Terrible but not surprised - Jewish community under threat

[mids2019]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx0331xxd7xo

It appears Jews are not safe in the UK at all.

Can we seriously look at the impact of anti semitism now?

Sorry but totally disagree with you - these marches are EXACTLY why anti semitism is rising and attacks are increasing. Your refusal to accept the connection is a huge part of the problem; you need to ask yourself why you won’t listen to the Jewish community explaining the harm it is doing.

Everyone marching alongside people chanting anti Zionist chants and holding up slogans supporting the destruction of Israel and hatred of Jews (which are so prevalent on all these marches even if you yourself aren’t saying this you are walking alongside and in support of that cause) are doing it under the thin ‘veil’ of concern for ‘babies dying’. If you only cared about the babies dying you wouldn’t be allowing all the calls for the dismantling of Israel of allowing chants of ‘genocide’ or ‘end the occupation’

when the next terrorist attack that gets through without being intercepted ends in the death of innocent Jewish people I hope you can’t sleep at night knowing you were part of the zeitgeist for perpetuating hate and enabling this anti Jewish ideology.

you might not like what I am saying but I beg you to ask yourself why so many people can see it when you refuse to. I assume you don’t like it because you’re not a bad person, so please please reflect.

Yes imagine if we blamed every single Palestinian person for what Hamas did on 7/10?

in fact imagine if we blamed every single Muslim.

is that ok?

I can see what you’re saying; but what if Israel isn’t looking for revenge and instead is trying to defend itself from future attacks? If strategically this means accepting Hamas needs to be demilitarised and eliminated then how is this achieved when they have embedded themselves in society?

If someone was shooting at your family, holding a child in front of them as a shield, would you let them kill your children or have to accept the innocent child must die to save your own? It’s basic philosophical questions that have no easy answer.

I agree Israel has managed this situation so poorly, disastrous PR for a country that is the victim. But I wonder how much of that is on them and how much is because so many have been so willing to accept Hamas / anti Jewish propoganda ?

I'm not a military strategist but if Israel wanted revenge (which is feels like they wanted more than they wanted the hostages back) then, God, even a month of that kind of onslaught they launched would have been enough. They could have stopped there and said, and there'll be worse than that to come if you don't surrender and give back the hostages.

That's kind of what has been happening though, there have been constant ceasefire negoations and Hamas still isn't for surrendering or handing the hostages back. So unfortunately it wasn't "enough" in the sense you mean.

Apologies for derail, this is exactly the problem though. Any threat against UK Jewish people just gets derailed back to the Israel situation with the subject (or sometimes blatant text) being that this is a justification.

What are you asking here? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt but it sounds like you mean, "Who is to blame for terrorists planning an attack on Jews in Manchester?" When surely the answer to that is the terrorists themselves.

Incidentally my German Jewish DGM lost several members of her family in the Holocaust, including one of her own children, and as far as I'm aware never contemplated returning to Germany after the war to shoot a load of innocent civilians going about their business.

What do you think were the factors and events that led up to this? And how do you believe that these factors and events can be managed?

I'm not saying I believe this, but a lot of the chat I'm seeing on X and even Reddit now is focussing on immigration policies as one answer to that.

But it is not genocide, it’s war.

The problem is that most people are seeing war for the first time because of Tik Tok, Instagram etc and a lot of people have never though deeply about or actually studied enough to know what wars are like.

People are seeing the things that have always been endemic to war for the first time and they are having a human reaction to it. They are seeing collateral damage for the first time, they are seeing dead children for the first time.

In reality, ever single war that we look back on in history (and those which we understand to have been completely necessary i.e. the American Civil War, WW2 etc), all these wars had everything that we are seeing in Gaza x 100, but we look back on those wars as wars, and not genocide, because we never had the emotional reaction of seeing war in action, in real time and seeing the cost of war via Tik Tok and Instagram. Even journalists and reports cannot capture the horror of war in the way that social media has been able to.

