Crossing the Narrow Bridge

On Diaspora Jewish Fear, and Those Who Stoke it

Things I’ve been reading recently:

A great piece about campus wars since October 7^th and what they show about our ides of ‘the campus’

A highly thought-provoking article on ‘The Jew as Reactionary in the US Media’ with many implication for the UK as well.

A piece from 2017 on growing up Jewish in Holland and constantly being compared to Anne Frank

A fascinating essay connecting the Yiddish and Palestinian writer Avrom Sutskever and Mahmoud Darwish (email signup required)

A brilliant ‘Declaration of Diaspora Jewish Independence’ from the Prague-based group Jewish Voice of Solidarity

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Jews are afraid. We have been told this again and again over the last ten months, so presumably it must be true. We’ve been told it mostly by media sources, with articles replete with anonymous Jewish testimonies, or ones with names changed, a time-honoured technique for insinuating something without having to actually prove it.  We have also heard it from Jewish family and friends, usually influenced by this media coverage. On the whole, this is the source of the fear, rather than direct personal experience. But in addition, many people know someone whose niece’s friend saw something nasty. And everyone has seen a screenshot of something offensive. There’s a reasonable chance that you reading this have also felt afraid, unnerved at a comment or something you’ve seen online. And if you haven’t felt afraid, isn’t that in itself a cause for concern? Do you worry that you’re missing something? Or that there might be something suspect about your Jewish identity?

I’m not suggesting that all our fears are imaginary. Of course there are violent assaults on Jews in Britain. CST reported that there were 266 of them in 2023, and I see no reason to disbelieve this figure, though I would suggest we put it in the context of hate crimes more broadly. But I do question the tendency to amalgamate a whole series of diverse phenomena: attacks, threats, offensive comments, potential tropes, unsympathetic language about Israel and even the simple display of Palestinian flags into a single category of antisemitism or threats to Jewish well-being, of which we should be afraid. These things are vastly different from each other, come from a range of sources, and require a range of contrasting responses. The idea that we can reach agreement on even the rough contours of what antisemitism means today is for the birds, or perhaps for the messiah.

And while I do accept that there are sometimes reasons to be afraid, I want to unpick the assumption that there is an organic, direct relationship between the level of fear and the level of threat. Instead, I think the relationship between the two is complex and heavily mediated by the media and communal Jeremiahs. If you are afraid, and you probably are, it’s because you’ve been repeatedly subject to material that tells you that you should be. There was even a JPR survey which began from the premise that since the low level of antisemitic attitudes amongst non-Jews didn’t tally with the level of Jewish concern over antisemitism, they needed to prod to uncover the antisemitic perceptions that surely lay under the surface. This process of instilling fear didn’t begin with October 7^th, it didn’t even begin in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader. If I had to put a date to it, I would suggest 2001; 9/11, the start of the war on terror and the breakdown of the Oslo process. It began to snowball from there: a few years after that, in 2007, the far-right newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn would produce a television documentary entitled ‘The War on Britain’s Jews’.

Both then and now, if you are afraid, it is in part because there are people who want you to be. Who are these people? At the most basic level we are talking about the Israeli government and its agencies, such as the Jewish Agency for Israel. From 1993 to 2001, the heyday of the Oslo peace process, there was a sense that the conflict was soon going to end. There had been (or at least so it seemed) a recognition that there were two peoples with a legitimate claim to the land between the river and the sea, and they were going to have to share it through partition. It was simply a matter of building confidence and ironing out the details. After the breakdown of Oslo, and the return of the Israeli right to power (where they have remained ever since), there was a gradually introduced notion that the conflict was never going to end, it was one of eternal enmity, and Israel could only prevail through strength. Moreover, the conflict ceased to be understood as one between two nations, but between the Jews and those who hate them. This new prism completely changed the game: a national conflict is solved through territorial compromise, a battle with antisemites is won by totally defeating them, since their actions are based on blind eternal hatred rather than legitimate grievance. We didn’t compromise with the Nazis, right?

At first this new approach was located mostly in Israel and centred around ‘security’. Yes, ideally Israel would give up parts of the West Bank for a Palestinian state, but then it would be too easy for Palestinians (motivated by hate) to attack Israel, there would be an insufficiently large buffer zone. Thus, for the sake of security there could be no return to Israel’s 1967 armistice lines, and the territories would have to remain in Israeli hands. Gradually this morphed into an argument centred around antisemitism – the Palestinians didn’t just hate Israelis, they hated Jews. Whatever evidence could be marshalled – antisemitic rhetoric from Palestinian Islamists, terrorist attacks targeting Jews outside Israel – was used to argue that all Jews, wherever they resided were a target, and needed protection. In this way, Jews around the world were co-opted into the Likudist project of holding on to the occupied territories. But for that to work, diaspora Jews had to be afraid and remain so.

