, I think this better be the last one, how can a lifelong lefty stay on the left given the appalling behaviour of so many.
I mean, that is how many people feel. And I know a lot of people who work on the left or are active on the left, who feel quite betrayed by the silence of their colleagues and friends on the left after the Hamas terror attack. And I guess it’s going to be a personal decision for people whether they stay in that political world or not, but I kind of feel like it’d be very wrong if progressive Jews were forced to give up their progressive values, and activism because of anti-Semitism. I think that would be an awful thing.
I think we better stop there, Dave. Look, I don’t know how to thank you for your wisdom, those brilliant books you’ve written, and also the fact that you’re out there every day fighting the fight. And I suppose the comfort is that we are really pulling together. Unfortunately, there’s about 30 or 40 questions we didn’t answer. We had an awful lot David we had nothing 90 questions. So, perhaps you’ll come back in the new year I know you’re incredibly busy but obviously people have gained a lot, and we’ve got to think of a way of getting education into the schools, Jewish education, and I’m talking about Jewish history into the schools. Anyway, again, thank you. Absolutely brilliant and keep fighting the fight. And the other thing I want to say about you, you are always so calm. A lot of people-
I have to be.
I don’t know obviously what goes on inside, but so many people when they have been speaking on these subjects have been so emotional, but I love the way you just keep it calm and rational when you deal with the irrational.
If you’d had me on in the sort of week, or two immediately after 7th of October, it might have sounded very different. But, you know, I think we all were absolutely so shocked by what happened. It sent an absolute shockwave through the Jewish world. Once we got over that initial period, then for those of us at CST, for those of us working in this field, it’s about, okay, let’s get on and do our work, let’s do our mission to protect the community, to help the community, support the community, because we will get through this.
And it’s amazing, on lockdown we’ve got people from every country, a lot of people live on their own, and everyone’s being so supportive of each other. And I think that is being echoed and just maybe out of this, we can get some good leadership and more initiatives and working more as a community. I think it’s time now, I think this has been a wake-up call.
Yeah, I think so. You know, every now and again we get something like this that really pulls people together, and you see the best of people. I think that’s what we need now.
We’re Jews, we have to be optimistic.
Yeah, of course. We’ve been through worse.
Yeah, we have. I would like to finish on a comment of my friend, Anita Laskowolf, she said, she was watching the march, and she said, I don’t care if they hate us, but I do care if they try and kill us. And when that came from a Holocaust survivor that really made me angry. I mean beyond that actually. Someone who, and I think that’s another area we haven’t even talked about the impact-
Yes.
It’s had on survivors.
Yeah, I know. And that’s very, that’s very sad and very upsetting, that whole side of things.
So anyway, thank you. Thanks a million. But can I hold you to it? You’ll come back in a couple of months.
Of course. Happy to.
All right. God bless. Take care, and thank you.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks, everyone. Trudy Gold - An Interview with Dr Dave Rich, Author of “The Left’s Jewish Problem and Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built”
- Well, good evening, everyone. It’s my great pleasure to reintroduce Dr. David Rich. He’s got, not only is he just produced two books that are so important today. He’s also the director of policy at CST, and every bit of any every anti-Semitic incident will pass his desk. Of course, he’s written two very important books. The first is on the left Jewish problem, and his last book, and I really advise you all to buy these books not only are they terribly important, and scholarly they’re written with a very easy style. And it’s full of all the information you need to know. So, his second book is “Everyday Hate.” So, those are the books. Welcome, David. Now, we plan to do this before October the 7th. We were just going to talk about your books. To what extent will October the 7th go down in your view as a very important day in that long history of the Jews?
Firstly, good evening, everyone, or good morning or afternoon depending on where you are. I think October the 7th has already left its mark in Jewish history, and it feels like a date we will be commemorating potentially forever. You know, we know in the Jewish calendar, there are terrible events in our history, going back centuries or even more, that we still remember every year. It’s something we do as a people. And it’s part of what keeps us together in a way, remembering that history. And I think one of the reasons why the attack on Israel on 7th of October had such a profound impact on the Jewish world as a whole is because we all instinctively felt right from the start that this was not just another round in the conflict in Israel, and Gaza of which we’ve seen every few years, it flares up. I think we all perceived immediately that this was different. This was of a different scale, a different character. And I think one reason why there has been so much shock and horror and grief, actually, across the Jewish world is because many of us felt it to be an attack on the Jewish people as a whole, and rather than something specifically within the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. And I think that will leave a permanent legacy in terms of what we remember and how we remember it.
And the hate that is being spewed out against Israel, and against the Jewish people from country to country to country, countries like Britain and Israel where they are, the governments are nominally supporting Israel. So, were you at all surprised by the level of the hatred that spewed out?
Well, let’s go back to the beginning.
[Trudy] Yeah.
When we woke up on the Shabbat morning, 7th of October, which was a festival, you know, supposed to be a happy weekend in the Jewish calendar. And we saw what was happening in Israel, we knew immediately there would be a spike in anti-Semitism because there is every time, you know, conflict flares up involving Israel, although this was of a different character, you could see where it was going to head. So, we knew there would be an increase in anti-Semitism. The numbers are higher and the rate is more than we’ve seen before. I mean, here in the UK, CST has logged over 1,200 anti-Semitic incidents across the UK since 7th of October. And to put that into perspective, we logged 803 incidents in the first six months of this year. So that just shows you the scale, it’s around five, 600% more than we would normally expect. And that’s more than previously. I think also what shocked a lot of people is the anti-Israel protests that we’ve seen that started within 24 hours of that attack on the 7th of October, when Israel had barely got going in terms of its response in Gaza, they were still trying to get all the Hamas terrorists out of Israel at that stage. There was nothing really that Israel had done to protest against. These were demonstrations to celebrate what Hamas had done. Let’s be clear about that. And they were smaller than the ones we’re seeing now, but that was the hardcore. And that’s their mushrooms. And so again, what we see every time Israel is at war, we get these big demonstrations against Israel of a kind that we never ever see for any other foreign conflict. And that in itself is just weird and not normal. And it that scares the community. And again, those have been bigger than ever before. So, I think there are, but I think the fact that this is all in response to, you know, how it started. It started with that Hamas terror attack, and we’ve seen a lot of denial of that. I think a lot of people going out protesting against Israel don’t believe that Hamas did anything or did anything wrong. So, there’s a lot of elements of it that are really quite shocking, I think, and that force us to re-evaluate this kind of cycle of activism that we’ve just got used to over the years.
I think in a way, somebody like you, who’s so on top of it, has been acutely aware, but I think a lot of people, we sleep, I can say that myself, I think we knew all about it, but somehow, we’ve been sleepwalking. Now, in terms of the kind of anti-Israel rhetoric that you’re getting, we know obviously about Hamas. To what extent do you think this, they’re using this palpable hatred is part of the Muslim community in Britain. Is there any way of breaking down figures on this?
