Is it different because I’m a black Muslim woman? I stand with Israel, just as I stand with other countries that are the victims of terror attacks. Yet people say anti-Semitic things in front of me and expect me to agree, or they grow angry at my condemnations of terror.
To recap: on Saturday October 7, terrorists attacked Israel, killing more than a thousand Jewish people including babies. It was the deadliest day for the Jewish community since the Holocaust.
Hearing the news I prayed for those lost and started texting my Jewish friends in London and some in Israel. I tweeted that I stood with Israel. Within minutes my Twitter and Instagram accounts were being flooded with hate and disgusting messages from people who were literally supporting the terror attacks.
I ignored this. But when on Sunday I made a comment on TV about how we seem to always dismiss the harm done to the Jewish community and how we can’t even acknowledge, let alone condemn, the murder of Jewish babies, things took an extreme turn.
Moving to Cardiff, I found my faith and culture were taken to mean I couldn’t be friends with Jewish people
People were suddenly foaming at the mouth that I would even have the nerve to talk about the terror Hamas caused rather than the politics of the region.
In fact, this has been a thread throughout my life — noticing the casual (and worse) racism towards Jewish people in Britain.
I grew up in Manchester with the British Jewish community. My first teacher, friend and neighbour were all Jewish.
When, aged seven, I came back from Somaliland after the war it was my Jewish neighbour who came round to us and it was a Jewish lawyer who helped us find my grandfather and bring him to the UK. I did not know they were Jewish at the time. Nor was it even something that I considered because they were just people who I loved and who loved me.
This all changed when I left Manchester and moved to Cardiff, aged nine. I had gone from a very mixed community to one where my faith and culture were for some reason taken to mean that I could no longer be friends with people who were Jewish or supported Israel. I thought this was stupid because even though I had no concept of antisemitism, which is what I was being fed though I was barely even 10 years old, I just knew it was wrong to hate people because of where they came from.
Maybe because I had witnessed civil war myself in Somalia and knew what hate could lead to, I was a little more sensitive to the targeting of a particular community. But from a very young age I have always rejected the (very sadly) normal casual racism and hate towards Jewish people in this country.
At university in Bristol and then living in north London, where I have been since moving to this city, I again found myself again in rooms where anti-Semitism was rampant. And where because I was a black Muslim woman, many of those in said room thought I would agree with them.
I did not and would never. I did know the complexity of the situation between Israel and Palestine but I have to say it was last year when I visited the region for the first time. I got a deeper understanding of how communities of people who were told they were enemies were in fact living together side by side and trying to find a way towards peace for their children.
For the first time I met Ethiopian Jewish people and those who were exiled from Middle Eastern countries when the state of Israel was created. There is a diversity in Israel that we are never shown. This feeds into the conspiracy theories that have dehumanised the Jewish community and we need to challenge that. We need to not just condemn what happened in Israel last week but what is happening on our streets in London.
We need to condemn people taking to our streets and celebrating the murder of innocent people. People whose families live in this city. I cannot tell you how painful it is to see the Jewish community of London, who always come out for those in need, have their pain dismissed. I thought as a country we were better than this.