Unfortunately, war is necessary - history has proven that. I do think this war is necessary. We fought in WW2 to prevent fascism and the horror that was the Nazi’s and their war machine from reaching our shores and destroying our way of life. And we would absolutely do the exact same thing again if we were at threat from a fascist, religious, totalitarian regime like Israel is. No doubt about it.

'being shipped up by Gaza?'

Do you mean the genocide of innocent children and people that have nothing to do with Hamas.

It was horrific what happened on 7th October, there is no doubt about that. I do sense a feeling that you do not appreciate there are children being starved right now, no medical supplies and millions displaced and living in inhumane conditions.

I would not have seen or said this in my 20's or 30's.

This is my experience. I have also changed my mind on this.

The UN has issued more resolutions against Israel, than all other member states combined - including Iran, North Korea, Russia, Sudan etc.

Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the only place in the Middle East where you can be a gay Muslim, living openly, is the place that has received the most human rights condemnations compared to any other country in the Middle East, or even the world.

Something isn’t quite right about that.

Yes why doesn’t every black person murder all the white people as revenge for apartheid and slavery and colonialism? Is it ok for me to kill all Russians or all Iranians because I disagree with the conduct of their state?

shall we call to eliminate Every person and dismantle every single country that has colonial roots? Palestinians would have to accept this includes them as Jews would argue they are the original colonisers, not the Jewish people who originate from that land.

it’s all absurd. The Hamas propoganda machine uses the ‘stop killing babies’ trope as a veil for the very very different issue which is the dislike for Israel existing at all. How Israel conducts its defence against terrorism is one question.
whether Israel has a right to exist another.

when you March for ‘free Palestine’ you are agreeing that what they are calling for is the land being ‘free from Jews’. Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 1945 and has no intention of doing so. That’s not the issue for Hamas, the issue for them is Israel ‘occupying’ Israel. They do not accept and have never accepted a two state solution. The only solution for Hamas is the final one.

many people do not understand what they’re marching for; they see children suffering and just want it to stop. That’s why they March, but they don’t see they’re being used. Used by people who despise them.

Isn't the rationale for marching to put pressure on government who allow arms to be sold to Israel while the IDF are killing thousands, destroying whole cities, and displacing millions? The government is in a position to put some diplomatic pressure on Netanyahu, while they obviously haven't got the same ability to put diplomatic pressure on groups like Hamas.

Compare it to the war in Ethiopia where many thousands of civilians have also been killed in recent years, there was no marching for that but one big difference is that the UK is not (currently) selling arms to them. Still, I think we can all agree that who gets international sympathy is not evenly distributed.

But you ask a good question about "what if it happened on our shores", and this has actually happened in British history several times. Israel as a state is dependent on the suppression and dispossession of land from the Palestinians, that's a foundational and ongoing aspect of the nation, not just something that happened in the 40s. Figures who resisted similiar long and successful occupations in Britain, like Boudicca, Alfred the Great, Hereward, are often considered heroic (though many of them failed).

Your last point presupposes the land was Palestinian? Isn’t the issue that Palestine itself was only fairly recently created and Judaism and its origins in that land predate Arab occupation. It also suggests that Israel exists at the exclusion of Palestinians when a large proportion are Arabs (as well as other religions and races). Israel does not depend on the suppression of Palestinians? It depends on suppressing ongoing terrorist attacks by Palestinians who disagree with Israel existing. But this is what seems to be so often confused, people focus on the controls on the border for example but don’t ask why? They do not focus on why Israel has to do this; they do not ask why Egypt does the same.

even if some Palestinians took issue with being dispossessed in the 40s, at what point do you draw a line under it? The perceived injustice of what happened to your great grandfather is not justification for raping and murdering people who weren’t alive in the 40s. as said above, you don’t see Jews raping and murdering Germans for the crimes of their great grandparents against them.

even if some Palestinians took issue with being dispossessed in the 40s, at what point do you draw a line under it? The perceived injustice of what happened to your great grandfather is not justification for raping and murdering people who weren’t alive in the 40s. as said above, you don’t see Jews raping and murdering Germans for the crimes of their great grandparents against them.