Well, I think it’s more diffuse and diverse than some people think. And I think, you know, if you look at the marches and the rallies, it’s not a case of it’s just Muslims.
Oh no, I know that. I just wanted to see if you could break down the Muslims part first.
So, there is quite a lot of opinion polling about attitudes, anti-Semitic attitudes across different communities in Britain. And what they show is, anti-Semitism is more prevalent in Muslim communities, but even they’re not a majority position. You know, it’s not something most Muslims go along with, but it is more common in those communities. But it’s also very common across the whole of society. And one of the things that the opinion polling shows is that the extent of belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes and so on, it’s in the sort of, it’s bedded in the mainstream of society.
Yeah.
That’s where it is. It’s more obvious and perhaps a bit more vicious at the extremes, the extreme right and the extreme left and so on. But if you removed kind of Muslims from the equation, the amount of anti-Semitism in day-to-day life in British society would not shift very much. It wouldn’t really change that very much because it’s there just in the centre ground in a way. And that is of course, because anti-Semitism has always been around. It’s these assumptions and stereotypes have always been part of mainstream society. It’s not something that has come in with different minority communities. It’s got a much longer history.
And I think this is one of the reasons people must buy your book, because you really, really start at the beginning. You talk about the anti-Judaism; you talk brilliantly about the development of anti-Semitism. And you also say very strongly that we we fare best in a liberal society. When society becomes illiberal, as it certainly is at the moment, all the old canals come to the surface. Now, this notion of conspiracy theory is one that I’ve always found absolutely fascinating. Jews are communist, Jews are capitalists, Jews are everything you don’t want to be really. Now, it is the demonization of the Jew and so what you’re, are you saying that you don’t think it’s lessened at all?
No, it’s definitely lessened.
[Trudy] In fact, Israel’s given it another reason.
It’s definitely, look, if we look at the broad sweep of Jewish history and we look at our lives in Britain, the community that we’ve built, the freedoms and protections we have, things have definitely improved. I know there’s a lot of worry in the community right now and quite understandably so about the amount of anti-Semitism we’re seeing, it seems to kind of come out of nowhere. And it makes you worry, is this what everyone thinks? They just don’t say the rest of the time. And the reality is, this isn’t what everyone thinks. But the people who think it, right now, feel emboldened to say it, because of everything that’s going on. But we live in a society, all said and done, we live in a society, where it is thought of as a bad thing to be anti-Semitic. Even the anti-Semites don’t admit they’re anti-Semitic. Right, they come up with different names for it and different excuses for it and all the rest of it, even when expressing ideas that we all know are anti-Semitic. So, it’s not thought of as, you know, there’ve been times in history where being anti-Jewish has been thought of as a positive moral good. That’s not the world we live in now, right? And look, my great-grandparents came to this country from Ukraine, what is now Ukraine and Poland, what was part of the Russian Empire, about 120 years ago. Britain today is less openly anti-Semitic than the Britain they arrived in 120 years ago, nevermind how anti-Semitic the Russia they left was at the time.
We’re not back in the land of the pogroms. We’re in a liberal, democratic, free, open society with the rule of law, where the government and the police see their role as protecting the Jewish community from hate crime and extremism, right? We can get into the detail of whether they fulfil that role as well as we would like, okay, that’s a different issue. But in theory at least, they’re not the ones who are doing the persecuting. And we’ve seen in the past in history, what happens to Jewish communities when it’s the government and the police who actually turn against us rather than being the ones on our side. So, we have a lot going for us. And I would also say that for all the 300,000 people on these marches and for all the anti-Semitism we’re reading about and hearing about, the great mass of British people out there, the silent majority, still are on our side. I think anti-Semitism is appalling. You know, these are the people who rejected Jeremy Corbyn four years ago, partly because of anti-Semitism. And so, we have a lot going for us. And I think it’s not about downplaying the anti-Semitism is there because it’s there. And it’s my job to research it and highlight it and talk about it all the time. But I think we should never lose sight of everything we have going for us, all the friends and supporters we have. And the challenge for us is how do we harness all of that.
Okay, it’s what I’m interested in is how the conspiracy theories that Jews are still seen, almost as the pillars of the strings behind all the evils of the world by certain sections of the society. How, when you think of the powerlessness of the show because we have there was an example of policy in history. It’s the shower. So, what has happened is that many anti-Semites will go as far as to say, well, and this comes from the extreme left and certain sections of extreme Islam, or the Jews collect. Design is collaborated in the shower. I mean, Mahmoud Abbas, who many people hope will be able to sort things out, didn’t he do his PhD in that subject at Patrice Lumumba University? So even the, look, anti-Semitism is totally illogical. We both know that. But what I’m saying to you is what weapons do we have to fight the conspiracy theories? I was in a baker shop in Cornwall sympathising with the guy price of bread and he said yes, it’s the Rothschild conspiracy. I mean you can smile
Price of bread and cornwall around the last thing that I’ve ever things to do,
I mean, you know, om one level, you can give a Mel Brooks answer, but it’s-
Yeah look it this is the heart of it, right? Anti-semitism is all about conspiracy theories. I mean on one level it operates as just a general prejudice, people don’t like Jews. What gives it its its unique character and really distinguishes it from other types of prejudice is this conspiracy theory, this idea that it’s Jews pulling the strings, and Jews have all the power and all the rest of it, and we see it in the most ludicrous examples. I think the one you’ve just given, you know, typifies it. And the allegation that, you know, the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust is an example of this. It’s something, of course, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, came out with a few years ago, and there was massive controversy over that, because the idea that the Zionist movement in the 1930s and the early 1940s had anything like the power to influence what Nazi Germany did is itself a conspiracy trope, and a complete misreading of history. And I take I see it as a form of Holocaust revisionism.
Yes, we do.
Because it essentially removes some of the culpability for the Holocaust. It takes it off the shoulders of the Nazis and puts it onto the Zionists for a very obvious political reason, which is to try and delegitimize Zionism and Israel. And we see these conspiracy theories in all sorts of places. And it’s a real challenge because conspiracy theories are much more popular amongst younger people than amongst older people. And that is because they are so prevalent on social media. They are spread by social media. And there is a lot of polling that shows there’s a correlation between how young someone is, how much they rely on social media as their primary source of information and news, and whether they’re anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitic in terms of believing conspiracy theories. And whereas younger people are getting less racist in almost every other way, when it comes to Jews, they’re becoming more anti-Semitic than their elders because they’re more likely to believe Jews run the banks and the media and all the rest of it. Now, how do we deal with this? We, now we as Jews cannot solve that problem on our own because this is a problem of the pervasiveness of social media and the global spread of conspiracy theories, and misinformation. And it’s a challenge for governments. It’s something that affects everything across the whole of society. And we are one strand of that, but it’s not something we can, or should have to fix on our own.
