No-go zones? Don't go there.

I’m sorry I haven’t written any posts for a while. My excuse is that I have been writing two new chapters about the global surge in antisemitism since 7 October for the paperback edition of Everyday Hate, which will be published on 16 May for a bargain £9.99 (you can pre-order a copy here). Those drafts are now done, leaving me free to spend time writing here again.

What is a no-go zone, exactly?

The Commissioner for Countering Extremism, Robin Simcox, has written in the Daily Telegraph that the regular pro-Palestinian marches have seen London “turned into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend.” Depending on which Jewish community leader you ask, this is either “utter fiction” or contains “a huge element of truth”.

As I write on Saturday, 9th March, there is another protest winding its way through central London, just as on many, if not most, Saturdays since Hamas murdered 1,200 people in Israel and took over 240 hostages, and Israel responded with a war in Gaza that has so far reportedly cost somewhere in the region of 30,000 lives (I’m not going to get into the accuracy of this figure, and how many are Hamas combatants or civilians - that’s a different topic).

There will be Jews on this march, as there have been on all of them to date. There will also be Jews attending synagogue in central London this morning. Taken literally, then, it isn’t a no-go zone at all.

On the other hand, some of those central London synagogues have got into the habit of changing their service times on days when there are anti-Israel demonstrations so their congregants can vacate the area before the protestors turn up; and there are usually police stationed outside, just in case. And a lot of other Jewish Londoners, the ones who live in the suburbs and might otherwise go into central London on a Saturday to shop, visit an exhibition or a museum or do whatever other people do in central London at the weekend, will be staying at home. So maybe not a no-go zone, but also not a normal, sustainable state of affairs.

It shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is the case. Imagine you are a Jewish person who lives in Golders Green. On the morning of Monday 9th October you woke up to find that somebody had painted “FREE PALESTINE” in massive letters across the two railway bridges that you walk under on your way to the tube station to get to work. I find it hard to believe it’s a coincidence that this happened in the best-known Jewish neighbourhood in the whole country: it looked very much like an attempt to intimidate the Jewish community.

Or perhaps you are one of the hundreds of British Jews who has had “Free Palestine” shouted at you in the street by a random stranger, in an act of racist hostility because they spotted a Jew. It’s unsurprising you might not want to put yourself in that same position again, but this time with tens of thousands shouting that same slogan.

I’ve written before about the unknowability of how many of these marchers are simply expressing genuine human rights concerns; how many are motivated by utter hatred of Israel; and how many are using it as a cloak for their antisemitism. We do know that all three types are present on most of these demonstrations, and we like to tell ourselves that the ones fuelled by hatred of Israel and Jews rather than compassion for Palestinians are in the minority, but really, who knows? Especially now that the hundreds of thousands of part-time protestors have drifted away and the demonstrations have reduced down to a hardcore of 20,000 or so true believers.

When people think of a “hate march” they tend to picture mobs of skinheads rampaging through neighbourhoods, beating up anyone they take a dislike to. Or perhaps violent jihadists seeking out their next terror victim. That is not what is happening in central London each weekend. These marches are mostly well-behaved with hardly any violence at all. If you are Jewish and happen to be standing by the side of the road as one of these marches passes by, you will probably be fine.

But a lot hinges on that word: “probably”. Nobody wants to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and since 7 October there have been a lot more wrong places and wrong times for Jews than previously. Just ask Duche Sorotzkin, who was attacked in Trafalgar Square after one march.

The Jews who go on these demonstrations are welcomed because they support the protests, but it’s a very conditional acceptance. If you are the wrong kind of Jew, or just have the wrong kind of opinions, your treatment will be very different. There are multiple examples of people with Israeli flags, or placards condemning Hamas, being physically attacked by demonstrators. These cases mostly involve Iranian anti-regime activists, but the message is clear enough. Jews and others are welcome as long as they don’t stray from the script.

This script tends to combine support for “resistance” with calls for a ceasefire, but this is very much a one-sided call. Any viable, permanent ceasefire deal is going to have to include the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza, but I’m yet to see a single placard, or hear a single speech, calling for that to happen. Instead, you get dozens of placards like these. Call Hamas terrorists on one of these protests and you risk getting beaten up; call Israel Nazis and you’ll be fine.

It comes down to the difference between a peace march and a peaceful march. The Socialist Workers Party, having called on people to “Rejoice” after 7 October, and who “support Hamas when it is engaged in military or non-military struggles against Israel”, flood these protests with placards calling on people to “Back the resistance”, along with the ubiquitous “From the River to the Sea” slogan. Put these together and it doesn’t sound like a call for peace. Resistance right now means Hamas, and we’ve all seen what they have in mind for Israelis.

If the organisers wanted to make these protests less alarming for ordinary Jews they could ask people not to bring placards like these. Everyone knows how grotesquely offensive it is to distort Holocaust memory in this way, and anything that sounds like a call for Israel to disappear has sinister echoes in history. They could even tell supporters of Hamas - a proscribed terrorist group, don’t forget - to stay away. But they don’t.

As a matter of principle I wouldn’t call London, or anywhere, a “no-go zone” for Jews. It’s more of an “I don’t want to be anywhere near these people because some of them hate people like me, and it isn’t worth the risk” zone. And that’s bad enough.