One Young Jewish Woman On Why She’s Marching For A Free Palestine

My Saturdays have been different over the past six months. Instead of heading to the gym or sending memes to my friends, I’ve been on the streets, shouting myself hoarse as part of the ever growing Jewish Bloc for Palestine. A coalition made up of anti-apartheid, pro-Palestinian Jewish groups like Na’amod and Black Jewish Alliance (as well as a large number of unaffiliated Jewish people), we formed in opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

And yet, there is a perception of these marches – which frequently see health workers, teachers, parents and children taking part – as violent “hate mobs” baying for Jewish blood. Robin Simcox (the government’s Commissioner for Countering Extremism), publicly claimed that London had become a “no go zone” for Jewish people as a result of the now regular pro-Palestine demonstrations, while the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, also invoked the very real rise in antisemitism – while simultaneously fuelling surging Islamophobia in Britain – in an attempt to curb the public’s right to protest.

Yes, there are people in our society who harbour genuinely violent antisemitic views (many of them are far right ethnonationalists who applaud the actions of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu), but I personally have not encountered a single one of them on these marches.

In fact, the Jewish Bloc seems to be treated with a strange sense of reverence. I have regularly seen people thank us, often through tears, for marching alongside them. Recently, at the protest on 9 March, we were met with the sort of applause typically reserved for main-stage festival acts. Within the Bloc itself, I have watched as new cross-group and intergenerational friendships are formed – we’ve even started to host regular shabbat dinners, as a way of fostering connections and championing our culture and heritage.

This, of course, flies in the face of those who would seek to categorise us as self-hating un-Jews, a (sadly) familiar and frequent attempt to belittle our position and our actions. Upsettingly, many of these people wantonly compare members of our bloc – a large number of whom are the direct descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors – to kapos [Jewish inmates in concentration camps who were appointed by Nazis as guards to oversee their fellow prisoners].

We do not stand in solidarity with Palestinians in spite of our heritage and belief. It is precisely because of our shared history of persecution, dispossession and genocide that we object to those who would use our identity to aid and abet slaughter.

Many of us within the movement are new to protest – people who have been moved to use their voices to decry this genocide even as some of them mourn loved ones lost on 7 October. These are the people I am most in awe of: those who have taken the first step to call for an immediate ceasefire, a hostage deal (aimed not only at those held hostage in Gaza, but also the thousands of Palestinians held in arbitrary detention), and an end to the siege on Gaza, despite great personal risk. They stand on the shoulders of Marek Edelman, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who said that “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”.

There is a quiet reckoning taking place in living rooms across this country, as many of us are forced to confront for the first time the British state’s complicity in the historic and ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Passover, the Jewish holiday which celebrates the biblical story of the Exodus, often sees Jewish people drawing comparisons between this ancient story of oppression and modern suffering. After all, we are instructed to see ourselves as though we were the generation that was liberated from Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, which translates literally as the “narrow place”. As my eyes turn to Gaza, I cannot think of a narrower place: not just in scale (the Gaza Strip is just 25 miles long), but in the physical and emotional constriction of her people, who are now witnessing the culmination of a 75-year long campaign of violence, a second Nakba. Nor can I stay silent, when my own family experienced dispossession, ethnonationalism and slaughter within my own lifetime.

My mother was born in a small village by the Drina river in Bosnia [then part of Yugoslavia], and I myself was born in the middle of a series of wars which saw her motherland torn limb from limb. Night after night people [in Britain] tuned into scenes of abject devastation on the news; libraries reduced to ashes, doctors executed, human blood sluiced over marketplaces. They watched as now convicted war criminals talked of safe zones and only targeting combatants as they herded innocent men and boys into the slaughterhouses of Srebrenica. Their suffering was reduced to 10-minute segments on BBC News.

Now I watch, as my mother watched, another war through another screen. I watch as libraries in Gaza are burned, as hospitals are bombed, as doctors are abducted, as desperate people are killed scrambling for meagre rations, and it leaves me furious. Freedom is a heavy load. It is one that I choose to bear.