Before we go further, I’d like you to explain a little how so many of the marchers would come from what you would consider themselves to be totally anti racist, who think of themselves as left wing. How come they are marching with Hamas supporters and people who want to destroy Israel, and people whose views in many other ways will be completely against anything they believe in?
So the-
This is what I find absolutely fascinating. We are we are the victim group that other victims find think of perpetrators.
I mean, not firstly, everyone thinks they’re anti racist nowadays. And this is what I mean, even racists think they’re anti racist. So that’s just, it’s just such a dominant moral value in our society not to be racist, that people, everyone feels they can’t deviate from that. And a lot of people on these marches will be there because they hate seeing the images of people getting killed every day and children being dug out of rubble in Gaza, and they wanted to stop, and they just think what’s more obvious than wanting a ceasefire and don’t complicate me with the politics of the conflicts, and that gets into the whole issue of just the amount of media coverage and why is that a war involving Israel is on the front pages and leading the nightly news every night for weeks when many more people die in other wars that never get a look in. But I think there is something deeper to it, which is why Israel attracts this amount of attention. This is the question never really gets answered satisfactorily by the people doing it, which is why is it that a war involving Israel can get 100,000 or 300,000 people on a demonstration when a foreign conflict, a different foreign conflict, would struggle to get 10,000?
And I’ve heard all the answers for this, all the explanations. You know that it’s about the occupation, it’s because Western governments support Israel, it’s because we sell them arms, it’s because we have a colonial history there, and all these answers also apply to other conflicts that no one else will march for. They apply to the Turkish suppression of Kurdish national ambitions; they apply to the war in Yemen and so on and so on. So, I don’t buy, I don’t think any of those explanations really add up. But I think if you look at the politics of what’s going on, what’s really interesting and alarming, but I think explains something, is this dominant narrative that has come through in that, in the anti-Israel movement, that Israel itself is a settler colonial entity, it’s a colony, it’s not-
An apartheid state.
Not just that it’s apartheid, but that it is not an authentic or legitimate nation state, that Jewish national identity is not authentic and legitimate, or even if it is, it’s kind of uniquely malevolent, and toxic, and therefore can’t be tolerated. And this is all about the narrative that it is a settler colonial entity, and that Israelis are colonisers, even if they’re born there, so however many generations, they’re colonisers and therefore they have no rights. And therefore, if Hamas go and kill them or kidnap them, well, you know, they’re on their land, what do you expect? And of course, remember that the kibbutzim and the towns in southern Israel that Hamas attacks were all on territory that has been part of Israel since 1948, that are recognised as part of Israel by every government and by the United Nations, that is not disputed land, unless you dispute the entire existence of Israel. You know, they’re not settlements in the way the West Bank settlements and so on and so on. And I think that the fact that people there are still people who will justify what Hamas did by saying, well, they’re on their land, says it all, it reveals a great deal about the just the sheer rejection of Israel’s existence by some people in that movement. Now, probably the 300,000 people on the big demo in London last Saturday, you know, if a two-state solution happens, probably most of them would, you know, accept it and move on. It’s not we’re not talking about all of them being really committed ideologues. A lot of people, a lot of them are there just because it’s fashionable. It’s the fashionable cause to go on a walk for on Saturday afternoon. But the people organising those rallies, they are hardcore ideologues, whether from the far left, from kind of Muslim Brotherhood aligned groups. And for them, Israel’s existence really is a problem. And that’s where the ideological framing of the this movement really comes from.
And I think also the hard left, I mean you’re-
Yes.
And can you can quite quickly explain how it comes from Russia because I think that’s absolutely fascinating, Because the way it infiltrated into broader thinking now.
I mean, look, it is very much from the left. Of the six groups organising these big rallies in London, two are from the far left, and four are kind of Muslim brotherhood groups, it’s a combination. And the left, as we know, traditionally up until the time of Israel’s creation, most of the left supported Zionism, the Soviet bloc in a very important way supported Zionism, supported the creation of the state of Israel and that left-wing sympathy for Israel continued, until the 1960s and people often look at the Six-Day War as the pivotal moment, when Israel went from the gallant underdog to kind of the military, the dominant military power, and the occupier and so on and so on. But there were other deeper trends going on, it wasn’t just that that war happened, and everyone flipped. Is that a new generation was emerging on the left who didn’t remember the fight against fascism in the 30s, and 40s and who had been brought up instead on decolonization and anti-imperialism as their animating cause in the 1960s, and into the 1970s, and the fight against apartheid and the Vietnam War, and so on and so on. And this is the generation that produced Jeremy Corbyn, and produced Roger Waters and produced Ken Livingstone, and people and Ken Loach and people of that ilk, and those kind of politics. And that was, as I say, that was a left-wing world dominated by anti-colonialism. And the Soviet Union was constantly trying to push its propaganda in there.
You know, there were big conferences of all these liberation movements across, you know, what was then called the Third World and now called the Global South, and also newly, you know, decolonized states and the Soviet Union would be there. And anti-Zionism and a real conspiracist anti-Semitic anti-Zionism was a really central part of Soviet propaganda pushed out to the Western left in English and other non-Russian languages from the 1960s onwards. And there was a real concerted effort to do it because they knew it was a way to recruit people. They knew it was very divisive, in particular in terms of the East German campaign against West Germany. It was very important. And it became really common on part of the left. And of course, it was the Soviet Union that inspired the United Nations resolution in 1975, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. And so, all of that framing we see in left-wing thought today, including in the liberal left, in other parts of the left, never followed the Moscow line in a direct way, was all influenced by a lot of that Soviet propaganda. And that Soviet propaganda was always very anti-Semitic in its anti-Zionism, not just in rejecting Israel and calling Israel apartheid and so on, but in constructing this idea of a global Zionist conspiracy against not just the Palestinians but against the left as well.
I mean, so you’ve got 2000 years of Jew hatred in the Christian world with certain amelioration, you now have this other issue. Howard Jacobson said something very interesting, he said “They can’t forgive us the Holocaust,” because your question, why do 300,000 people come out marching for against Israel, after one of the most appalling programmes that anyone could imagine. Isn’t it also to do with the fact that on one level they expect us to be their moral arbiters, at some deep psychological level? Why are we so central? I mean there are 15 million of us in the world, I mean how many Muslims are there? You know, look at the size of Israel, if you use any logic, Dave it’s just crazy.
