Squeezing Jews out of public life

You wouldn’t ordinarily look to Preston when trying to assess the impact on Jewish life of the October 7 terror attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, but events in that Lancashire town over the past week reveal something about the way that Jews are getting squeezed out of parts of public life that, prior to this conflict, had previously been open to them.

There are few Jews in Preston - just 76, according to the 2021 census - and the last synagogue closed in the 1980s, so Jewish engagement with the Muslim community in the town (which numbers almost 24,000) tends to come from Greater Manchester, around 30 miles to the south east, where Britain’s second largest Jewish community resides. In September this year a meeting between Muslim and Jewish leaders was organised by Preston City Council’s interfaith network, to be held in a local mosque, with Manchester’s Jewish Representative Council taking part.

So far, so good: interfaith activity between Jews and Muslims largely collapsed in the UK after October 7 last year and it has been a struggle to get anything like this off the ground, so this seemed like a positive step forward. Or so you might think.

Others, predictably, disagreed. This week 5 Pillars, a Muslim news website with a long record of extremism, revealed that four “local residents” had written an open letter criticising the Quwwatul Islam Mosque for hosting a meeting with “Zionists” who are “supporters of a genocidal state”. The organiser of the meeting responded by saying that he would never have done so “had I known they were Zionists.”

5 Pillars has a habit of criticising interfaith activities between Muslims and Jews that they claim are attempts at “normalisation”. Five years ago they led a campaign that forced a London mosque to cancel an exhibit about Muslims who had saved Jews during the Holocaust, because the exhibition was provided by Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre Yad Vashem - and anything Israeli is by definition verboten. They have even condemned mosques and synagogues making chicken soup together for local homeless people in London, because this supposedly helps Zionism.

To get a sense of how readily 5 Pillars’ output can slip into antisemitism, twice this year, after hosting lengthy interviews with leaders of Britain’s far right, they have been found guilty by the regulator Impress of promoting anti-Jewish prejudice in those interviews. 5 Pillars’ response to these adverse rulings was not to change their editorial policies to prevent the promotion of antisemitism, but to withdraw their membership of Impress.

Now they have got it in for a mosque in Preston for the crime of meeting “Zionists”. I don’t know whether or not the Jewish participants in that interfaith meeting would describe themselves as Zionists, but I bet they all think Israel should exist and that the Jewish people have the right to a state - and that’s how most Jews define Zionism. If mosques who want to build relations with local Jewish communities are going to be harassed into saying that they would never meet “Zionists”, then there isn’t much future for Muslim-Jewish engagement at all.

That’s probably just how 5 Pillars would like it, and they are not alone. All over the pro-Palestinian movement there are people gradually falling for David Miller’s logic that anyone with any kind of connection to Israel is a “Zionist”, and therefore a supporter of genocide and apartheid, and an enemy of Muslims - and unsurprisingly, the 5 Pillars article about Preston quotes Miller approvingly. In reality, if that is the criteria for ostracising people then the vast majority of Jews will become legitimised as targets for harassment, abuse, intimidation or worse.

This gets to the heart of what needs to be done to tackle the growing extremism that is given so much energy by the conflict in Israel and Gaza. There is a general sense that the fabric of British society is under immense strain, with the shockwaves from the October 7 attack and the subsequent ongoing war in Gaza added to by the summer riots in Southport and elsewhere. It is as if the polarisation of narratives and outlooks on social media is starting to feed back onto our streets and shaping attitudes within our communities. Extremist groups and online actors play a significant role in this, stirring up suspicion and playing on real or imagined grievances to sell a story that makes people feel threatened by the ‘Other’ - whoever that ‘Other’ might be. For 5 Pillars and the people who are increasingly influenced by them, that ‘Other’ is anyone with any connection to Israel, however non-political or liberal that connection might be - which inevitably includes most Jews and Jewish institutions in this country.

A year of extremist activism on this divisive principle is starting to bear fruit. The backlash suffered by a mosque in Preston for meeting mainstream Jewish community leaders is just one example. Just this week I’ve read about an Israeli dance performance being cancelled by the Exeter International Dance Film Festival, and a Jewish philanthropist being forced out of a major arts charity. Or consider the difficulties the Jewish Film Festival had finding venues to host Israeli films this year - venues that never had a problem with it previously. And for every story of this nature that you read, there are countless others that don’t make the news involving Jewish people choosing to hide their identity, withdrawing inwards, and making the mental adjustment that is needed to get on in a society that doesn’t seem to be as friendly as it used to be for Jews.

Sometimes this is down to the hard-line ideological beliefs of the activists involved, such as the pub in Ireland that banned “Zionists”, or the protest at Birmingham University that called for “Zionists off our campus”. But more often, it is due to a fear of public pressure, intimidation of staff, and demonstrations outside their venues. In every case it is alleged links to Israel that are given as the premise, but really, it is the consequence of an obsessive anti-Israel protest movement that is able to whip up intolerable levels of pressure on well-meaning and under-supported organisations across civil society.

This is how, beyond the hate crimes and the threat of terrorism, extremism has a direct impact on the willingness and ability of Jews to participate in public life. There is currently a government review of strategies to counter extremism and, separately, a new approach to social cohesion, with the plan being that those two tasks will be housed in different departments of government. There are understandable practical reasons for this, but the episode in Preston ought to make the link between extremism and social cohesion obvious. Debates about the impact of extremism tend to focus on terrorism, but really, most of the time extremism is not violent and affects people’s lives by sowing suspicion, spreading conspiracy theories, and reinforcing negative stereotypes. In other words, damaging social cohesion - not only for Jews, but undermining wider society as a whole. Any strategy to tackle extremism needs to incorporate that element as a central focus of its work and measure of success.