I am an Iranian Jew. So I'm brown and Jewish and I have to say it's way scarier to be Jewish in this country right now. I can't hide being brown but I'm afraid to tell people I'm Jewish because the people who I have always supported and trusted - people in left wing, queer spaces, are becoming terrifyingly antisemitic.
As for people defending synagogues - my synagogue was defaced with swastikas a few months ago - I came out of my door to find swastikas drawn all along my street. It didn't even make the news outside the local community and no offers of help were made.
Synagogues and Jewish schools in this country have armed guards because they receive constant death and bomb threats - where are the defenders? The only ones are from the Jewish community.
I'm gay. At the dyke March in Brighton which is meant to be a pride event, banners displaying the Hamas red triangle were shown - a symbol as frightening to me as a swastika. At all pride marches anti-Zionist banners have been displayed - now, to be Zionist only means that you believe the Jews should have a safe self determined homeland. If you believe in a two state solution and want a peaceful safe Israel and a peaceful safe Palestine as I do then you are a Zionist. 95 percent of Jews hold Zionist beliefs, according to all polls I have ever seen, so when you hear people saying they don't hate Jews just Zionists they are actually saying 'I don't hate Jews just 95 percent of Jews'.
My friends have been told to 'go back to Poland' when they have no links to Poland. Incidentally when Jews did try to return to Poland after the war they were met by mobs and slaughtered there. It's one of the factors that lead to the necessary creation of Israel.
My younger family members have been attacked, harassed and spat at in the streets for being visibly Jewish on the way to Jewish schools.
White students in Keffiyeh at student protests have used the Hamas red triangle, spoken about globalising violence against Jews and made death threats.
the Israeli team at the Olympics have recieved multiple death threats. Crowds in an Olympic stadium held up Palestinian flags and chanted heil Hitler at the Israeli athletes.
We are often told Jews are attending the protests - many of these Jews are a sect called the Neturei Karta - they are Jews who believe the Holocaust was punishment for not being good enough Jews and that we must suffer more before we can return to Israel - that's why they are anti Zionist because they think only the purest who have suffered most deserve to live there.
Please also consider the many young Jews who know they will lose friends if they are seen to be in any way supportive of Israel when their friends are yelling about Israel being baby killers. This is why we get tired of hearing that there were 'good Jews' at the protests.
If the Palestinian protests wanted peace they would be protesting both for freedom and self determination for Palestine and for Israel - for an end to war and a return of the hostages and for Hamas to give themselves up.
They wouldn't be calling Israel genocidal and not shouting about Hamas and Iran's openly stated genocidal intentions and wish to destroy Israel and the Jewish people.
They wouldn't be invoking blood libel stereotypes against Israel and not mentioning the children killed on October 7th - two children of a family friend were burned alive among many killed that day. I personally had family at the Nova festival who survived when many of his friends did not - I have been told that claims of murder and rape on October 7th were fake.
They wouldn't be saying Israel was 'killing brown people' as someone has said in this thread because they'd know that 20 percent of the population of Israel (not Palestine just Israel) are non-Jewish Arabs and 50 percent of the population are Mizrahi Jews like me whose families were ethnically cleansed from the wider Middle East - there used to be 2 million Jews living in the Middle East outside Israel, now there are maybe 1000, due to this ethnic cleansing.
They wouldn't be calling Jews who fled europe after quarter of them were murdered for not being white 'white oppressors' either.
They might not rage about there being a Jewish ethnostate which is a tiny country the size of wales with a population the size of Greater London where about a third of the worlds Jews live ( there are still only 16 million Jews in the whole world by the way compared with 2 billion Christian's and more than a billion Muslims ) when Israel is only 76% Jewish but Greece and Romania are 90 percent Christian and just about every Arab state is 90 percent Muslim.
Anyway this got very long but I read this thread and wanted to try to explain why pro-Palestinian flags at an unrelated protest can be upsetting. It's another space that I feel unwelcome in, because I'm frightened of how those people view Jews. Meanwhile I'm frightened of how the rioters view Jews and people of Middle Eastern origin. So where can I feel safe? Nowhere, it seems.
I was very glad to see the counter protests, it does make me feel glad that the racism on the extreme right has been called out in such a way. But I wish antisemitism on the left wasn't being given such a free pass and dismissed when we try to say we are frightened.