Six weeks after Hamas’s attacks on 7 October I still have a lingering dread from that Saturday morning. Like almost all Jews I know, I frantically messaged family, friends and colleagues, desperate to hear that they were safe. I still struggle to fathom what unfolded as the largest-scale murder and torture of Jews since the Holocaust.
Initially, after 7 October, being Jewish on the left often meant being isolated or intimidated by responses from those I thought would be allies. Some marched alongside calls for jihad, intifada or “Khaybar, Khaybar, yaa Yahood” (referring to the murder and expulsion of Jews). Others tore down posters of children kidnapped by Hamas. Or stood silently alongside anti-Semitism and protesters lauding Hamas’s “resistance”. Stop the War activists objected to Peter Tatchell demanding, in addition to his call for an armistice, an end to “Hamas’s sexist, homophobic, anti-human rights dictatorship”.
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