It is not only Israel that has an interest in diaspora Jewish fear. There are also the numerous anti-antisemitism bodies: such as the CST, Campaign Against Antisemitism and Antisemitism Policy Trust in the UK, plus newcomers like the decidedly unacademic London Centre for the Study of Antisemitism. Like any charity, these bodies have a vested interest in the problem they campaign against continuing to exist. Were antisemitism to somehow magically disappear these groups would go out of business, and the people who work for them would lose their jobs. Less drastically, if the level of antisemitic incidents were to decline, or even remain stable, then donations to these groups might well fall as donors reconsidered their priorities. Anti-antisemitism thus requires a constant state of crisis, for antisemitism to be constantly rising, for ever-new sources of threats to be on the horizon, for the organisations to keep ticking over and keep their plutocratic donors happy. These groups are also in competition with one another. When the Campaign Against Antisemitism was formed in 2014, CST was hostile towards them, accusing them of fear-mongering, of exaggerating the antisemitic threat. In other words, precisely the things that left-wing critics have long accused the CST of doing. In time, CST got use to the upstart threat, and they now compete as to who can say things are worst. Having less scruples, the CAA usually wins at this game, memorably creating a metric for ‘antisemitic anti-Zionism’ which finds people who state that they don’t ‘feel comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel’ guilty of antisemitism. However, CST has more influence, having existed longer (since 1994 as a distinct charity) and is the recipient of the considerable largesse of its key founder, Gerald Ronson. Either way, it is the psyches of diaspora Jews that are the losers in these catfights, constantly made more afraid so the anti-antisemitism business stays afloat.

There is one further group with an interest in diaspora Jewish fear: the British state, particularly under the rule of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. In that period there was a strong effort to use Jews as a weapon in the culture wars that these administrations were so desperate to provoke. The Conservatives had little to offer on economic grounds, after Cameron’s and Osborne’s austerity programme, so they were left with trying to stoke fear – fear of trans people, immigrants (particularly those arriving on ‘small boats), of extremists (which essentially means Islamists) of ‘woke’ attitudes on issues of race and gender, and of devious historians revising the histories of our glorious island and empire.  They quickly realised that Jews could be extremely helpful in this regard; the claim that they were protecting Jews helped justify crackdowns on ‘extremism’, restrictions on public protest, greater limitations on student protest at universities, opposition to diversity and equality campaigns and greater support for NATO/US militarism. These are all things that the government wanted to do anyway, but it looked much better to say that they were doing so in protection of a historically racialised minority group. This campaign preceded Corbyn but was ratcheted up while he was Labour leader. The right found the perfect vehicle to whitewash themselves as anti-racists: the widely misunderstood Labour antisemitism crisis. In contrast to what appeared to be Labour’s insensitive treatment of Jews, the Conservatives sought to hug the Jewish community ever closer. It suggested that it was not the right but the ‘anti-racist woke left’ that was the greatest threat to the Jews; Jews should ditch any anti-racist alliance with other minority groups and instead go with the Tories, who would protect them from other minorities. All this required Jewish fears to be sky high and the Labour scandal provided that, and soon afterwards things kicked off in the Middle East. The Conservatives gleefully promoted the narrative that there was a wave of antisemitism against Jews in Israel and the diaspora, and only right-wing governments like theirs would protect Jews from antisemites, protestors, anti-Zionists and Islamists, groups which were painted as largely synonymous with each other. There weren’t many groups which stuck with Conservatives at the last election; British Jews and British Indians bucked the national trend. For Jews, the fears that Conservative leaders had stoked for a decade played a central part in this loyalty.

Of course, some fear is justified. Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And it is ok to feel afraid. But it is also ok not to. We’ve reached the point in which fear has almost become constitutive of Jewishness, so much so that people start to feel that if, for whatever reason they are not afraid, they are somehow no longer authentically Jewish. At this specific moment it feels countercultural, even heretical to state that you have not been seriously impacted by antisemitism, that you have not been troubled by attitudes to Israel on protests and on social media, that you are not afraid. It used to be different: Zionists used to see themselves as fearless, depicting diaspora Jews as ‘Jews with trembling knees’, as Menachem Begin put it in 1982. Now it’s the other way round: Zionists see threats to Jews around every corner while Jewish diasporists see a world that is, by and large very welcoming to us, and where we are flourishing within diverse, multicultural societies.

As the song goes:  כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלוֹ גֶשֶׁר צַר מְּאֹד וְהָעִיקָר לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלַל  - the whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the main thing is not to be afraid. This is taken from a text by Rebbe Nachman, but it isn’t quite what he said. The actual phrase from Likutei Moharan 48 is:

ודע , שהאדם צריך לעבור על גשר צר מאד מאד, והכלל והעיקר שלא יתפחד כלל

Know that a person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, but the key principle is not to make themself afraid. Yitpached is the reflexive form of the verb, to make oneself afraid. Fear, according to Rebbe Nachman, is not just something ‘out there’ but also internal, something we choose to do to ourselves in response to the external world. And, we might add, what others do to us in order to serve their goals.