I know, I mean this is also, you know, the Jewish world is a tiny world, Israel’s a tiny country, and we shouldn’t matter to other people as much as we do. On the other hand, we, you know, the Jewish people set ourselves up as moral arbiters in our, you know, foundational myths to be a light unto the nations and all the rest of it. So that is part of our moral code, to try and live to certain moral standards. And that’s something I think to embrace that we try and meet a certain moral standard ourselves. But I think the, you know, if you look at a lot of left-wing politics today, a lot of the identity politics that has really elevated the status of victimhood. And of course, this has very powerful Christian antecedent of martyrdom and victimhood in Christian theology. And then the Holocaust happens. And so much of the post war settlement in Europe was built around the rejection of the political ideas that led to Nazism and led to the Holocaust. And Holocaust commemoration has become a very central part of our national calendar and our national mythology of modern, tolerant, diverse societies, not specifically in a Jewish way, but in the countries, we live in. And so, the idea that the Jews are the ultimate victims, is a challenge for some people, especially if it interferes with their political, with their politics around Israel.
They have very close mindsets, haven’t they? I mean, nobody-
Well, it leads to this idea that, you know, Zionists and Nazis and all the rest of it, it’s a way to square that circle.
And never any mention of the fate of the Jews of the Arab world. Yeah, that gets missed. And that gets missed in the narrative that Israel is a white supremacist state and European colonisers, and so on. And the fact that, you know, half the Israeli population is not from Europe, is Mizrahi Jews and Ethiopian Jews and others, and that all gets just all those nuances get flattened out in this very simplistic narrative.
So, it’s a simplistic narrative, it’s an ideology. I’d now come on to Holocaust memorialization because somehow, and I’ve been involved in Holocaust education for 40 years, but my analysis now is that it’s been de-Judaized.
I mean this is the, yeah, this is the way.
I mean, look the it’s commemorated along with other genocides and I’m not in any way decrying anyone else’s tragedy because that been so many, but the point is, people don’t somehow understand they don’t know anything about Jewish history, they don’t understand why it happens so you I, and I remember looking at the GCSE syllabus a few years ago, Jews appear on it, either in the Holocaust or the Arab Israeli conflict. And at that time, it was taught 1948 to 67. You know, you have always been quite optimistic, and I suppose the big question, what on earth is that anything because we’re talking rationality really are we, we’re looking at the situation through a rational prism. Is there anything we can do about it? I mean there’s that great quote of Isaiah Berlin on the subject of anti-Semitism. Of course, we’re paranoid with our history. We need to be. And I’m having very rational friends of mine thinking, well, maybe we should emigrate. And the question is where to this time? So, what can we do?
Yeah, I mean, there’s always things we can do. There’s always things we can do. I mean, the issue of Holocaust commemoration is a really interesting one because, you know, as I was saying, lots of countries, you know, across Europe and the United States and others have taken on Holocaust commemoration as an expression of our nation’s core values of diversity, and tolerance and rule of law and rejection of racism, and rejection of dictatorship and all the rest of it. And in some ways, that’s good, and that’s something Jewish communities have pushed for. But like you say, there is always this balance between teaching about the Holocaust in a very particularist way, that this is about Jews and it’s about anti-Semitism. And we want people to remember that and to understand that there is a very long history of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, and it was not random chance that it was the Jews that the Nazis picked on as their scapegoat to target for extermination. There was no other minority that really would have fitted exactly that bill. I mean, we were not the only minority persecuted by the Nazis. There was genocide of Roma and Sinti, and of gay people, and so on. But the Nazi ideological kind of clothing that they put on to the Jews could only have been put on to Jews. Now, on the other hand, you have this universalist way of trying to get everyone to embrace the memory of the Holocaust and remember it and absorb its lessons in the hope that therefore it won’t happen again. And there’s always this balance, and if you over-universalise it and you miss the Jewish aspect, you don’t teach about the whole history of anti-Semitism. Sometimes I think the Holocaust, people think the Holocaust just drops out of a clear blue sky.
Yeah, if you look at the syllabus in most schools, that’s exactly what happens. Yeah, or they think it’s, you know, it was part of war, and it happens in war. And it’s not really that either. So, I think there are things for us to learn in that respect for how better to teach, not just about the Holocaust, but about the history of anti-Semitism. And if you teach it as part of a much longer story, then it’s much easier to explain. And by the way, anti-Semitism didn’t end with the Holocaust, because that’s the danger, is that people think it’s something in history. And for young people, it’s so far back in history now, you know, it may as well be teaching about the tutors. So, it didn’t end with the Holocaust. And it isn’t only Nazis who are anti-Semitic. And those are really important things to teach about. But I do think-
How are we going to do it? No, you see, it’s not, it’s the schools, it’s the universities. And I hate to say it, the majority of our own kids aren’t taught the history of the Jews, let alone the history of anti-Semitism. And I think that’s why so many of them are very bewildered. I think there is much more appetite out there to learn about Jewish life today, Jewish culture, and Jewish history than there was even five years ago. I feel this in my work, the amount of interest we get and requests we get at CST, the amount of stuff going out, all out there to revive the history of Jews in mediaeval England, which is a whole other story that is completely forgotten about and needs to be remembered. And you’re starting to get more and more towns, and cities around the country, looking to try and revive that history as part of a celebration of their own diversity, and multiculturalism and so on. So, I think there are some really positive sort of green shoots going on there that we could add to, and we could really encourage.
I think it’s got to go on the curriculum. Yeah, because I think it’s because it enough. It’s that, and you asked what’s the new anti semitism. I mean, Jonathan sack said it beautifully. First, they hate our religion, then they hate our race now they hate our nation, because the kind of appropriate as you said, Israel gets is like nothing anywhere else in the world. And I’ve actually mentioned this to a couple of left-wing Jewish from less left-wing non-Jewish friends. There aren’t many of them left in my life anymore. I’m fine. It’s very painful for me. I’m going to say that. But then they say, oh, this is what about to read. We expect you to understand. And it’s so on one level, as I said before, they put us up on this high moral pedestal. And on the other level, they want to push us over. So, when Israel in inverted commas, steps out of line, and honestly, anyone who looks at the pictures coming out of Gaza is going to feel screened. It’s horrible. Anytime a baby’s killed, it’s horrible. But they’re not in any way thinking, well, Hamas did this. So, there’s no leeway for them.
I do think, you know, if every other war in the world got the same amount of media coverage and scrutiny as Israel’s wars do, there’d be a lot less war going on. And this comes with that, you know, if people want to pay attention to Israel you know, to Israel and demonstrate against Israel, fine, whatever, that’s up to them. What I want explaining is the gap between that and the lack of interest in everything else. It’s that gap, that difference that I think unnerves people in the Jewish community and makes people ask, well, what is actually going on there? You know, I do think in answer to your point, you know, we have Holocaust education on the curriculum in Britain. It’s been there for over 30 years, and it’s done a good job in teaching about the Holocaust. But I think what we’ve learned is it doesn’t actually necessarily help teach in a broader sense about anti-Semitism and about Jewish life, both in history and today, and I do think there is a piece of work to be done to improve in both of those areas in terms of teaching.
