No one in power respects my grief. And no one is coming to console me

Politicians, the police and the media want millions of us to imagine we are alone in grieving the slaughter of Gaza's children – and that our grief is shameful. They need us to succumb to their lies

Members of the Jewish community have been grieving for three days now over the killing of two innocent people in last week’s attack on a Manchester synagogue. Politicians and the media keep telling us how important it is to respect their grief.

I and millions of other Britons, some of them Jews, have been grieving for much longer – over the killing of tens of children in Gaza not on one day last week but on every single day, without break, for two years. And yet no politicians or media seem to think it important to respect my grief.

I grieve over much more than a death toll that now runs into many tens of thousands of children.

I grieve over my government’s active complicity in providing the weapons and intelligence that made possible the mass slaughter in Gaza.

I grieve over my government’s refusal to oppose the abduction of British citizens trying to reach Gaza and bring food to the population Israel is starving. And I grieve at my government’s refusal to mount an official flotilla of its own, a naval one, to break Israel’s illegal siege of the enclave and end the famine it has engineered there.

I grieve over the relentless erosion of the public’s right to protest the slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

I grieve over the designation of any practical effort to stop the slaughter as “terrorism”.

I grieve over the condemnation by politicians and the media of my grief as “antisemitism”.

I grieve for the death of my last illusions. The illusion that a civilised society treats all life as precious. The illusion that a civilised society learns from history, so that it stops recycling history’s worst atrocities. The illusion that our society is civilised.

I grieve knowing that no one in power is coming to console me in my grief. Not the police. Not the politicians. Not the media.

I grieve knowing that, in truth, they will vilify me, they will legislate against me, and one day they will arrest me.

They want me and millions of other Britons to imagine we are alone in our grief, and that our grief is shameful. They need us to succumb to their lies.

But we must never forget. We are many. And it is they, not us, who are the monsters.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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