RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

This is how I think it would play out. Initially, liberals and the left would express concern with the fascists’ planned march. They might even sign a Change.org petition calling on parliament to ban it, given their preference for the taming influence of state authority over the unpredictable force of people power. They might put an anti-fascist symbol in their social-media bio, next to their pronouns and the BLM fist. They would tweet ‘Down with fascism’ or ‘Ban the march’ and post a link to a Guardian article on the problematic history of fascism.

Soon, though, doubts would creep in. What about Islamophobia, some would say? Why all the focus on anti-Semitism? Why are we putting the suffering of the Jews at the top of ‘the hierarchy of racism’ again? An imagined ‘hierarchy of racism’ has been the obsession of Britain’s left for years. They are convinced, in the absence of anything resembling evidence, that the Labour Party and other institutions of society prioritise sympathy for Jews above sympathy for other social groups. I don’t think I have taken part in one media debate about anti-Semitism on the left without my interlocutor saying, ‘And what about Islamophobia?’. It’s like a tic they have.

Their intersectional beliefs would soon kick in. This is one of the most ruinous ideologies of the post-class left. It holds that the multiple forms of discrimination a group faces combine, overlap and ‘intersect’ to give rise to an entirely distinct experience of suffering that people from outside the group are unlikely to be able to understand. So where a Muslim woman, say, faces many ‘intersecting’ forms of discrimination – on the basis of her skin colour, her sex, her religious beliefs, her veil – a Jewish man experiences very few. He’s white, he’s male, he’s probably cishet – he’s fine. Intersectionality is motored by a toxic belief that some people are ‘more oppressed’ than others, and by extension that some people are ‘more privileged’. How long would it be before the ‘privilege’ of the Jewish targets of the planned fascist march would become a factor in the discussion? Not very, I would wager.

Soon we would arrive at one of the higher, even more noxious stages of what passes for progressive discussion in the 2020s. Are the people being marched against Jews or Zionists, some would wonder? Do Israeli flags hang from the windows of the street the fascists intend to march on? If so, that might pose a problem. In fact, any outward Jewish symbol might be an issue for the modern activist class weighing up whether or not to take a stand against fascists. We’ve all seen the footage of a police officer in Scotland advising a Jewish man to hide his Star of David necklace lest it make pro-Palestine protesters ‘very, very angry’. We all remember when Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism walked by a pro-Palestine demo in London, in his kippah, and an officer advised him to move on. We all remember what the crowd chanted at Falter when he did move on: ‘Zionist scum, Zionist scum, Zionist scum…’

So, clearly, a judgement would need to be made before solidarity could be offered. Are these Jew Jews or Zionist Jews? Are they a little too proud of their Jewish identity, which might smack of Jewish chauvinism, and too supportive of Israel? If so, maybe they’re the fascists? Perhaps they’re the far-right threat? The progressive set’s luxury belief of Israelophobia and its wariness of ‘Jewish privilege’, its tendency for viewing Jews who like Israel as bad Jews, might soon dampen its enthusiasm for going anywhere near that street where the fascists planned to march.

Then would come their most pressing, and ugliest, query. What do the fascists look like? If they were white-skinned and red-faced with beer bellies, a St George’s flag wrapped round their shoulders, that might rekindle the interest of the activist class and the Smart Set in counter-protesting them. The post-class left loves a showdown with ‘gammon’. But if they were radical Islamists, if they were extremists who hail from a minority community, forget about it. No one wants to run the risk of being branded an Islamophobe. No one wants to compound the oppression of the supposedly oppressed by taking a stand against them. No one wants to be on the side of ‘white’ people against ‘brown’ people. Following this cruellest of calculations, this most regressive of deliberations, the modern Battle of Cable Street would be over before it had even begun.

And the denouement to this thwarted fight against fascism, to this fizzling out of a sequel to Cable Street? Perhaps one of the Jewish residents would post a video online tearfully asking where all the solidarity is. ‘Okay, Karen’, might come a reply. ‘Cry harder, Zionist’, someone might say. And, inevitably, ‘What about Islamophobia?‘.

The Battle of Cable Street is inconceivable in modern Britain. The ideas, the bravery, the plain decency required for such a street fight with fascism no longer exist. The atomising creed of identitarianism, the relentless rise of privilege policing, the cult of competitive grievance, the wariness of Zionism that so often crosses over into wariness of Jews – all of this has ensured that those 20th-century gatherings across religious lines, colour lines and identity lines to fight for a greater, human cause are unrepeatable in the modern era. These poisonous political strains have made the Battle of Cable Street feel like a distant, almost ancient event. One we can admire but not really imagine. One that the cultural establishment romanticises while being blissfully unaware that were something similar to happen today, they wouldn’t be on the side they think they would be on.

We don’t even need to use our imaginations. Since 7 October we have seen with our own eyes what would happen if there were a sequel to Cable Street. We have seen liberals and leftists march shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists calling for further pogroms against Jews. We have seen self-styled progressives mingle with Islamists chanting about Muhammad’s violent vengeance against the Jews. We have seen bourgeois radicals chant ‘Zionist scum’ at a man in a kippah. We have seen left commentators make excuses for the bloodiest pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust. And we have seen them say nothing when a man was given a paltry suspended sentence for threatening Jews with a knife in Golders Green in London. And when three men in the north of England were arrested on suspicion of plotting a gun attack on Jews. And when synagogues were attacked. And when Jewish schoolkids took off their blazers to dodge the attention of racists. And when anti-Semitic hate crimes in London rose by 1,350 per cent.

Is silence still violence, as they told us during the BLM protests of 2020? If so, their ‘violence’ against Jews has been deafening.

The truth is that there have been mini Cable Streets in Britain and elsewhere almost every week since 7 October. Outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the mobbing of ‘Zionist scum’, the chanting for pogroms, the racist harassment of Jews on campus. And the left that loves what happened on Cable Street 88 years ago has either turned a blind eye or taken the side of the persecutors. This is the inhumanity of identity politics. This is where that post-class, hyper- racial, privilege-obsessed ideology of the cultural establishment ends up: with a low-level war on Jews, in broad daylight.

I cycled down Cable Street shortly after Hamas’s pogrom. From virtually every lamppost there fluttered a Palestine flag. It’s a mostly Muslim area now, the Jews having left long ago, so perhaps that is understandable. And yet I couldn’t help but think how sad it is, how tragic even, that on this street where the Jews and their friends held back the tide of British fascism, there now flew the flag of the side that had just carried out a pogrom against the Jews, and not the flag of the side that suffered it.

A fightback is needed against the indifference of our elites to the difficulties facing Jewish people, and against their excuse-making for pogroms, and against their infliction on our societies of a politics of jealousy and division that they falsely call ‘progressive’. And, most importantly, against the people on our streets agitating against ‘Zionists’, which means Jews. If you see them, tell them: You shall not pass.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy