Only a Game?

About once a month I stand outside my synagogue on security duty.

So many questions begged by that short sentence.  What godforsaken level of security would incorporate me into its ring of steel? And what exactly would I do, beyond soiling myself, if I encountered a genuine security threat? But most of all, why? Why is this necessary? Why do most synagogues in the UK and around the world require a security presence?

To reassure you on those first two questions, I suppose that my role is to provide a familiar face while keeping my eyes open, and while other people who actually know what they are doing look after us. But that last one, well we stopped asking ourselves that question a long time ago. We take the why of it for granted – that whenever we congregate – whether to pray, or to meet, and often when we celebrate, we need a physical presence at the doors and around the building to deter others from doing bad things to us. Because we are Jews.

I’ve always rather enjoyed my security shifts. In truth, although I spend a lot more time outside our synagogue and only occasionally venture indoors in search of some form of spiritual (or other) replenishment, I’ve always regarded the very notion of me and security as a juxtaposition. As kind of funny.

Lately I’ve stopped laughing.

 We’ve all had Amsterdam on our minds this weekend. We know how Thursday night ended – with Israeli football fans getting chased through the streets, abused and beaten by organised gangs of Jew haters. It was as frightening to watch as it was sickening.

What happened before that is murkier, and speaks, in part, to the nature of large scale football events. Participation in major matches can be pretty chaotic, and groups of football fans are often deeply unpleasant, particularly from the perspective of the locals who are going about their daily business. Even when it’s good-natured, not everyone enjoys hordes of foreign fans taking over their city and filling the night with nursery rhyme football chants and “banter”.  

And some fan groups are palpably worse than others. It’s clear that the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans included an element which behaved aggressively and obnoxiously, and there is footage of a group of them removing a Palestinian flag, and singing a racist song about Arabs. Disgusting behaviour, which, and this is not in any way to minimise how contemptible such behaviour is, still falls within the ambit of things that sometimes happen during football away visits.  

I’ve tried hard to think again about the way that night played out. Am I missing something? Seeing so many online quick to dismiss this as a group of obnoxious football fans who got what was coming to them, I had cause to at least look hard at all the available evidence, and to think again.

But there is no way past it, what followed was unique and devastating to see. It appears that a large group of locals planned the attack on the Israelis in advance. These were not Ajax fans – the perpetrators had no involvement in the football, their attack was motivated by a desire to hurt visiting Jewish Israelis. An organised “Jew hunt” with innocents chased down and interrogated to test whether they might be Israeli or Jewish, forced to shout “Free Palestine”, and badly beaten if they didn’t pass the test. It must have been utterly terrifying for the Israelis in Amsterdam that night, including women and children, a fun visit to this famously liberal city transformed into being hunted down by gangs. Because they were Jews.

And then there’s the inevitable but no less chilling prevarication. Progressives (a word which no longer means what they think it means) so easily dismissing what happened, because the victims are Israeli. No pause for thought, just “they had it coming”, goes the knee-jerk reaction. It is, I think, inconceivable that if a group of a different race, nationality or religion were hunted down en masse in a foreign city by a large local vigilante group, that those same activists would not be loudly condemning what happened as a grim racist attack. All of this is a facet of a long-term, and distressingly successful, effort to vilify and dehumanise one national group. And guess what – it’s the ones from the Jewish state.

I’ve been looking at and thinking about all of this way too much since Thursday – at the footage of Israelis being chased and beaten in Amsterdam, and at the mass equivocation, and asking myself what it means. It’s such a stark image, of Jews being hunted down in a European city. Is this one, finally, the wake up call? We’ve been hoping to hear from that silent majority for quite some time now, though I guess the clue is in the name. But if you are moved by what you are seeing, please – don’t hold back. Join us.

Life goes on. We work. We holiday. We celebrate. Boy do we celebrate. But there’s a sense that this thing that shifted has not shifted back. That we’re in this unsettling limbo, where things are mainly normal… except when they’re not - when we see our community centre targeted by extremist protesters. Or our kid struggling to find her path to a university class blocked by protesters telling her she’s not welcome. When we look at that Amsterdam footage and ask ourselves, could that happen here?

None of this is normal. Needing to do security for our synagogue is not normal. I’ll gladly keep doing it, and yearn for a time when me being on security starts to seem funny again.