I actually think it’s even, as I said, I think I’ve got the right to say it because I’ve been involved for 40 years, I sat on IRA. I’ve even got to the stage now where I think it’s counterproductive, but I really think that if there’s any way that we can get Jewish history on the syllabus. And then you’ve got the issue of the universities and the how so many academics have become entrenched in their anti-Zionism anti-Semitism. So, I don’t know if grandparents, other grandparents, parents, friends of mine are being alarmist, but the talk now is not what university can our kid go to study this subject or that, but which one’s safe? Is that alarmist?
I mean, look, it’s understandable people feel that way, but all the universities are safe in a physical sense, you know, right? But what university students are facing at the moment is anti-Semitic comments, anti-Semitic graffiti, threats on social media, it’s horrible stuff, and it is alarming and it is very upsetting for the students and look at CST we have a full-time team, campus team, who go around the country the whole time supporting students and helping them with this so we know what’s going on.
Yeah, of course-
I also know that generations of Jewish students have put up with this stuff. And like everything in anti-Semitism, one of it’s new. That doesn’t mean it’s okay. It doesn’t mean we have to just shrug and put up with it. We shouldn’t have to put up with this. But it does mean we have experience of dealing with it. And the answer is not to hide away. You know, the answer, especially with campus, I think, is what can we give our students to make sure they have the strength and the resilience and the resources to deal with this, to deal with this kind of ignorance in a lot of cases, sheer ignorance, and some hatred and nastiness, and to firstly, know how to argue back, to know how to stand up not just for themselves, but for each other, because the strength in numbers and this is where Jewish societies and the Union of Jewish students can play a really important role in Jewish students supporting each other. And I know that’s easier at some campuses than others because some campuses there really are not many Jewish students, I know that, and that’s where we and UJS’s external bodies can help and really give that extra support but, you know, and that applies across the Jewish community at the moment. There’s a lot of fear in the community a lot of anxiety about what the future holds, and I get that that it’s as totally understandable. But, you know, there’s also a lot of strength, and there’s a lot of resilience. And for every story I hear about people, I do know, Yamaka, and wearing a baseball cap instead. I also hear stories about people who’ve gone out and bought a Magna David necklace for the first time, because they’re proud of their identity. And they want to show it and both responses are completely legitimate and understandable. I would never criticise anyone either way.
Well, I would.
We do have to, you know, as a community. You know, it looks like this conflict is going to go on for a while and it looks like things are going to go back to normal for a while. And however fearful we all are, we need to find it within ourselves to be a bit stronger than wherever we are at the moment, and find that resilience, and support each other and have that strength together as a community to get through this. Because I do think we have it within us to get through this.
And we are pulling together as a community far more, I think, than I’ve seen for a long time. And I think my last question before we turn it over. We know that in some of the mosques and in some of the schools, children are taught to hate Israel. We live in a liberal society, that wonderful, that we have freedom of speech, is this kind of event, going to curtail freedom of speech to make people feel safer? Are we at that terrible crossroads for any liberal society where we have to curtail certain freedoms to protect the majority?
I mean, it’s a really interesting question, it’s a really difficult challenge as you say because the whole point is to have those freedoms, and we all benefit from those, and we all enjoy them, but I think we’ve probably all seen some language, and some behaviours on some of the protests, and so on that are quite obviously quite harmful, and quite damaging but maybe slip through one, or two loopholes in the law that could do with being tightened. You know there’s been a lot of talk about the police aren’t arresting people and so on, actually the police are arresting and charging people for a whole range of stuff that even two years ago during the last conflict they weren’t doing. So, we have seen progress there. We are getting more and more people arrested and charged for stuff they’re saying and carrying on the demos, which is good. It’s progress. But still, there are things happening that aren’t getting people aren’t getting arrested for. And it may be that that’s because actually there isn’t quite a law written in the right way to deal with it. And we could do with tightening that up to deal with, you know, what’s been labelled hateful extremism. And it’s the kind of stuff, it’s not about things that are offensive or upsetting, because in an open society, we have to put up with a certain amount of things being upsetting and offensive. It’s about language that is dangerous and harmful because it incites hatred. And that’s where I think it’s really important to make sure that the law will act to protect the freedoms ultimately that we all enjoy.
David, I can see about 50 questions. So, I’m going to start. Let me open them month, please. I’m going to go off. Sorry, I’ve done this wrong. Yeah, that’s better. Now, let’s have a look at questions now.
Q&A and Comments:
This is from Stuart Seidel. Right now there’s a huge rally, March for Israel, March to Free Hostages, and March against anti-Semitism on the National Mall in Washington. Members of Congress, the administration, and the residents of Israel via satellite, as well as many performers from all over the US and Israel have spoken. Hundreds of thousands from all over America has shown up. And this is from David. CNN is reporting 60,000. So, that’s something interesting. Oh, this is from, yeah, no, this is in America. And then Dr. Phillips is saying here in North London, some Uber drivers are refusing to pick up Jewish passengers.
- I mean, if you get, it’s something like that. I saw that Matt Chorley, who writes for the Times, tweeted last night about an anti-Semitic comments made to him by an Uber driver. If you do experience anything like that, any anti-Semitism, whether from an Uber driver or anyone else, please report it to CST if you’re in the UK, or to equivalent organisations if you’re in other countries, because we can get action taken if it’s criminal, we can report it to the police. If it’s something like this, we can get a complaint to Uber and get the driver disciplined for it. We’ve had examples of I mean, everyone saw the video of the or a lot of people have seen the video of the tube driver leading a chant of free Palestine on the weekend of one of the demos, and he got suspended. There’s other cases with other examples on transport of things like that where we’ve taken action and people have been suspended. So, please do report it to CST.
Q - Stephen says, many in the anti-Israel demonstrations of white and young has Holocaust education in the UK failed?
A - I mean this is what we’ve been discussing-
That’s what we’ve discussed.
It’s Holocaust education, it teaches about the Holocaust and what we’ve learned is it won’t teach about other types of anti-Semitism and frankly if what you take away from Holocaust education is that the Holocaust is the anti-Semitism is something that is only done by Nazis and that was done you know nearly 100 years ago in the past and is part of history, then it isn’t necessarily going to help you understand what Hamas did, because that’s just in a totally different context.
And all you’ve got to do is read Dave’s book, or read Robert Wistrich’s book. There are so many good books on this now, and we’ve just got to get the information into the schools. This is from David Rubin on this same point, Dave. I live in Ontario. Recently, the government have mandated Holocaust education to be given to schoolchildren. You see, it’s a panacea, isn’t it?
