Weak Britain has failed to crush anti-Semitism, having succumbed to Hamas manipulation
When my children were born, I knew that when they were old enough I had to take them to Auschwitz. We are finally going in the New Year, but the times have radically changed. What does remembrance mean now that the old trauma is once again upon us? The Shoah is no longer something remote. It is breathing down our necks. This is where Jews find themselves in 2023.
Viktor Klemperer, the chronicler of Germany’s darkest century, concluded that the Jews are a seismic people. After thousands of years, we have learned to feel the tremors early. But what good has it done us? After the Holocaust, Jews fled to their homeland – went back where they came from, if you will – and now that homeland has become a butcher’s yard.
The October massacre took place 3,000 miles away, but the earth is rumbling in Britain. Posters of Jewish hostages are torn down within hours. If only that was the extent of it. Look at the red paint thrown over a Jewish school in Stamford Hill. Look at my orthodox sister, jeered as she picks up her toddler from nursery. Look at my nephew being threatened in the street. Look at the hate preachers glorifying Hamas in mosques. Look, for God’s sake, at the mobs marching through London every Saturday holding anti-Semitic placards while the Met Police reflects on the definition of jihad and broadcasters insist that these masked youths only want peace.
Overseas, Jews are first slaughtered then scolded for defending themselves; meanwhile, their enemies hide behind babies, prepare the next atrocity and beckon the television cameras. At home, society seems divided between those who hate the Jews for fighting back and those who suspect they had it coming in the first place.
What of the silent majority? We saw over 100,000 on the street last Sunday, Jews and non-Jews alike, ambling awkwardly – it’s not very English to protest – towards Parliament Square while holding ironical placards and chanting bashfully for peace. Here flasks of tea and bobble hats met the flares and facemasks. A quickening of the mild-mannered. As moving as it was, however, these people remained in the minority, eclipsed by the pro-Palestine protests and dwarfed many times by the tens of millions sitting idly on their sofas watching telly.
The silent majority remains silent. What will it take to rouse them? If the last eight weeks have taught Anglo-Jewry one thing, it is this: when our feet stumble on the tectonic plates, everyone else puts the kettle on.
I don’t mean to denigrate Britain. We are a wonderful nation. If quizzed, most people would have no truck with the brazen anti-Semitism of recent weeks. Many politicians have spoken out and I have received many messages of support from friends. But what is the benefit of a decent majority that never finds its voice?
As my visit to Auschwitz looms, I cannot help but dwell on the years before the Shoah, when millions of people crossed the road as Jews were targeted, kept their heads down rather than spoke up, concerned themselves with the sphere of their own lives instead of taking a principled stand. Jewish leaders were beset by infighting rather than facing up to the threat. We know where that ended.
No, let’s not hyperbolise. We’re not about to see death camps on British shores. But while liberals invoke moral outrage at our government’s immigration policy, they invoke nothing but apathy about anti-Semitism.
One cannot help but baulk at the hypocrisy. The very people who require trigger warnings at performances of Macbeth thicken their skin when it comes to the dismemberment of Jews. Those who cry trauma at micro-aggression show a surprising acceptance of macro-aggression. The anti-racists pose with torn posters in their hands.
It doesn’t need to be this way. In the latter part of Hannah Arendt’s A Report on the Banality of Evil, she ranges through the countries of wartime Europe to judge their behaviour towards the Jews when they were under occupation. The results were surprising. While Romania was vicious, neighbouring Bulgaria found ways to protect them.
Denmark in particular stands out. “When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge,” Arendt writes, “they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation.”
Remarkably, the hard-bitten SS commanders and Gestapo men then had a change of heart and began to refuse Berlin’s orders. Police units had to be despatched from Germany to round up the Jews, but they were threatened with arrest by the Danes. By the end of the war, almost all the country’s Jews survived.
What would modern Britain do? Would we be Romania or Bulgaria? Would we be Denmark? I have my doubts. It’s not about evil. It’s about banality. For all the stories we tell ourselves about tolerance, for all the burbling about equality, diversity and inclusion, most people cannot get off their phones while mobs call for genocide in the street.
I fear that with the loss of the wartime generation and the rise of the age of plenty, our society is losing its moral fortitude. With the ubiquity of social media and the erosion of concentration and knowledge, we are losing our intellectual strength. If this is our disease, should the symptoms surprise us?
Should we be shocked when people so easily believe the Hamas propaganda that paints brutalised hostages as contented and well cared for, or the Jews as a nation of genocidal baby killers, or the Gaza death toll as unfeasibly high and consisting solely of civilians? Is it any wonder we have forgotten that sometimes, as against Nazi Germany, there can be no avoiding the hell of war?
I have a theory. Partly, our somnambulance is explained by a failure of imagination. One of the reasons why visiting Auschwitz is so important is that the human mind is ill-equipped to assimilate such depravity. History books have limited effect when they contain material so far beyond ordinary experience. You have to see it for yourself. Even then, the elastic potential of the average mind returns it by degrees to its comfort zone. This exposes our tender spots to the claws of Holocaust denial; it was difficult to comprehend in the first place.
Perhaps a similar mechanism is at play with October 7 revisionism. Some think it can’t possibly be true, distrusting the duplicitous Jews, demanding footage of every rape while swallowing claims of Palestinian deaths whole. Others turn away. But in this post-Shoah world, there can be little excuse for failing to accommodate the atrocities of Hamas within the depths of immorality pioneered by the Nazis. They may not be comparable in terms of scale and in many of the particulars. But the Nazis created the space.
In the end, this is about Britain. If we cannot stand up for the Jews, we cannot stand up for ourselves. Our enemies are watching and calculating; we stand by as Chinese-owned TikTok leads our children to praise Osama Bin Laden and blame the Jews for their own destruction. We stand by as identity politics grip our schools, universities and national institutions. We stand by as society hollows itself out. For the Jews every day is the day after; but the rest of society seems frozen in the day before.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia
