On the evening of 10 October, 2023, I boarded an eastbound London Overground train at Stratford station. I found myself sitting next to an Orthodox Jewish woman. Opposite sat her two Orthodox Jewish woman companions. There were a few minutes to go before the train’s departure time. As the carriage filled up, the women chatted to each other in what I, not being a speaker of it – or, as it happens, Jewish – assume was Yiddish.
The carriage was otherwise fairly quiet, and as the seconds ticked by I experienced a blend of anxieties and emotions. They arose from a wish to protect, one whose implications for the inside of my head included:
- A mental debate about the possible unintended outcomes of instigating a well-meaning social interaction with the women.
- Imagined scenarios in which a fellow passenger instigated an interaction with them of an unpleasant kind, prompting me to nobly but perhaps self-righteously and disastrously intervene.
- A more general speculation about how the women might be feeling a few days after fellow Jewish people in a far-off land had been the victims of murder, injury, kidnap and rape, these acts committed with premeditated savagery and, in some quarters, celebrated with great glee, including in parts of London.
I refer, of course, to the incursions of 7 October 2023 by Hamas attackers and kindred spirits from Gaza into southern Israel during a Jewish holiday and their killing of around 1,200 people, more than 800 of them civilians, including children, their kidnapping of 251 people, again mostly civilians, and their acts of torture and sexual violence against others. Not all of these victims were Jews, but the great majority were.
Two years later, Israel’s sustained military response to that attack has officially ended with a fragile ceasefire, but only after it resulted in the deaths of close to 70,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Throughout those two years, London has been the scene of widespread and conspicuous demonstrations, with protesters proclaiming their support for Gaza and the wider Palestinian cause, some of them large marches through the heart of the capital, some of them smaller local rallies outside government and cultural institutions, some of them displays of flags on lampposts or in the windows of shops and homes.
These public alignments in favour of Gaza and against Israel have become routine and ubiquitous – part of the London scene. Debates about their meanings, motivations and legality have been loud and rancorous. There has been less reporting of the everyday experiences of Jewish Londoners during this time as they have led their London lives among the city’s multitudes and in the privacy of their homes and minds.
How have Jewish Londoners been feeling all this time? How have their fellow Londoners been feeling about them?
***
A short walk north from where I live in Hackney lies the borough’s Cazenove electoral ward. It forms part of a neighbourhood containing a strictly Orthodox Jewish community of around 15,000 people. Most are Hasidic Jews, adherents to a movement with 18th Century origins in what is today western Ukraine. This is the largest such Orthodox grouping in Europe and is famously synonymous with the Stamford Hill area.
One of Cazenove ward’s three councillors is Ian Sharer, whose remarkable career in Hackney politics has seen him represent three different parties over three decades, starting with Labour in 1994, continuing with the Liberal Democrats, and now with the Conservatives, for whom, in January 2024, after a spell out of the Town Hall, he won in serene style an otherwise fraught by-election, having narrowly missed out on a Cazenove seat when running as a Lib Dem in May 2022.
He is very much at home in the ward, and not only because he has lived there for a long time. Invited to his house and there provided with a stupendous cup of coffee and five neat slices of delicious honey cake, I asked him my very simple question about a complicated situation – had his London life changed since 7 October, 2023?
“To a certain extent, yes,” Sharer replied. “I am very wary of going outside my own area.” He explained that he and his wife, both of them still working full-time despite having a combined age of 159, go shopping every Sunday in nearby Wood Green, across the borough boundary in Haringey. “I do not go wearing a kippah,” he said. “I always wear a cap. But that doesn’t really disguise me. We still look pretty Jewish, my wife and I. To the credit of Wood Green, if you like, I’ve never had a problem there. But I’m always very aware of what’s going on around me.”
Other types of excursion have sometimes led to other types of experience. “I have been shouted at while driving in various parts of London,” Sharer said. “People being nasty to me. It’s always happened, but it’s happening more than it used to.” He revealed, too, a still sharper difference between his London life before the Hamas-Israel war began and since: “I would not go out at night, now, outside of this area.”
It is an area some might imagine cannot possibly exist. Yet Cazenove has long been noted for the good relations between its Jews and its Muslims, who between them make up around 40 per cent of its 15,000 or so residents. At the last Census count there were around 3,700 Jews and 2,308 Muslims there. “For the last 30 years, I’ve been working with the Muslim community,” Sharer said. “They are really good friends of mine.”
He had a wealth of stories of interfaith solidarity, ranging from local mosques and synagogues backing each other’s planning applications for extensions, to the local Shomrim patrols – Hebrew for “watchers” or “guards”, a kind of Jewish Neighbourhood Watch with a hotline to the Met – embracing mosques as well.
The recent terror attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester was followed by WhatsApp messages to Sharer’s phone from Muslim locals, saying, as he put it, “this is totally out of order and we stand with you on this”. And when out on the street, on his way to pray, he was stopped by Muslim passers-by, wanting to tell him how sorry they were about what had occurred.
As a councillor, he is on call for local Muslim institutions and individuals, some of whom pop by to talk through this or that local matter, and it is heartening to imagine their conversations taking place in the same pleasant parlour where I sat with my coffee and cake. When he dines at local mosques, Sharer is provided with kosher food. When a Jewish school was daubed with antisemitic graffiti a few years ago, local Muslims sent its pupils a delivery of kosher cakes.
There is, though, no escaping the rise in antisemitic incidents over the past two years. And Jews in this part of London have been subjected to attacks in their own backyard.
In September, arrests were made after video footage emerged of a 77-year-old rabbi being pelted with food and subjected to abuse outside the Stamford Hill branch of Boots, and after a man on an e-scooter rode into two Orthodox Jewish women, reportedly shouting “fucking Jews”. In December 2023, two teenagers, both of them girls, were sentenced after being found guilty of four separate attacks on Jews in the neighbourhood, most of them children, in the space of half an hour. One recent attacker travelled from afar. In 2022, a man from Dewsbury came to Stamford Hill and assaulted three Jews, one of them a child, punching another of his victims unconscious.
Sharer spoke of his life as a Jewish Londoner with a mixture of positivity and realism. “All my life, I’ve been made aware by people that I’m Jewish,” he said. As a youth, he’d been a good cricketer, yet his form master at a non-religious secondary school in Leyton never picked him for the school team. There was, he said, one other Jewish boy in his class. Both of them noticed how often they were punished for misbehaving compared with the other kids. He recalled a Labour Party meeting held many years ago when a latecomer decided against taking the last remaining seat, which happened to be next to Sharer’s.
That would not happen, he said, with today’s Hackney Labour, even though he has become a Tory. He went out of his way to praise Caroline Woodley, the borough’s Labour Mayor, for taking matters he raises with her seriously. Sharer is firmly of the view that what some on the Right call “hate marches” in support of Palestine and against Israel should not be banned – “you’ve got to allow freedom of speech,” he said – and he accepts in the same spirit the Gaza protest events that have taken place both outside Hackney Town Hall and in its public gallery.
There is a lot of such activity in Hackney. A few days after I visited Sharer, the borough’s Green Party councillors, who include London Assembly member and Hackney mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett, and their Hackney Independent Socialist allies, had the full council debate a motion demanding that it cut all “ties” with “Israel’s genocide in Gaza”. The other day, a leaflet fell on to my doormat from a campaign called Hackney Votes Palestine 2026, urging me to vote Green in the borough elections next May.
Sharer’s experiences and reflections provide both comfort and hope for the future and a window on to a larger landscape of anger, misunderstanding and prejudice. Sharer regards himself as thoroughly English, and spoke with pride of family members with impressive records of service to the British armed forces, going back to World War II and beyond.
Like many British Jews – though not a majority of them – he feels no attachment to Israel, and has never been there. He described what it has done in Gaza as “appalling” and condemned its government’s inviting a British far-Right activist, the so-called Tommy Robinson, to visit the country as its guest as “making him mainstream, and I don’t think that’s right”.
