Shock, rage, increasing unease: UK’s Jewish community wrestles with response to war
British Jews came together to condemn Hamas, but concerns over Israel’s actions are being voiced.
People attending the vigil outside Downing Street for victims and hostages of Hamas attacks, on 9 October 2023. Photograph: Lucy North/PA
Two days after
Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians in southern Israel, hundreds of British Jews waved Israeli flags and sang the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah, at a vigil outside Downing Street.
The event, organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, and attended by the chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, was a powerful show of communal solidarity as the enormity of Hamas’s atrocities was still becoming clear.
Now, two weeks after the terror of 7 October, unease is creeping in, amid the grief and shock. “It still looks like the community is united, but there are incipient tensions,” said Keith Kahn-Harris, an academic and author of several books about British Jews. “And the longer it goes on, the more fragile Jewish unity will become.”
“It”, of course, refers to the war between
Israel and Hamas. As images of dead Palestinian children, devastation and an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe have largely superseded images of dead Israeli children, shattered communities and grief-stricken relatives, some British Jews have begun to voice disquiet about what is happening and what is yet to come.
One expression of this was
a letter signed by eight eminent British Jewish lawyers, including Lord Neuberger, a former president of the supreme court, reminding the Israeli government of its obligations under international law.
[…]
In the US, there have also been signs of discomfort about the unfolding war among American Jews. Protesters – including 400 Jews and 25 rabbis, according to Jewish Voice for Peace – gathered to demand a ceasefire near the Capitol. “We are here to say, ‘Not in our name’,” Jay Saper
told the Washington Post. “We are here as Jews – many descendants of survivors of genocide – to stop a genocide from unfolding in real time.”
[…]
British Jews came together to condemn Hamas, but concerns over Israel’s actions are being voiced
www.theguardian.com