There is no other situation where I could ever conceive of rape, murder and mutilation of 1,400 men, women and children being ignored and/or dismissed in this way.

Again, something isn’t quite right.

Someone commented that they didn’t think inter faith work was of value in stopping situations like this. Which I disagree with, I don’t think it’s the whole solution, but I think it should play a part.

So I wondered what factors and events they thought lead up to this? I wanted to understand what they think might reduce the risk of attacks and potential attacks.

Not looking to place blame on anyone, we are all ultimately responsible for our own actions, looking at it from a logical perspective with regard to what people think would be helpful.

Thinking of Jewish communities that are feeling unsafe, it’s not a nice feeling.

Is this before or after we hold hands and sing songs?

The people who lived there and had and have their home dispossessed are Palestinian, the region has been called Palestine for over two thousand years. Not what I'd call "fairly recent". The people living in the area didn't pop into existence when Mandatory Palestine was formed. Ben Gurion explicitly recognised that the land was occupied and for Israel to exist they had to kill and exile Palestinians. That process is ongoing to this day.

It's not just a historic injustice (and there are people alive today who went through the first Nakba, so it's not just 'great grandparents'): Gaza is an open-air prison, Palestinians living in Israel are second-class citizens, and the West Bank is occupied and continually settled upon by Israeli settlers who dispossess current inhabitants. None of this is a secret and is obvious to anyone who spends even a little bit of time looking into it.

100%

My view of the UN has for numerous reasons, including this, has been irrevocably damaged.

Looking at similar events in the 1940s, WW2 (1939 - 1945) displaced 60 million people, and the partition of India in 1947 displaced 15 million. Millions also died in both. There are, of course, many, many more examples. But it wasn’t uncommon for that time in history, and it was certainly not limited to Palestine.

The occupation of the West Bank is unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising, is it. The odds of the West Bank becoming another Gaza are high. I mean, it would more than likely become another Gaza.

This could, and by all means should, have been historic. But in the same way that the events of 7 October are ignored and dismissed, so too is the religious fundamentalism
that drives the ongoing conflict.

So let’s accept you have two groups who both claim to originate from the same land; and one that disagrees with the apportionment in recent modern history.

Lets even go as far as to ‘accept’ what you say about the treatment of Palestinians in Israel, are you saying any of this would justify the rape and murder of innocent people?

if Palestinian take issue with this, will they next come to rape and murder British children and grandmothers in response to their occupation of Palestine prior to giving it back to Jewish people (done let’s not forget in response to the fact that Jews had been cleansed from most other countries and not as an attack on Arabs who to this day only continue to grow in numbers and are ‘safe’ to live in many countries across the globe).

I just don’t see how even on your facts one can justify terrorism.

@Muthaofcats, I'm not justifying terrorism. Rape and murder are bad, almost everyone in the world agrees on this point. The conflict didn't begin on October 7th but even if it did, do you think killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying a whole city, and displacing and attempting to starve millions is a proportionate relatiation?

@NotSoBigCrocodile The big difference between this situation and places like India was the British eventually left India. That's not possible in Israel (they have nowhere to go back to). In this respect it is more like the apartheid regime in South Africa.

I agree there is a religious element to it— regional support for Hamas is motivated along Islamic grounds and the whole situation feeds into antisemitic conspiracy theories shared by many fundamentalist groups including Hamas. But if you stripped out the religion, you'd still have a conflict due to the political violence. If someone kicked you out of your house and took it for themselves, you would hate them regardless of religion.

