There’s a Latin phrase I’ve been using a lot over the past twenty months or so. And in the past few days, since the BBC decided that a dose of Jew hate from Glastonbury made for compelling viewing, it’s barely been off my lips: status quo ante (a return to the previous state of affairs).
For decades after 1945, open expressions of antisemitism were rare. There was debate – perhaps questioning is a better way of putting it – as to whether there was a widespread recognition that after the murder of six million Jews, it was impolite to be antisemitic in public, or whether the murder of six million Jews had actually destroyed the virus of Jew hate, and the world’s oldest hatred was effectively over.
But as Lord Sacks put it, antisemitism is a constantly mutating virus. Even in the post-war decades it was obvious it had not been eradicated and had merely changed its appearance. When open Jew hate was frowned upon in polite society it took another form: Holocaust denial. Denying Jews the Holocaust was, for antisemites, an even more enjoyable form of hatred. And it could be couched as supposedly objective research, albeit ‘research’ that only Jew haters would countenance.
So antisemitism never disappeared. Why would it have? Murdering six million Jews was the apotheosis of antisemitism but it was not the end of it. The only issue in reality was when the self-denying ordinance against open Jew hate would end.
There was a clue – a pretty big clue – that it had ended after 2015, when the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader opened the floodgates to open antisemitism, especially on social media. But poisonous and worrying as it was back then, it was more or less contained to self-identifying Corbyn supporters.
The real irony of this timeline is that it is possible to date precisely when that dam fully burst and open, proud and unabashed antisemitism was given its head again, for the first time since the Holocaust. That date was, of course, October 7 2023. Remember that the PSC contacted the Met to get permission to hold a march on October 7 itself, while the massacre was still in progress.
It’s a sick irony that one response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah has been a return to – here’s that phrase – the status quo ante. An outpouring of Jew hate, that is, that takes us back to the world before 1945.
That’s why, for example, we saw the Glastinbury crowd chant ‘death, death to the IDF’ – death to Jews, in other words – without any compunction or embarrassment. Quite the opposite: the chant and the sentiments were as frenzied as their precursors at the Nuremburg Rallies.
And it’s why the BBC took the decision not to pull the plug on its broadcast of the rapper leading the chants, Pascal Robinson-Foster. A deliberate decision. If someone had stood on stage and said ‘death, death to the Muslims’ do you really think the BBC would not have cut its broadcast immediately? But – as David Baddiel pointed out in his book – Jews don’t count. Open antisemitism is not just tolerated now. In some quarters, such as the BBC, it barely even registers as hatred.
If you want to see open antisemitism being normalised, look at how the police and CPS stand and watch as the hate marchers scream their poison and call to ‘globalise the intifada’ – to kill Jews. Not just stand and watch, indeed, but actively protect the marchers’ right to spew hate. If you turn up to protest against this hate, you will be the one arrested by the police.
But it’s not just a return to the status quo ante. There is now an additional element that has changed the dynamics: the growth of radical Islam and the reaction of politicians who are scared witless that they will be wiped out by the sectarian Muslim vote. We are now caught in a poisonous cocktail of old-school antisemitism – note how the child-killer trope is foremost among the attacks over Gaza – and Islamism. In that context, the response to the death chant of Health Secretary Wes Streeting, often cited as some sort of friend of the community, was instructive. Instead of simply condemning the appalling chant, his response was to add snide whataboutery: "I'd say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order". As if the Israeli embassy is somehow responsible for a death chant at Glastonbury. But with a majority in Ilford North of just 538, Streeting has only one concern: avoiding being turfed out by a sectarian Muslim candidate at the next election.
Here we are, back where we started two millennia ago, back where Jew hate has developed in those millennia, back where antisemitism is out and proud. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in.
