Having lived in Britain for much of his life, Jonathan Foreman wasn’t surprised that the current war in Gaza prompted anti-Israel protests and the like. But even he was surprised by their intensity, the fact that they began immediately after the October 7 massacres (rather than after the IDF’s military response), and the way they have drawn in people like his middle-aged neighbors, who on October 10 hung Palestinian flags and banners outside their house:
This felt different, more disturbing. My neighbors—the wealthy, white, haut-bourgeois banner-hangers—were, whether they would admit it or not, celebrating October 7, rejoicing in the targeting of civilians for rape, murder, and mutilation, cheering the murder of Jews for being Jews.
Every Saturday since 10/7, London has endured large anti-Israel demonstrations. At each one, students, Palestine-obsessives, Islamists, and hard-left extremists march shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of people from Britain’s Arab and Muslim communities. They wind their way from Parliament through central London to the Israeli embassy in Kensington, where police in riot gear keep them back from the gates. As in past years, some of the demonstrators let off flares, scream anti-Jewish slogans, and break various minor laws that the police choose not to enforce.
As British Jews have begun to realize, it is only a small step from these kinds of selective inaction by the police to turning a blind eye to the beatings of Jews in the street, Weimar-style—if carried out by passionate young men from certain highly sensitive communities. It would be a different story if the assailants came from the miniscule “far right.”
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/jonathan-foreman/hating-jews-and-israel-the-view-from-london/