It is many years since I heard Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, sung. But the haunting sound of British Jews singing it inside a synagogue at the weekend stopped me in my tracks. Not everyone on the video clip that popped up on my phone seemed to know all the words. But perhaps that partly reflects who is seeking the comfort of collective worship in these frightened days.
Secular Jewish friends who once barely thought about their Jewish identity talk of feeling jolted into doing so now, while profound differences of opinion over the current Israeli government are momentarily bridged. The terrorists who murdered and abducted teenagers at a peace rave, or idealists drawn to live in kibbutzim near Gaza because of their support for cross-border peace projects, didn’t care after all how they voted or what they believed.
But neither, of course, will the fire raining down on Gaza now necessarily be able to distinguish between the views of Palestinian civilians caught beneath it; whether they full-bloodedly supported Hamas or had their reservations, or whether they were only in the strip visiting relatives (like the trapped and terrified parents-in-law of the Scottish first minister, Humza Yousaf). In peace you may choose a side but in war it chooses you. And now the consequences of those choices reverberate across a world that has never been more intimately connected.
War enters all our living rooms more than it once did for many reasons, from the unfiltered immediacy of social media – where images of headless bodies too graphic for mainstream publication are now ubiquitous – to the explosion of travel, work and study overseas that means a surprising number of Britons will feel their memories stirred by names or places in the headlines. But perhaps most intimately of all, the heightened emotions of war cascade down through diaspora communities, tied via family and friends to what is happening thousands of miles away but also fearful now of reprisals at home. Domestic tensions can arise in any conflict, of course. But the added risk in this one is that they could be actively stoked for cynical ends.
Already the British hard right is seizing on images of pro-Palestinian rallies across Europe, or diatribes by wannabe student politicians to proclaim the supposed grand failure of multiculturalism, or the idea that society is enriched by different groups being able to maintain their own religious and cultural traditions (within the confines of the law). What price that richness now, they sneer? To see anyone celebrating murder is obviously horrifying. Yet so, in its way, is some of what this ghoulishness unleashes in return.
“This is where multiculturalism leads – civil war. We cannot have different people, with different cultures living side by side without conflict,” tweeted Nick Buckley, self-styled independent candidate for Manchester’s next mayor. Britain First, an extreme rightwing party banned from Twitter until Elon Musk took over the platform, put it more bluntly: “Enoch Powell was right #riversofblood.” Where mainstream critics of multiculturalism used to argue that there were better ways of living alongside each other in a pluralistic world, its new opponents bellow that no such world is possible; that mass immigration has broken the west, and that citizenship should be revoked from those already here if they express unacceptable views. The twisted irony of this argument that Islamic and non-Islamic worlds cannot peacefully cohabit is that it’s the one jihadis make, too.
What happened in Israel feels like another 9/11 not just because of the terrifying death toll but because these unspeakable acts seem calculated to destabilise and confound wider society. The beheadings and the burnings, the sadistic atrocities filmed and uploaded for the world to see, are Islamic State-style tactics used as IS once used them, not only to project this conflict worldwide but to trigger the kind of primal emotions that make it hard to reason or think straight. But since that is the reaction Hamas wants, it is the one we must not give them.
Britain is, lord knows, not perfect. It struggles with the same challenges as every other liberal democracy, not always successfully. But it is still also a country where a Hindu prime minister can wear a kippah and join Hebrew prayers at a time of Jewish mourning, profoundly moving many who do not share his politics. It’s a country where a Muslim mayor of London who has managed these last days with exemplary grace can break bread in a kosher restaurant in Golders Green one day and visit the London office of a charity working in Gaza’s hospitals the next; where the wife of the Scottish first minister, Nadia El-Nakla, can speak emotionally of her fears for her parents’ lives while introducing a motion to the SNP’s conference that both unequivocally condemns the Hamas attacks and calls on Israel to respect international law in response.
These things too are multiculturalism in action; and so is the sound of British Jews singing another country’s anthem in their chosen place of worship, for reasons with which anyone can instinctively sympathise. The true richness of diversity is its capacity to build a new depth of understanding, a sensitivity to our neighbours, and an ability to hold sometimes painfully conflicting thoughts and feelings simultaneously in mind which helps us navigate a complex world. A politics that fuels division and hate leads ultimately only to fragmentation. But in our flexibility, our fluidity, lies Britain’s national strength. We will need it in the days to come.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
