Zoe Ornstein offers her thoughts on challenges as an Anglo Jew and why she joined the 100,000 plus gathering in London to march in support of Israel.
Growing up in London in the 90s, my dad always raised me with the mantra that if you wanted to get along with everyone in polite society, the topics to avoid were religion and politics.
It wasn’t from a shame perspective, far from it, but from a “don’t look for trouble” perspective. That option was easy at a multi- faith school where we all made friends at eleven, but at university I discovered it to be much harder. It felt like concealing something – the tricky inner question of when exactly to confess my Jewish identity to new friends.
There were the occasionally awkward, unexpected conversations – the father of a friend who asked me to justify Israel’s position on the territories at her 21st birthday party. Then later in my twenties, there was the elderly German neighbour who took in a package one day while I was at work, and when I collected it she observed: “Hmm, Ornstein. What kind of name is that? Sounds like a medieval peasant name?” There was the uncomfortable morning a colleague greeted me as I walked into the office with “I see the Israeli army have been pulling down Palestinian houses again.”
But the reality remains that being Jewish in modern Britain – or indeed anywhere outside of Israel – has become much harder. I am fifth generation British, my children sixth. I have a full family tree here with roots in Scotland and Bristol. I have sent three children to non- Jewish schools and have mixed half and half in Jewish and non-Jewish friendship circles all my adult life. I received many messages of love, support, and friendship in the aftermath of 7th October, going back to my university days and up to mum friendships made at school gates.
The shape-shifting nature of antisemitism of “It’s not antisemitic to be against the Israeli government” here (as elsewhere) has been clear for all those willing to see it since the Corbyn years, but the majority of non-Jews I know didn’t vote for him he made Labour unelectable: bad for the economy, weak, not
a statesman for the international stage and tainted by bad associations. Likewise, my non- Jewish friends gave me words of support after 7th October because they wanted me to feel their essential humanity and decency, to let me know that what happened was utterly appalling and devastating in their eyes, too. I went to the first vigils because I wanted the hostages home and I wanted the Qataris to leverage their influence, not because I was worried that trouble in the Middle East would affect me or my kids. I didn’t feel afraid or take down my mezuzah, or tell my kids not to get involved in difficult conversations (unless there was an obvious danger involved): I wanted them to speak up and have the difficult conversations, and to feel Jewish pride and own their identities, however hard that might be.
But now, as the weeks wear on and as the war in Gaza has unfolded, it has been impossible to see those terrible scenes of human catastrophe without deep compassion and heartache, too. And I march now for a different reason. I want those fair-minded, intellectually strong, good people here to understand what they are seeing through my eyes: a horrible war with a terrible human cost brought about as a result of a brilliantly strategic publicity campaign masterminded over 20-plus years in creating a revisionist history that is underpinned by Jew hatred: a propaganda war of “alternative facts” which has fused militant Islamist jihadi theory with 1970s Communist dogma.
The reframing of the historical narrative, of seeing the emergence of Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement, of ripping down posters of missing Jewish babies or children in Israel in the belief that the public seeing their faces somehow negates the heartache of innocent children suffering and dying in Gaza. Maybe that’s why I feel obliged to march now: for a less vitriolic, less hateful, more emotionally mature society.
Those organisations marching with us in solidarity have recognized that what they saw on 7th October was a pure hate crime, designed to inflict maximum atrocity. Some of us marched to counter the simplistic, misguided, wishful narrative that the fault lies with Israel’s current government or that
this will not have happened had there been a two-state solution. That 7th October and the conflict since wasn’t ever about Palestine and Israel, or the type of viable land share that I’ve grown up discussing since I was 12 years old. They marched because Jewish life has value: and none would wish that upon their British daughters, or anyone else’s, anywhere – and because children don’t deserve to be taken from their beds and kidnapped.
I march because there is no justification, no contextualization, no whataboutery on this planet that will facilitate resolution to any political conflict without a basic understanding that training for, practicing, and then committing those hate crimes came from an ideology of naked hatred towards the Jewish people. And I march because I believe terrorism has to be defeated: because I believe that deradicalization is at the heart of the problem. We cannot have another generation of children being brought up in Israel/ Palestine or anywhere else on this earth to believe that jihadism and martyrdom are values to die for.
I march because I want the foundation of what made this country home to my ancestors to remain tolerant, fair and enlightened: tea drinking, weather obsessed and decent, regardless of a changing demographic of who lives here. There is a place for us all, and good lives to be had, if we subscribe to values of tolerance and respect. I march as much to express my Jewishness as my Britishness and to reassert the deep and abiding gratitude I have for my life in the UK – an imperfect but free, democratic society which grants inclusion to all its citizens with laws that do not allow for incitement of hatred. I march because keeping my bloody head down and not marching isn’t an option any longer, because I want to see an end to these ideologically extremist, racist, misogynistic, politics of division that afflict many regions of the world – with their attendant lies and the resultant human cruelties and failings they engender – and a return to politics of moderation, or else an alternative: a new era of modern politics which grants lives of peace, prosperity, hope. That would be a march worth attending.