It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that views like as Sharer’s are infrequently heard, not least because too many don’t wish to hear them. And, being Jewish and visibly so, nothing he does or believes can exempt him from the enmity of bearers of the oldest hatred. He remarked as we talked on the saying that antisemitism is a light sleeper. Even in Cazenove’s safe haven, it is awake.
***
The increase in antisemitic incidents in London that followed the Hamas atrocities has raised sobering questions about the capital’s preferred – and largely justified – image of itself as a city at home with its vast human variety, one that renders laughable the claims of cranks and provocateurs that “real” Londoners have been “pushed out” by immigrants or that it is full of “no-go zones” controlled by Islamists imposing Sharia Law.
The heightened caution of Ian Sharer made me think again about the “existential weight” felt by the Newbury Park rabbi I interviewed last year, as he described how the mass appearance of Palestinian flags on local lampposts had made his congregants feel.
It also brought to mind the observation of a Jewish woman from north London I met for coffee early in 2024, who said that even though her Jewishness might not be obvious from her appearance, the thought of visiting Whitechapel, where flags of Palestine were at that time everywhere, did not appeal.
She spoke also of noticing that she had, almost unconsciously, begun spending more of her time with fellow Jews, doing a bit more talking about old, familiar worries and frustrations: about threats, security and the chilling absurdity that out there on the streets or maybe festering and fantasising in internet bubbles in their homes, were persons as yet unknown for whom every Jew in the world was somehow responsible for every act of military retribution approved by Benjamin Netanyahu in a different country 3,000 miles away.
Hearing such stories illuminates a particular precariousness, a necessary kind of watchfulness, that, for many of London’s roughly 145,000 Jews is an ingrained part of their London lives among nine million others. It also serves as a reminder that this state of affairs is far from new.
Other kinds of Londoners go about their London lives conscious of potential dangers of one or another kind, not least Muslims from self-styled “patriots”. But none has felt so routine a need to have security guards outside its community centres, places of worship or schools – and felt that need, not just for the past couple of years, but for decades.
***
A few days after visiting Ian Sharer but still before the Gaza-Israel ceasefire was declared, I spoke to Esther Levy – not her real name – a Jewish woman who lives in a part of the north west of the city not noted for its Jewish population and characterised by a more typical London ethnic and cultural mosaic. Esther called it “a very mixed area,” whose Muslim residents, unlike its Jewish ones, tend to be visibly so, primarily because of women wearing hijabs. It’s very different from Cazenove ward in many ways. Yet an equivalent good neighbourliness has long been a feature of life there.
Esther recalled when, pre-Covid, a local mosque would, every year, build a sukkah in its grounds – a temporary hut commemorating the wilderness shelters scripture says were used by Jews after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. Members of the local synagogue would accept the mosque’s invitation to join local Muslims there, and friendly links were built.
The pandemic put paid to that, though, and Esther described a “fracturing” since the onset of the distant war that, to her, “felt wrong”. Attempts to put that right have included “peace walks” in local parks and other events, primarily involving Jewish and Muslim women. “We’re just trying to feel like we’re all part of the same community,” Esther explained.
This rebuilding has followed a period of sudden anxiety following the 7 October attacks and the reaction to them in London. On Kilburn High Road, for example, flags and stickers appeared. There were people wearing “Free Palestine” badges. “Initially, I felt very threatened,” Esther said. That was despite her, unlike Ian Sharer, not standing out as Jewish and, like him, being “British through and through” and having next to no feeling of connection with Israel, which she has spent a total of eight days in all her life.
Esther mentioned the long-established pattern of antisemitic incidents increasing in London following outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, “but nothing like this”. Her daily habits didn’t change, although she emphasised that had she had wished to go into the centre of London, there was no way she would have done so on a weekend when a pro-Palestine demo was taking place there (she still feels the same way).