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s mandated and it just, it can’t do what it can’t do, you know, and we have to think about other ways to deal with the anti-Semitism of today. One of those ways also to think about is, you know, we are a very small community and how many people in Britain actually know any Jews, have any Jewish friends? Most Jewish kids go to Jewish schools, so how many non-Jewish kids have Jewish friends at their schools’? And the answer is not many. And so, what do we have to do as a community to overcome those problems and encourage and generate the kind of human contact that does break down prejudice? That’s a challenge for us to think about.
This is a nice one for you. I’m afraid because we’ve got so many questions I’m having to pick and choose. What is it about anti Semites that they don’t accept Jews were the parents of Jesus and that Jesus himself was a Jew, such that they lack empathy for Jews and don’t value that lineage. Well, if you’re going back, if we’re going back that far, of course, the kind of anti-Jewish narratives that were developed in the early centuries of early Christian thought are in some ways the kind of bedrock and the precursors of the anti-Semitism we see today, precisely because Christianity was a breakaway from Judaism. And the early Christian writers and thinkers who kind of shaped this new religion. Because of that they did it in in relation to and rejection of the old faith that they were leaving behind, and a whole set of anti-Jewish discourses, and narratives were developed at that time, and you can see the lineage from all the way back there to now.
That’s what needs to be taught. This is an interesting question. How can you harness the goodwill of the silent majority to speak out against anti-Semitism and join the peace rally?
I mean, that is the million-dollar question, basically. You know, we saw during the Jeremy Corbyn years that once the message, once people had to really think seriously about who Jeremy Corbyn was because he wanted to be their prime minister and they were going to have to vote for or against, and they started to look in more detail at his views and at things he’d said and done, then you had people who had never thought about Jews or anti-Semitism before, for the very first time, starting to think about it, and basically came to the conclusion that anti-Semitism was just not British. It wasn’t how the British people like to think of themselves. Now, put to one side whether historically, you know, how much anti-Semitism has been part of this country, whatever, it’s not how British people wanted to think of themselves or as their country, and they thought it went against their values. And they just saw the anti-Semitism of Corbyn as one of several reasons why they just didn’t like him. They thought he was basically a wrong-un. He was not a good guy. And that only really happened because it affected them, because they had to vote in a general election. It’s very hard to get people, the vast majority of people, who don’t pay that much attention to the news, who don’t care about Jews or about Israel. And we think in our bubble, everyone cares deeply about it for or against. Actually, most people don’t care at all. And the challenge is to try and reach those people, you know, and make them realise that this is something that says something about Britain as a whole, as a country, that if they are forced to take an opinion they won’t like, they won’t like the anti-Semitism.
But there is another side to this because I know a lot of English people are being deeply offended by these rallies. For some I think it’s just a horror of extremism, and for others it might bring out another strain which we would also not like. That’s true, I mean it does, you get the kind of, like you say, there is a rejection of extremism, there’s also very much a strand that we’ve seen on the streets recently of kind of Islamophobic intolerance towards these rallies, but mostly people don’t like these rallies because it’s just, so inconvenient because it clogs up the city centre every Saturday. I think people are getting fed up with it.
Q - And Monica asks the question, what can we do as individuals to counter it?
A - You know, I think as Jewish people, it’s about and there’s different answers for different people here. I think as Jewish people, there’s definitely things we can do. One of them is a lot. I’m obviously going to say this join CST volunteer for CST we can take. We’ve had over 1000 new volunteers come forward and join CST since 7th of October, which is fantastic.
That’s amazing.
It’s amazing. And you know what it shows just how much strength and resilience there is in our community.
Yes.
We’re all worried. And understandably, we’re all worried, but it’s a sign that people are actually determined to stand up for what we believe in, stand up for our rights. And I think that’s something we can do as Jewish people is is however worried we are, let’s try and all, you know, be as strong as we can be, basically, and let’s support each other and speak to each other. And for people who aren’t Jewish, I think the most important thing is to reach out to any Jewish people, you know, and ask them how they’re feeling and tell them you care. And I know from people I’ve spoken to that really makes a difference.
Q - Yeah. How is it there’s no swell of protest, no demand that Hamas release those to whom they’ve kidnapped women and children?
A - Yeah, I mean I totally agree, and I think it says everything about these big rallies that they are not full of people calling on Hamas to release the hostages. You know it’s a very one-sided call for ceasefire.
Q - This is from Helen. Do you think that Iran is behind the organisation of large numbers of marches in the anti-Israel demonstrations? Are they mustering the large numbers of Muslims in Western countries and also pulling in the anti-European anti-Semites? This whole notion, to what extent is Iran behind all of this?
A - Yeah, so probably not as much as they would like to be. I mean, there’s no doubt that Iran is trying to stir things up, both through its kind of proxy organisations in this country, and through media and through social media, and so on. But Iran does not have that much sway in the British Muslim community, because it’s a sheer power, the vast majority of British Muslims are Sunni, they are getting their kind of political influences from other places. So, it’s sort of, it’s there, it’s within this movement and these demonstrations, but it’s not the prime mover.
Q - And this is Roger Levy, should we be encouraged or not that John Lansman of Momentum has recently voiced concerns about anti-Semitism on the left? Perhaps you could explain what Momentum is.
A - So, this was very interesting. So, Momentum is kind of a campaign group that was formed to support Jeremy Corbyn when he became Labour Party leader. It was like a shadow organisation to the Labour Party of the far left. And it was run by a guy called John Landsman, who has a long history on the far left of the Labour Party and is a Jewish guy. And he’s a very interesting character because he’s hung around, you know, and given his political support over the years to some very problematic people on the far left. But he himself, he does understand anti-Semitism, he’s not an anti-Zionist, he talks about his family, he’s got family in Israel. And he gave an interview very recently to the New Statesman, where he basically talks about how he thought the left had really lost its way when it came to Israel, and Zionism, and anti-Semitism, and had really fallen into some quite toxic positions. You know, if only everyone agreed with him in his political world, that would make life a lot easier.
Q - And this is from James, is it not obvious that the reason the Gaza war attracts large demonstrations is the fact there’s a huge minority of Muslims in this country?
A - Sorry, James, but that’s not it. That’s not it. There are a lot of Muslims on those protests, but there are also a lot of liberal, a lot of non-Muslims who are there because they’re from the liberal left, or they are young people for whom this is the latest fashionable cause after Me Too and Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter and so on and so on. It’s much broader than just saying this is all about Muslims. And that makes it a much deeper kind of challenge politically to try and deal with as well.
Q - This is from Mark, why do anti-Semites think that all Jews in the diaspora have control over the actions of Israel?
