Hamas on the High Street
It's chilling to be a Jew in London these days as Arab youths launch fireworks in celebration of October 7th and protestors march through Westminster to demand an end to the Palestinian "genocide"
The first I knew of Hamas’s vicious, pre-meditated assault on southern Israel was when I woke on Sunday, October 8, and saw a video on X posted by the BBC Countdown presenter Rachel Riley, showing a group of young men dancing and waving Palestinian flags minutes from my home in Acton, west London.
Riley’s tweet was date-stamped 7.55pm on October 7. The Israeli Defence Force had barely begun its retaliation but already, it seemed, some people were rallying round the terrorists. Never mind that Hamas’s victims included a young German tattoo artist and an Arab-Israeli paramedic, as far as Hamas’s supporters were concerned the Zionists had it coming and if a few non-Jews got killed along way, they were collateral damage.
Later, I learned the celebrants had gathered in front of one of my favourite cafés, Pista Honey, on Acton High Street. Apparently, several passers-by had honked their horns in sympathy and later someone had lauched a volley of fireworks.
Such mindlessness is to be expected from local youths inflamed by images of Palestinian children mutilated by Israeli rockets. But for Left-leaning progressives to exhibit similar insensitivity when confronted with evidence of Israeli children mutilated in cold blood by Hamas, an openly antisemitic organisation, that I was not prepared for.
Nor was I prepared for the silence of friends and academic colleagues. When George Floyd was choked to death in Minneapolis by white police officer, I joined in taking the knee. But when I queried the BBC’s refusal to describe Hamas as a terrorist organisation and pointed to the snuff videos Hamas operatives had posted on the Facebook pages of their elderly Jewish victims, no one paused to offer sympathy. Instead, I was treated to a lecture on impartiality and why it was important for the BBC not to take sides, especially given IDF’s record of making misleading statements to journalists.
Since then we have had further proof of the murderous deeds of Hamas and its supporters, including, most likely, a mis-directed rocket launched at Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) but which fell instead on Al-Ahli Arab hospital, killing between 100 to 500 Gazans.
But on the streets of Acton and Westminster, where tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered on Saturday to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, there was no room for equivocation, much less doubt or nuance. Instead, chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a phrase that many Jews interpret as a call for them to be expunged from their Biblical homeland - they demanded an end to the Israeli-led “genocide”. In so doing, they demonstrated they misunderstood the meaning of that term and aligned themselves with an antisemitic death cult that draws direct inspiration from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious anti-Jewish Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (for more on Hamas’s links to the Nazis see David Patterson’s essay ‘From Hitler to Hamas: a geneaology of evil’).

Though I was raised in an areligious household and have never been to Israel, like other British Jews I felt incredibly isolated this week. I have also never felt more Jewish. I owe this mainly to my father, who though he turned his back on Judaism as a as a young adult, never forgot the taunts of “Christ killer” from the Irish boys on the way to his school in upstate New York or being turned away from a country club that had a policy against admitting Jews.
Presenting as an atheistic Brit, I never suffered direct antisemitism but can still remember bristling inside when schoolmates hooked their fingers over their noses in imitation of Shylock to accuse someone of being a skinflint. My identification deepened when I read about Kristallnacht and how in Nazi Germany it took only two Jewish grandparents to be considered legally Jewish and thus a candidate for the death camps.
This week the UK papers have been full of accounts from other British-Jewish journalists with similarly loose connections to Israel and Judaism who have felt the same sense of isolation and rejection. It as if suddenly people we used to count as friends and allies have lost their moral compass. As one journalist colleague who is not Jewish but can sympathise put it the day after the first pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London two weeks ago:
“You would never guess from today’s protests that - only a week ago - more Jews were murdered than on any day since the Holocaust. Or that a great many brutally abducted Israelis, of all ages, still languish in captivity. What is the matter with us?”
It is a good question. The protestors are by and large good people – the sort of people who would not hesitate to show sympathy for other discriminated-against minorities. But for some reason, when it comes to Israel their emotions run cold. Instead, we are treated to lectures about the Balfour Declaration, the importance of “context” and accepting that Israeli is a colonialist “settler state”.
The effect is both depressing and chilling. With antisemitic attacks on Jewish Londoners at their highest level in 40 years, it is hard to shake the feeling that October 7 was our Kristallnacht and that the only people we can count on are ourselves.