This is a column laden with shame – my shame. It’s about how lazy and complacent I’ve been in my attitude to Jews, or “my Jewish friends” as liberal progressives like me might put it to show that I’m on their side, really. And, to get it all out to begin with, I’m quite willing to accept that I may be shame-signalling here, which must be a version of virtue-signalling that suggests that I’m better than your average antisemite because I feel ashamed about it.
What I’m ashamed about is this: I was pulled up short, really affected by the racism displayed, by vandalism to the Gail’s bakery-cafe in London’s Archway. And then intrigued by the casual prejudice and contempt contained in a Guardian column last weekend, which opined that “even though Gail’s describes itself as ‘a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK’, its very presence 20 metres away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.”
Gail’s, you see (though in a way I hope you don’t), was founded in 1993 by British-Israeli baker Gail Mejia before Israeli entrepreneur Ran Avidan led its expansion from 2005. They sold out to Boston-based private investment fund Bain Capital in 2021.
So, basically, it’s run by the Elders of Zion, or something. Anyway, it’s close to a Palestinian cafe called Metro, so what to do? Best daub Gail’s with slogans such as “reject corporate Zionism” and throw a brick through its window. The Guardian doesn’t condone any of this, but sportswriter Jonathan Liew concludes his column about the nearby plucky little Palestinian cafe thus: “The falafel, the lentil soup, the upside-down chicken: these are blunt and frankly inadequate tools of defiance. But when they’re among the few things you have left, you may as well use them.”
Really? The home front of the Israel-Palestine conflict is being fought between sandwich bars in Highgate? Who knew? The headline: “A corner of north London where food has become a battleground in the Israel-Gaza war”. So. Wink, tap side of nose – if you’re of a certain generation, you know what that “north London” means. Them. Jews.
But why my shame? I live in Sussex, not north London. It’s this: It took this cafe intifada, the exchange of bagel-pita ordnance, to show me what antisemitism looks like. It wasn’t the massacre of young Israeli festival goers by Hamas on 7th October 2023, the mass shooting on Bondi beach of Jews late last year or the deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue a couple of months earlier.
It’s not the desecration of Jewish graves with swastikas or the hateful chants and slogans of pro-Palestinian marchers in London. It’s a ham-fisted piece of journalism about attacks on a purveyor of over-priced cinnamon swirls and Bircher muesli of supposedly Jewish origin.
Maybe it’s the very everyday ordinariness of this event, in contrast to the huge hatred bubbling under. Maybe the smashed window and illiterate daubed slogans have a Kristallnacht resonance with the Nazi pogrom of Jewish shops and synagogues in pre-war Germany.
I don’t know. But the Battle of Gail’s shook me. And I think the shaking has to do with my complacency. Look, it’s happening here. It’s happening again. It wasn’t just our parents’ generation who spoke (and they really did) of “the smelly Jews”. A shop, in London, by virtue of a long-former Jewish ownership, is seen as complicit in Israel’s foreign policy some 3,000 miles away. Wow.
So I’m late to the party. The public return of mainstream antisemitism has been widely called out for some time. I haven’t ignored it; I’ve tut-tutted as much as the next Gentile. But something different, dark and insidious is happening – it’s that very ordinariness I referred to. Antisemitism is being made as mundane as a Flat White and croissant in a bun shop, if we’re being called to boycott Gail’s, as we are.
As with many a non-Jewish commentator, I used to say I haven’t got an antisemitic fibre/bone/breath (choose your noun) in my body. It was David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count that first made me feel uneasy some four years ago. He showed me to beware “the difference between the active quality of traditional far-right anti-Jewish racism and the passive nature of the progressive neglect of Jewish sensibilities.” I was passive, so I realised I could be unconsciously antisemitic.
And Melanie Phillips, usually strident on these topics, writes calmly this week of her new book, which I haven’t read, but if her column is a summary she’s recommending education and humour as among weapons to meet the threat.
But those weapons aren’t good enough for those of us who don’t directly face the threat. Christian voices in particular must speak out loudly, from the foundation of our faith in its own Jewish story. Before casual, insidious antisemitism becomes something even deeper and darker, like a new Blood Libel. Before a storm in a north London coffee cup becomes a whirlwind. Before it’s too late.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
Brislington Community News 