A - Yeah, exactly and this is something we see a lot is kind of holding Jewish people responsible for what Israel does and attacking us as like local Israel. And this doesn’t happen with any other foreign conflict. You know, after Russia invaded Ukraine, you didn’t get a big wave of anti-Russian hate crime in Britain, it just didn’t happen. But it happens to us every time. And it is part of this anti-semitic mindset that gets really, really angry about what they think Israel is doing and completely blurs any distinctions between Israel and Jews, and people who probably have anti-Semitic attitudes anyway, frankly, and just use this as an excuse.
This is very worrying from Phyllis. Here in Toronto, many people are frightened to be seen as Jews or supporting Israel and Jews. The supporters of Hamas and Gaza are far more vocal, but also physically aggressive. We’ve had bombings in Montreal, shootings at Montreal, Yeshiva and graffiti and threats against our politicians who support Israel and also at Jewish businesses.
Yeah, some of the incidents in Montreal have been really bad, really serious. Like Phyllis says, a couple of shootings, thankfully no one harmed, but obviously shooting at Jewish buildings and a firebombing of a synagogue. It’s a level of anti-Semitism we haven’t yet seen in Britain, but these things can spread, you know, when the protesters that we’re worried about call for, you know, global intifada and an intifada worldwide, this is what it looks like, this is the kind of thing that we’re talking about.
This is a long question from Professor Huberman. Is it not the case that Israel, the part of Israel say that support the current Prime Minister and the additional settlements are seen to be post-colonial oppressors. The colonials were the British who set up the seeds of potential conflict as they did in South Africa. The argument that makes a post-colonial oppressor argument understandable to some is that of a historically oppressed, of the historically oppressed becoming the oppressor by dint of protection and trauma inherited. I think this is something we’re going to have to have a lecture lecture on Lucy, I really think we’re going to have to get some locks and post-colonial theory and on this interesting point but that will take an hour. This is from Betty Abraham was taught about our need for self-esteem and I wonder how much Jewish ascendancy and success in so many spheres of life, out of all proportions, their numbers in the world creates an uncomfortable threat to an anti-Semites comfort level.
It’s an interesting argument, you know, there’s, you know, there’s an interesting line of thought that a lot of the anti-Semitic persecutions and kind of legal repressions in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were about economic competition, and envy of kind of the academic, and professional success of Jewish communities in countries. I think there’s always underlying prejudice, it’s not the economic competition argument is a bit too simplistic, but there’s definitely something in there of, especially if you look at Israel and the success that Israel has made of itself since 1948 in becoming economically, militarily so powerful and socially so successful for all its internal divisions. I do think it’s fascinating how all the internal divisions in the protest movement in Israel over the last year, which everyone thought were really, really profound and systemic divisions, of all basically everyone’s just come together right now. Even if they don’t, you know, people who still don’t like their government, but for when Israel is under attack, they all came together. I think that’s very admirable.
It is.
Yes. And this is from Adrian, perhaps the money for the Holocaust Memorial in the UK should be used for educational purposes. I think that’s very sensible. Yeah. Susan is saying you might enjoy this short BBC piece from October 2017. The headline reads, Canada forgot to mention Jewish people at Holocaust Memorial. Oh, well.
It does happen sometimes. It does, yeah, that’s the really extreme end of when it gets completely universalized.
Bobby says it seems that in the current maelstrom of violent hatred against Israel, Jews and Zionism, facts are irrelevant. Of course, that’s prevalent everywhere, but I think it’s rampant in the pro-Palestinian movement. How do we get the facts to matter again, a call for enlightenment and Russia-
It’s very difficult, but this is a really important because there is so much denial, so much misinformation, and so much denial that Hamas did anything wrong on the 7th of October. And a lot of the people marching against Israel, they simply don’t know or don’t believe that Israel had any right to attack Gaza or that Hamas did anything. And that is a really difficult thing to challenge because that is about misinformation online, it’s about how social media spreads things. And again, I come back to some of these things are… what we are facing is a symptom of much broader, and deeper challenges that operate across society, and across countries, and that we can’t fix on our own, and that needs to be fixed at governmental level, and at industry level.
And perhaps I might add, and we need a very high calibre of people in politics, don’t we? Well, that’s the talk for another day. That’s all.
I know, I hope you come back, Dave. You’ve got so much information. This is from Helen. I live in Prague; the Czech Republic is one of Israel’s staunchest allies. We’ve had two large peaceful demonstrations these last weeks, attended by the Prime Minister, the Chief Rabbi and Israel’s Ambassador. Yes, I read today that anti-Semitism is growing on student campuses here, it’s very disturbing.
I mean look, that kind of support for communities is really important. Support for authorities. And in Britain, we’ve had similar, you know, really strong support from across politics and police and from the royal family and so on. And it means a lot. And it’s vital, I think. But that doesn’t mean there’s no anti-Semitism. It doesn’t mean anti-Semitism won’t grow. Even if the anti-Semitism is perpetrated by a minority of people, you know, it can still grow and it can still become more open, you know, and there’s a question as to whether what we’re seeing is more people becoming antisemitic or just people with antisemitic attitudes becoming more emboldened to express them, or both?
This is from Zafira, who’s one of our Israeli participants. Lucky me being born in Israel, actually in Palestine, just before we got out of state, and living in Israel. I’ve never encountered anti-Semitism in my country. I’ve been exposed to it only in America and in Europe. And then she says, School books in the Gaza Strip for years are preaching hatred for Israelis all the way from the kindergarten and presenting us as devils, Mein Kampf, translated to Arabic, is on the list of obligatory books to be studied in the schools. Again, facts.
Yeah, exactly. And again, what’s taught in schools being really important.
This is from Yona. I think this is very interesting the problem in teaching history is traditionally, we started the beginning and work forward to be effective, we need to start with where our society is today, and from there jump back and forth in time to show how events in the past have led to today. Now, that’s from a born educator.
Yeah, it really is. And I have to say, I have to, that’s exactly the model that I took in my book, “Everyday Hate,” is that it’s very much a book about the here, and now and why the world is the way it is in terms of anti-Semitism. But you have to go back into history to explain that and go back and forth in that way.
Oh, this is from Lucy again. I resigned at a university professor a year ago, it’s not only what you need to give the students is how to educate the faculty, even at a senate meeting to discuss the IHRA definition of anti-semitism that UK universities didn’t wish to sign up to. I found they wouldn’t even uphold the Angela Merkel work around with her cabinet. This was thrown out as being potentially anti Palestinian This is because the Palestine course has captured many institutions for many reasons, some of which are being discussed here, but over a long period of time, like the Stonewall capture of institutions, which became very visible after some time. That is a very serious point, isn’t it, David?
