https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/05/jewish-lives-matter/
This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.
Imagine if the Battle of Cable Street took place in 2024. Imagine if this celebrated clash between Jews and their working-class allies on one side, and a fascist movement on the other, were to blow up in 21st-century Britain. What would happen?
The actual Battle of Cable Street took place in the East End of London in 1936 – 88 years ago this week. It was a revolutionary uprising by Jews, leftists and workers against the threat posed by the British Union of Fascists. The BUF was founded by Oswald Mosley in 1932. Mosley had been a Conservative MP before crossing the floor of the House of Commons to join the Labour Party. At the start of the 1930s, following a trip to Italy to meet Mussolini, he converted to the cause of fascism. And he won over many in high society. Leading journalists, a peer, friends of royalty and, notoriously, two of the aristocratic Mitford sisters joined his fascist crusade. One of the Mitfords – Diana – went the whole hog and married him, at the home of Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.
The people of the East End were rather less taken with Mosley’s Mussolini tribute act. And they let it be known when the BUF announced its intention to march through the East End on 4 October 1936. The East End had a large Jewish population then. The BUF’s planned parade, in which thousands of its backers would be on the streets in their Blackshirts, was viewed by many East Enders as an intolerable anti-Semitic provocation. So they decided to take action. Against the advice of both the Metropolitan Police and the Labour Party, who were concerned that a counter-demonstration to Mosley’s march would give rise to lawlessness, the workers of east London plotted their fightback.
Their slogan was ‘They shall not pass’, an echo of the cry of the Spanish republicans who had risen up against Franco’s nationalist coup earlier that year. The East End rebels set up barricades on Cable Street. They used an overturned bus, tables, chairs and paving stones to block the fascists’ access. They gathered together makeshift weaponry – rocks, chair legs, rotten vegetables and even the contents of their chamber pots – to wield against both the fascists and the Met police officers who tried to dismantle the barricades and clear the street. Children were sent out to roll marbles under the hooves of police horses. An entire community had prepared itself for all-out battle against fascism, and in defence of Jews.
When the battle came, it was intense. Mosley marshalled around 5,000 Blackshirts. On the other side, behind the barricades, there were thousands: Jews, Irish dock workers, communists, anarchists, trade unionists. There followed some of the most ferocious hand-to-hand combat ever seen on the streets of Britain. Bricks were hurled at Mosley’s car, sticks were wielded against his Blackshirts, stones were thrown at the police who supported the Mosley mob’s right to parade down Cable Street. Hundreds were injured, many arrested. And the anti-fascists won. In the face of baton charges by horse-mounted officers and the violent menace of the Blackshirts themselves, the Jews and their allies were victorious. Mosley abandoned his plans and scurried back to central London.
The Battle of Cable Street is rightly celebrated as one of the great people’s uprisings of the early 20th century. There is a mural of it in east London today. There are books, films, even a musical. Many Britons are proud that in the 1930s, Jews in east London who had fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s did not suffer the same violence and indignity at the hands of Mosley’s mob. (Although, on the weekend after the Battle of Cable Street, east London was rocked by the Pogrom of Mile End, when 200 Blackshirts smashed the windows of Jewish shops and homes.) The Battle of Cable Street is seen by many as the street fight that foretold Britain’s war on Nazi Germany, as the trailblazer of our future showdown with fascism, as early proof that this racist, inhuman ideology then moving through Europe might just come unstuck against Britain.
And yet, what if it were today? What if a fascist mob marched through a Jewish area of London in 2024? Would we see an uprising of resistance, a taking to the streets to see off the fascists and rally around their targets? I fear we would not. I fear such solidarity is all but impossible in the era of identity politics, intersectionality and progressive suspicion of ‘Jewish privilege’. I fear today the Jews might be on their own – though hopefully joined by that smattering of the population that still appreciates that when anti-Semitism rears its head, society is in deep trouble.