What did change, though, was the expectation of others that she, being Jewish, would be an authority on Israel: “Suddenly, we all have to be experts. And you get the feeling from people that they think you must be slightly responsible for what that country is doing. And that’s what led to what happened in Manchester.” She elaborated, referring to the killer: “He didn’t check first to see if people supported Netanyahu. He just wanted to kill Jews.”
She said, as have many others, that the Manchester attack, though, horrifying, came as no surprise. And she noted: “We have heard loudly the silence of people we thought were our friends, who haven’t contacted us. People don’t seem to get it.” She remarked, too, on a recurring difficulty with having conversations with people about the beginnings of the war. “There’s always a ‘but’. Every time anyone mentions the 7th of October, they then say ‘but’. No! Twelve hundred people were killed, in cold blood, including babies.” Esther concluded: “It’s very odd. And it’s been very destructive.”
***
I think I recognise what Esther means about that use of “but”, how it ushers in a contextualisation that can sound like a justification. Six days after the Hamas-led attacks, on the morning of 13 October 2023, I sent out an edition of my newsletter, On London Extra, with the headline A Jewish Voice. Israel’s military response, though clearly gearing up, had barely begun. Yet the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign had already mobilised, holding its first big central London demo, complete with chants of “from the river to the sea”, on 9 October, just two days after the attacks and the day before my chance sharing of an Overground carriage with those three Jewish women.
I don’t write about the politics and conflicts of the Middle East and never have. The reason for that is simple – it’s not my subject and I know very little about it. But I do write about London, I knew that Jewish Londoners would be worried about the implications for them of the terrible events overseas, and I wanted to express some sort of empathy. My solution was a sort of appreciation of the part Jews had played in my life since my early childhood – a part my London life had helped me to see.
It concerned Helen Shapiro, born in 1946 in Bethnal Green and raised and schooled in Clapton, where I have lived since 1992. The granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, she became, in the 1960s, one of Britain’s most successful pop singers.
As a very small child growing up far from London, I would often hear her records on the radio or played at home by my big sister. I had no idea that Shapiro was Jewish, or what a Jew was. At my primary school, I came to know the word “Jew” as something other children called you if you wouldn’t let them have one of your crisps.
My reminiscence about Shapiro and its connection with the London outside my front door was written as a personal way of showing my appreciation for Jewish Londoners, for whom the Hamas attacks and the delight with which some had greeted them were so obviously distressing. This modest offering did not impress one On London supporter, who responded to it with an email tirade, complete with gory pictures, about the iniquities of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians, and the immediate withdrawal of their £5 a week.
Here was a taste of the venomous polarisation Gaza continues to inspire. My correspondent (and ex-supporter) even allowed that what Hamas had done was terrible – terrible “but”.
***
Jewish Londoners are diverse, not least in their perspectives on Israel, its attitude to Palestinians, and the way feelings about the Israel-Gaza war have been expressed in their home city.
Dan (not his real name) was born in London and has lived here for many years, but, in between, had an Israeli childhood and young adulthood. He came back to London because, as he puts it, he “had a sense that Israel would be extremely lucky to avoid ending up essentially where it is now”. He continues: “I would totally define myself as a Zionist, but in a very minimalist sense that I think there should be a Jewish homeland”. One of his children, he adds, currently lives in Israel, without being Zionist in the slightest.
Dan says his London life has been little affected by the war. Working in the tech sector “it’s so multinational that it’s taken for granted that people have backstories that occasionally become awkward”. Describing his Jewishness as “not conspicuous,” he reports having faced “no street aggro” or, unlike some fellow Jews, any hostility when travelling on the tube.
Neither does he feel “threatened by Palestinian flags”, something he links to his view that there should be a Palestinian state and that “illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank are an absolute disaster”.
However, Dan says he would feel “very uncomfortable going on any of the pro-Palestine marches”. He doesn’t care for those chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. If the word “Palestinians” was used instead of “Palestine”, that would be fine with him. But the meaning of “Palestine” in that context is, for him, to imply that between the Mediterranean to the west of Israel and the River Jordan at its eastern border, “there’s to be a place called Palestine, and nothing but. With that, I’m not comfortable, at all”.