It is, and there is a real long-term problem with academia, with the spreading of, excuse, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionism, and the whole kind of settler colonial narrative about Israel in academia, which has done a huge amount of damage. And if you look at these marches, and if you look at the number of people willing to justify the most appalling atrocities by Hamas in the name of decolonization, I think academia has a lot to answer for probably more than any other sector of society.
There’s a wonderful quote of Einstein’s you know, after the First World War he’s saying, he said, “I blame those teachers who never taught properly for 50 years.” Yeah, it’s this is from this is a Monty saying, you know, we’ll she’s going to be on lockdown on Thursday has a brilliant take on people demonstrating about Israel, she calls it the Disneyland of hate. I urge you to ask her to explain what she means, or we have the ENAT coming in on Thursday. There are so many questions. Why are the people who have never met a Jew, and have no religion part of the anti-Semitism problem?
Well because anti-Semitism is not about how real Jews actually behave. It’s a set of kind of abstract beliefs, conspiracy theories and myths about this kind of fantasy image of the Jewish conspirator, the powerful, wealthy Jew who’s to blame for everything. So, that’s why you get anti-Semitism in countries where there aren’t any Jews. I mean, there are plenty of countries around the world. You look at, you know, post-Holocaust Poland, that persecuted its very few remaining Jews in 1968, who left. You look at modern day Pakistan, you look at lots of countries around the world where there aren’t any Jewish people. You look at Shakespeare’s England, for example. anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews around for it to thrive. In fact, in some ways, it works better if there aren’t any real Jews for people to realise the anti-Semites are saying is nonsense.
And this is an important point, I’m concerned that your discussion ignores the inevitable effects on the general population of the woeful nature of the television coverage, not least by the BBC. I mean, this is something we touched on earlier, which is the media coverage of the conflict, and it puts it, it makes it so present in people’s minds in a way that other conflicts aren’t. And that’s before you get to the whole issue of, you know, bias and the whole question about why wouldn’t they call Hamas terrorists, and other kind of examples of language used, not just by the BBC, I have to say, I mean, you know, there was the whole scandal about the way the explosion at the hospital, the Al-Ali Hospital was reported, which news organisations all around the world immediately reproduced the Hamas line that it was an Israeli attack, and it killed 500 people, neither of which was true. And that one news story generated riots in several cities across the Middle East, firebombing of two synagogues in Berlin and in Tunisia, the disruption of the US President’s diplomatic initiative, all for one story that went around the world that wasn’t even true. So, it just shows the impacts of misleading media stories. A couple more points this is from elder, she said it’s just come in a plane of marches flew from Detroit to Washington DC for the big pro-Israel march, the buses that were supposed to take the people to the area refused to take them because they were Jewish, yet another form of anti-Semitism that stings and makes me angry. Yeah, I would be very angry.
Wow, yeah, that’s awful.
And Zafira from Israel is saying, we in Israel are very concerned and very offended by the pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic demonstrations. Oh, and this is a nice one. A local shop in Hendon put a notice in its window that, contrary to rumour, Jewish customers are welcome here.
Yeah, no, that’s a really important story, because one of the things that’s happened in the last, well, five weeks now is the number of rumours that have gone around the Jewish community that simply haven’t been true and that have caused a lot of anxiety and a lot of upset. And this was one of them, there was a rumour went round in Hendon, which is in North London where our office is, that there was a particular shop there that was refusing to serve Jewish customers. And it wasn’t true, I think the shopkeeper had had an argument with a Jewish customer over something else, something different. And so, in the end to counter this, he put a sign in his window saying, you know, Jews welcome. And it’s really important not to simply believe, you know, whatever the latest rumour is that you get on a family WhatsApp, or that you see on social media. If something really serious has happened, or is going to happen, or there’s a serious and imminent threat, you’ll hear it from CST, or the police, or equivalent organisation in your own countries or on, know national media, it won’t be something in a kind of unattributed anonymous screenshot that goes around on social media.
A lot of people are saying you’re absolutely brilliant. Oh, this is from Eva Simmons, I think this better be the last one, how can a lifelong lefty stay on the left given the appalling behaviour of so many.
I mean, that is how many people feel. And I know a lot of people who work on the left or are active on the left, who feel quite betrayed by the silence of their colleagues and friends on the left after the Hamas terror attack. And I guess it’s going to be a personal decision for people whether they stay in that political world or not, but I kind of feel like it’d be very wrong if progressive Jews were forced to give up their progressive values, and activism because of anti-Semitism. I think that would be an awful thing.
I think we better stop there, Dave. Look, I don’t know how to thank you for your wisdom, those brilliant books you’ve written, and also the fact that you’re out there every day fighting the fight. And I suppose the comfort is that we are really pulling together. Unfortunately, there’s about 30 or 40 questions we didn’t answer. We had an awful lot David we had nothing 90 questions. So, perhaps you’ll come back in the new year I know you’re incredibly busy but obviously people have gained a lot, and we’ve got to think of a way of getting education into the schools, Jewish education, and I’m talking about Jewish history into the schools. Anyway, again, thank you. Absolutely brilliant and keep fighting the fight. And the other thing I want to say about you, you are always so calm. A lot of people-
I have to be.
I don’t know obviously what goes on inside, but so many people when they have been speaking on these subjects have been so emotional, but I love the way you just keep it calm and rational when you deal with the irrational.
If you’d had me on in the sort of week, or two immediately after 7th of October, it might have sounded very different. But, you know, I think we all were absolutely so shocked by what happened. It sent an absolute shockwave through the Jewish world. Once we got over that initial period, then for those of us at CST, for those of us working in this field, it’s about, okay, let’s get on and do our work, let’s do our mission to protect the community, to help the community, support the community, because we will get through this.
And it’s amazing, on lockdown we’ve got people from every country, a lot of people live on their own, and everyone’s being so supportive of each other. And I think that is being echoed and just maybe out of this, we can get some good leadership and more initiatives and working more as a community. I think it’s time now, I think this has been a wake-up call.
Yeah, I think so. You know, every now and again we get something like this that really pulls people together, and you see the best of people. I think that’s what we need now.
We’re Jews, we have to be optimistic.
Yeah, of course. We’ve been through worse.
Yeah, we have. I would like to finish on a comment of my friend, Anita Laskowolf, she said, she was watching the march, and she said, I don’t care if they hate us, but I do care if they try and kill us. And when that came from a Holocaust survivor that really made me angry. I mean beyond that actually. Someone who, and I think that’s another area we haven’t even talked about the impact-
Yes.
It’s had on survivors.
Yeah, I know. And that’s very, that’s very sad and very upsetting, that whole side of things.
So anyway, thank you. Thanks a million. But can I hold you to it? You’ll come back in a couple of months.
Of course. Happy to.
All right. God bless. Take care, and thank you.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks, everyone.