Do I personally think it’s proportionate? I don’t feel qualified to determine if Israel’s actions are proportionate. I will wait to see what the ICJ decides, having had access to all the evidence. (It’s very hard to know whether the sources we are all accessing are real; and there’s always an element of confirmation bias, particularly for those who use social media to inform themselves as we know algorithms just serve you more of what you like. )

So that point aside, sadly collateral damage is a fact of war; and it has been accepted by the ICJ that Israel DOES have a right to defend itself. So in that sense yes I do think Israel has a right to retaliate and sadly that does mean suffering of innocent citizens caught up in it.

What is highly unusual in this war is that you have a target which has deliberately embedded itself in society and uses its people as shields. It is further complicated by the fact that many of these people support Hamas and have a very different ideology to the western world. Extreme Islamism does not value life and death in the same way as you or I do, so they make a different assessment about the cause and dying for it. They do not seem to value their children’s lives in the same way. I see that Israel actually works hard to warn people ahead of strikes or work to deliver aid. Whether it’s enough, as I say, I really am not placed to judge.

What no one can ever answer is what proportionate defence WOULD look like to them? Or is the only acceptable outcome one where Israel does not seek to defend itself at all?

would the same outrage be felt for the Jewish babies who died as a result of Israel being attacked again and again ? I didn’t see western people marching in outrage on October 7th despite seeing the footage of children shot in their mothers arms and Holocaust survivors being murdered and broadcast on their own Facebook. The eerie silence said everything.

Sadly yes - oct 7th was a direct action against Israel and many of the activist seem to take the view that Israel should give way on all fronts. Israel was not the start of this conflict. As Israel is the only Jewish state there seems to be an increase in anti Jewish sentiments which is fuelled by the demonstrations

@Muthaofcats I think you misunderstand what a protest march is for. People don't tend to march just to show outrage (though sometimes they might), the strategic aim of a march is to put pressure on the state to change policy. Obviously, the UK state doesn't support Hamas, so marching against them wouldn't do anything.

I suggest proportionate defence would not involve killing tens of thousands in return (including thousands of children) and levelling a city. The Israelis did defend themselves quite ably from the initial Hamas attack, what they're doing now is just revenge slaughter. Their justification that wiping out Hamas would be an act of defense doesn't hold water when they have to create countless additional blood feud grievances to do it. No one expects the children who manage to survive this attack in Gaza to grow up with love in their hearts for Israel.

Where does all this end?

1. You can have the problem rumble on until the Palestinians are eliminated, their lands absorbed, the people exiled or murdered. This could take another 100 years or more.
2. A regional or world war happens and Israel is wiped out by neighbouring states. This seems unlikely now, but who knows what the world will look like in another few decades.
3. Some form of peace process (like that in Northern Ireland) with some kind of political settlement with agreed borders or political representation and an end to the violence. The people in power on both sides right now are belligerent, but in the next generation this could change. A peace summit managed to end the Second Intifada, after all.

People who are steadfastedly against a peaceful settlement are essentially saying that they would prefer that one side should eventually be wiped out by the other.

Sorry but totally disagree with you - these marches are EXACTLY why anti semitism is rising and attacks are increasing. Your refusal to accept the connection is a huge part of the problem;
Antisemitism is rising because people conflate Judaism with Zionism. You can be a Zionist and Jewish but you can also be Jewish without being a Zionist. By Zionist, I mean people who want the territorial expansion of the state of Israel (see the settlers in the West Bank and the eviction of the Bedouins).
Antisemitism is rising because people do not understand that the Israeli government is behaving the way they are, not because they are Jewish, but because they have an agenda.
Do I believe some marchers are antisemitic? Yes, without a doubt. All of them, no. I understand the anxiety of the Jewish community around the marches. I have been there when the EDL marches. My husband and I have been victims of open racism, some by the police.
You also make some very personal attacks on my character whilst you know nothing about me and my background. You also make a lot of baseless assumptions about me. Kindly, refrain from repeating this. It is uncalled for.