He regrets “the tone deafness of some of the supporters of the Palestinian cause” which can lead to their becoming “inadvertently antisemitic”, along with “a refusal to engage with Jewish concerns around that”. He detects a reluctance on the part of the UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign to accept the two state solution long accepted by two actual Palestinian bodies, the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. It is a reluctance that he finds “menacing”.
It is also, Dan observes, “nothing new”, and notes a “lack of clarity” on the Left about “what it actually thinks about the Jewish state”. He can see reasons for that failure: “Any ethnic state needs to work extremely hard not to become discriminatory, let alone one which has been holding millions of people under military occupation for decades”. He thinks there is a heavy onus on such a state to “protect minorities, proactively”.
Amid the complications and contradictions, Dan is sad but unsurprised “that the argument goes simplistic very quickly”. He sees a reflection of that in the refusal of the organisers of a London protest against the banning of the Palestine Action group to call it off in the wake of the Manchester attack. Dan characterises that stance as one of “aggressive self-righteousness”.
Through it all, though, he remains positive about London. “I think London’s wonderful,” he says, underlining that conversations and collaborations with Muslim Londoners have continued and endured, albeit sometimes, in some cases, with regretful caveats and new constraints. “I may be naïve, but I don’t feel at risk walking in any part of London,” he says, though he adds that if he wore a kippah, he might not want to walk in “some parts of Tower Hamlets on a Friday afternoon when people are coming out of mosques”.
He offers a broader perspective, too – a feeling that both the Jewish and Muslim communities of London and the rest of Britain are “becoming playthings” in types of politics that aren’t very much about those communities or the issues that affect them at all.
***
From my safe middle distance of a London life that daily encounters the symbols and stridency of Gaza activism – the flags, posters and badges, the marches and demos that have, at times, seemed to be around every street corner – without being directly touched by them, I think I recognise the types of politics in question.
Where the Left is concerned, they are nothing new. In February 2003, I joined the march against the war against Iraq – not out of any very considered analysis, but because Tony Blair struck me as being too eager to follow where George W Bush led and because I had an uneasy feeling the whole business would not end well.
It was the biggest protest march in London’s history. I got there rather late, in the company of my wife and two of our young children. Harold Pinter, the great east London Jewish playwright, who grew up in a house very close to mine, had already declaimed from the stage in Hyde Park as we brought up the rear of the procession.
Pinter’s involvement contributes to my strongest memory of that day being exposure to the most explicit and virulent display of antisemitism I had yet encountered: a little group of young Muslim men and women up ahead, gathered behind a banner bearing a crude cartoon depiction of Albert Einstein, and chanting the words “Jew, Jew, Jew S A”. In their minds, it appeared, US power and Judaism were indivisible evils, joint authors of all that was most wicked in the world.
I recall speaking to one of the march’s stewards. Had he noticed what those marchers were doing? What they were chanting? Was there anything he could do to stop them? He shrugged and shook his head. And while I can see that there wasn’t much he (or I) could do at that moment, even had he (or I) had the will and the courage to try, the clanging incongruity of such sentiments being so uninhibitedly expressed on an occasion extolling the virtues of peace confirmed doubts I already had about the part of the Left that organised the march.
Twenty years on, the same part of the Left has been to the fore in the campaigning about Gaza. It retains the same willingness to accommodate or turn a deaf ear and blind eye to antisemitism, sometimes explicit, sometimes subtler, among its activists and followers.
I am happy to accept that most people who go on Gaza marches do not harbour a hatred of Jews. I know that, as some defenders of the marches are eager to point out, Jewish people take part in them. I question the characterisation of those events as “hate marches”, especially when done so by people whose motives are, I suspect, more hateful than what lies in the hearts of most of the marchers.
