Violence and the Dividing Line

The Manchester synagogue attack must be condemned without qualification — just as Israel’s destruction of Gaza must be named for what it is: genocide.

It looks like today’s attack on a synagogue in Manchester was the work of an Islamist terrorist. The news is still raw. The details are shifting. But some things are already clear. However much rage there is in the world, however brutal Israel’s war on Gaza, an antisemitic attack on Jews in Britain cannot be excused. That has to be said plainly, without hedging, without qualification.

When I posted on social media earlier (just a simple note, hoping those injured would recover, not yet knowing two people had been killed) the replies came quickly: but what about Gaza? What about the hundreds of Palestinians shot and blown up this week by Israeli forces? The reflex is revealing. Both are wrongs. Both demand condemnation. But they are not tokens to be balanced on a scale, as though the suffering of Jews here cancels the suffering of Palestinians there. To collapse them into each other is to miss the point.

The truth is that grief is stratified. When violence hits Britain, the media mobilises with care and precision. Rolling coverage, sombre language, careful human detail. There will be vigils, interviews, special reports. Parliament will fall silent. But when the killing is in Sudan or Congo, it barely scrapes the ticker. Even Gaza. Where genocide unfolds in plain view. It is always wrapped in evasive terms: clashes, hostilities, regrettable events, and the like. Grief becomes a managed commodity, some lives narrated with dignity, others blurred into statistics.

Tonight in Manchester, there was a march against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It had been planned before the attack on the synagogue unfolded. Yet the Daily Mail headline stripped it of context, collapsing the protest into the crime: “I don’t give a f** about the Jewish community right now”: Pro-Palestine protestor says as marches happen just miles from terror attack synagogue. A single quote, turned into a banner, and suddenly the thousands who marched for Palestine are rebranded as accomplices to terror. The division is manufactured in real time.

The right-wing press knows how to weaponise this. It now has what it wanted: an attacker of likely Islamic faith, protests on the same night, a frame in which Muslims and their allies are cast as a danger, as a fifth column. We saw this after 7/7, when Muslim communities across Britain were told to apologise en masse for the acts of four young men. We saw it after Woolwich, when the EDL tried to march through London with blood still on the pavement. Every time, a community of millions is forced into the dock.

But the other slippage is just as corrosive: the assumption that every Jew is somehow implicated in Netanyahu’s war machine. As though a British family walking into synagogue is responsible for F-35s over Rafah. That logic is the mirror of the right’s smear. Both trade in collective guilt. Both serve the politics of division.

History offers a different thread. Jews and Muslims in Britain have stood together. In the East End of the 1930s, it was Jewish and Irish dockers, communists and socialists, who turned back Mosley’s blackshirts at Cable Street. Decades later, Jewish and Muslim activists marched together against the National Front, then the BNP, then the EDL. The bond was never perfect, but it was there: a recognition that fascism threatens everyone, and that solidarity across communities is the only defence.

Of course, there are extremes in both traditions. Zionism at its most chauvinist, jihadism at its most nihilistic. To deny that is to retreat into denial. But to treat those extremes as the whole story is to hand the argument to the far right. This is the simplistic framing, the dangerous approach, of Farage and Robinson: strip away nuance, reduce communities to caricature, then demand collective punishment.

The British state has always played this game. Jews were once the “enemy within” — blamed for profiteering, treated as alien, attacked in the press. Later it was the Irish, branded terrorists, watched and harassed. Today it is Muslims. Islamophobia has become the respectable prejudice, dressed up in talk of integration and security. Each turn of the wheel divides, isolates, and distracts.

To answer violence with more violence, suspicion with more suspicion, is to do the state’s work for it. The harder task is to hold two truths at once. To say: yes, this synagogue attack was antisemitic terror. And yes, what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. To refuse the ledger where one cancels out the other. To condemn both, without letting either be instrumentalised into the culture war.

That is not an easy position to hold, especially when social media demands instant sides and the press demands easy headlines. But it is the only way to resist the logic of division. Jews and Muslims in Britain do not need to be enemies. They never did. What they need, and what the dominant class fears most, is solidarity.

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