The news broke while I was on my way to Brighton’s Friends Meeting House on Tuesday evening for an event billed “The Silencing of Palestinian Advocacy”. Two men in their thirties had been arrested in Manchester under the Terrorism Act on Sunday, the eve of Yom Kippur, on suspicion of plotting to attack the city’s Jewish community. The Community Security Trust called it “utterly chilling.” Less than a year earlier, on Yom Kippur 2025, Jihad al-Shamie had attacked Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, and two worshippers, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, died.

The timing has a context. Eleven days before the Heaton Park attack, the Labour government recognized the State of Palestine. Two weeks before this latest plot was disrupted, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, describing them as necessary to “salvage” a two-state solution. Both steps were justified as strengthening the prospect of two states. Both times the Jewish community warned that people who had spent decades trying to kill that prospect would read the steps as a signal that violence pays. No straight causal line runs from Whitehall to a synagogue door. But the sequence is plain to anyone with eyes to see it.

I was uneasy for a more personal reason too. On 5th September 2026 I was not allowed to stay at the launch of the British Chapter of Antifascism International, and I half expected the same here. The organizers, Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign, are a group that stood by a man who assaulted me at the Peace Statue on the seafront, of all places, on 6th December 2025. As it turned out, nothing happened. A couple of people seemed to recognize me, but nobody spoke to me, and the only words I said all evening were an offer of a pen to someone behind me who needed one. The chair told the room that the organizers had “been a bit worried about potential Zionist attacks,” but reassured them that “we’ve got stewards, so we should be fine.” The one Zionist in the room sat quietly and took notes. Then I listened.

The first speaker deserved to be listened to. Stephen Kapos, now 89, is a child survivor of the Holocaust in Budapest. He described wearing the yellow star at the age of seven, and the Arrow Cross militias who marched Jews to the Danube and shot them into the river. He described being hidden in children’s homes run by the Lutheran pastor Gábor Sztehlo, who saved around two thousand Jewish children. He read Miklós Radnóti’s “Fragment”, recovered from the murdered poet’s pocket after his mass grave was exhumed. It was the most affecting part of the evening. Later, though, Kapos spoke about visiting family in Haifa. He said that many of his relatives there who had survived the Holocaust, including a cousin who came back from Auschwitz, were “all, I’m afraid, racists,” and he attributed their fear of Palestinian violence to propaganda that is “completely false.” When a man who survived one attempt to exterminate the Jews treats his cousins’ fear of another attempt as a delusion, it is a measure of how far this politics has travelled.

Sukaina........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)