Three Years On: What I Got Right, What I Didn’t Expect

Last year I wrote that I had never seen the world the same way since October 7th. I stand by that. But rereading it, I notice that most of what I described was a feeling: shock, disillusionment, a sense of having been misled. This year I want to write about what happened next, because the past twelve months have shown me the difference between a mood and a trend.

The relief that didn’t change anything

Last October ended with something I had stopped believing in: a ceasefire. The last 20 living hostages came home on October 13th. By January, the remains of the final hostage, Ran Gvili, had been returned, and every hostage taken on that day was finally back in Israel. I cried watching those reunions, and I allowed myself to think that perhaps the temperature would drop here too. Surely, I thought, once the hostages were home, the argument would lose its urgency.

It didn’t. If anything, I learned something uncomfortable. I had assumed the hostility was tied to the war: to its images, its pace, its horror. The ceasefire put that assumption to the test, and it failed. The hostility outlasted the thing it claimed to be about.

From the street to the institution

Last year I described hatred on the streets and in activist circles. I called it performative, a trend, something that would burn out. I was too optimistic. Within days of that anniversary, two worshippers were murdered at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Then came a run of attacks on Jewish institutions across the UK in March and April. I used to think of “Do we have a future in Britain?” as a conversation for another day. This year it is the conversation, and I hear it daily, from people who would never have dreamt of asking it.

Then there is what happened this September. The Green Party debated a motion declaring Zionism to be racism, at a conference where, for the first time, the party hired private security to protect its Jewish members. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust all wrote to urge them to reject it. Jewish members warned they could face complaints simply for attending synagogue. The party’s leader, himself Jewish, has said that Zionism as it exists in practice is racist. Last year I was angry at social media trends. This year I am looking at a mainstream party where the question isn’t whether Jews are safe, but whether the movement of most of them is acceptable. That is a different order of problem, and I hadn’t seen it coming.

The calendar tells you everything

This year, student groups chose October 7th itself for a march across four London campuses, so much so that the Metropolitan Police publicly asked organisers to pick a different date because of the effect on Jewish students and staff. Some of the material for these events speaks of “three years of genocide” and honours “martyrs,” on the day of the massacre. Last year the question was whether people would justify what happened. This year the date itself is being claimed. There are 365 days in the year. They chose that one.

Revisiting my own questions

Last year I asked whether I had been wrong about multiculturalism and immigration, and whether the voices I’d been taught to dismiss deserved a fairer hearing. I want to be more careful this time. I still believe those questions deserve honest debate rather than reflexive shouting down. But a year of watching has made me wary of easy answers. The hostility I have seen doesn’t belong to one group. It appears in student unions, in political parties, in the comment sections of people who think of themselves as the good guys, and on the streets. I’m less interested now in locating it in one community and more interested in why so many institutions that should recognise it don’t, or won’t.

What the community did

The most hopeful thing I can report is how British Jews have responded. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research has been tracking the community since before October 7th, and the numbers are striking: the share calling antisemitism a very big problem went from 17% to 50%, and more people now identify as Zionist than before, 66% against 59%. That is not a community that has been talked out of its identity. If anything, it is the opposite. And the Board of Deputies launched Jewish Culture Month this year, with the slogan “Less Oy, More Joy,” a deliberate reminder that Jewish life here is more than a security briefing. I find that more moving than any statement.

Where that leaves me

Last year I said I would not waste energy convincing anyone of anything. I’d soften that now. I’m not interested in convincing people who need me to be a caricature. But I do care about the person who, like me three years ago, assumes this is all a misunderstanding that will pass. It hasn’t passed. The hostages came home and the problem stayed.

Nothing here changes my sorrow for the civilians in Gaza, which I feel as strongly as before. Compassion for them was never the dividing line. The dividing line is whether you can hold that compassion without turning on Jews, or on Israel’s existence, and it is shocking how many people can’t.

As I write this on the third anniversary, I can say that last year’s question has been answered. I wondered whether this was a moment. It wasn’t. It was the beginning.