But as we’ve seen from some of those prosecuted, the sometimes blurry line separating disagreement with “the Jewish state” from antipathy towards Jews, all Jews, is too often crossed. I went to the one in central London on 9 October, 2023, as a writer, to observe. I found the mood among the hardcore near the speakers’ stage and the messages delivered from it pitiless, ghoulish and chillingly devoid of qualifications or misgivings.
We can debate all day the meaning of the chant “from the river to the sea”, how that meaning can be shaped by context, how it means different things in the mouths and ears of different people. But I’m with Sir Sadiq Khan on this one. Addressing the issue at the Jewish community hustings during last year’s mayoral election campaign, he said: “If you know that it causes distress, anxiety and upsets your Jewish friends and neighbours, don’t chant it – it’s as simple as that.”
Meanwhile, some of the noisiest in their professions of support for Jews are also some of the most destructive and extreme right-wingers in the country.
In November 2023, I went for a walk with a friend through central London. It ended at the Royal Courts of Justice, which was the starting point for a march against antisemitism.
My friend, a Labour Party person, joined it, as planned. I thought that rather noble, given that Boris Johnson and Robert Jenrick were also in attendance and that so-called Tommy Robinson would have been too – despite the organisers not wanting him there – had the Met not detained him. I felt a bit ashamed of being glad I had to rush off somewhere else.
It would be unfair to impute ignoble motives to every figure on the Right who is conspicuous in their support for Jews. As well as being a crude and wrong, it would ignore the fact that, for example, the crude and wrong Jenrick’s wife is Jewish.
At the same time, would it be mistaken to suspect that the fervour with which some Tories and members of Reform UK – not to mention “Tommy Robinson” – protest their outrage about antisemitism is not unconnected to a dislike of Muslims? Maybe, even a veiled way of endorsing such a dislike among others? Maybe a way of deflecting and defusing wider accusations of racism and xenophobia as they rage against asylum-seekers, immigrants and immigration?
***
I have dealt with my reservations about the most publicly prominent Gaza-related and anti-antisemitism campaigning by steering clear of both while helping both causes in a different way – by giving money every month to the Community Security Trust (CST), which protects Jewish communities in Britain, and to the Red Cross Gaza Crisis Appeal. That’s my stance and I’m sticking to it.
The predicament of Jewish Londoners – and, by extension, Jews anywhere in Britain and beyond – is, to put it mildly, less neatly resolved, especially at a time when political and social polarisation drives a troubling absence of empathy and an increased default preference for venting rage over seeing complicated pictures more clearly.
I will end this article with excerpts from two others, each of them by London-based Jewish writers. The first is from Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, writing last year in response to the latest CST figures about antisemitic incidents:
An arresting fact about the latest numbers is that the biggest surge in anti-Jewish activity came immediately after the 7 October attacks, when Israelis were still reeling – still counting their dead and missing – and had scarcely responded at all.
As the CST put it: “In the week following 7 October, CST recorded 416 anti-Jewish hate incidents, higher than any subsequent week. It indicates that it was celebration of Hamas’ attack, rather than anger towards Israel’s military response in Gaza, that prompted the unprecedented levels of antisemitism across the country.”
Viewed this way, when Israel is in the news – whether as villain or victim – it acts as a kind of bat signal, summoning either the antisemites from their caves or, more subtly, the antisemitic feelings that lurk even in the most seemingly blameless hearts.
The second, also published by The Guardian, is from the CST’s director of policy, Dave Rich. It appeared soon after the Manchester synagogue attack:
When Jews are attacked by the far right, solidarity and sympathy flows easily from the anti-racist ecosystem that exists to protest and campaign against prejudice and hatred. But when Jews are murdered by jihadists? Not so much.
There are plenty of reasons for this, but they all amount to the reality that large swathes of the anti-racist movement that stood alongside Jews when they faced neo-Nazis in the 1960s abandoned Britain’s Jewish community a generation ago.
The instinctive support that progressives show for other minorities, the sense that they are naturally on their side, has evaporated when it comes to Jews. This has to change.
If London is to fully be the multicultural success story it mostly is, that change cannot come too soon.
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