Just over a year ago, I wrote in Coffee House about meeting an Israeli academic during a quiet lunchtime at a small village pub I run just outside Oxford. The pub is around 500 years old and, in its time, has seen the best and worst of England; that day, it was especially quiet. I ended up chatting to the woman for the best part of an hour. The encounter has stayed with me ever since. What struck me most was the look of fear in the eyes of this plainly kind, decent and obviously deeply intelligent and well-read woman.

Link to the Coffee House article from May last year:

 https://spectator.com/article/why-do-some-irish-people-hate-israel-so-much/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OEprMnSej8

Since then, like many of you, I have watched the constant rise in antisemitic violence that has slowly become Jew hate, directed at our Jewish neighbours. From spitting on buses to stabbings and the burning of Jewish volunteer ambulances in Golders Green, much of this hatred has become conflated with the wider conflict in the Middle East. People have retreated into tribal camps.

Hundreds of thousands have marched every weekend in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The rest of us have not marched. In fact, the majority of the country has stayed away. That is not because we hate Palestinians or because we condone every action of the Israeli government. It is because we understand that this is a complicated, difficult and nuanced conflict. It does not conform to our own political, religious and sectarian divides but follows its own grim rules. It has a way of punishing those who become involved and corralling them into one camp or the other.

Yet no conflict thousands of miles away can justify the level of Jew-hatred now spreading across Britain. The statistics are damning. According to recent official figures, there have been well over 100 antisemitic incidents per 10,000 Jewish people in the UK. This rate has no comparison to any other religious or ethnic group in terms of the number of incidents and the sheer violence and hatred involved.

I have wondered for some time what those of us who are not Jewish can do to show solidarity and support for our Jewish neighbours. In conversation with one of my closest friends, we asked ourselves what we could do. I wanted something small, visible and deliberately non-political that ordinary Britons could do to show our Jewish neighbours they are not alone.

The idea of a simple badge stating I stand with British Jews came about. It removes the politics, the bitterness and the tribal divisions that anything connected to Israel inevitably brings with it. We wanted to make it about Britain and about British Jews.

The badge is straightforward. It features a Union Jack with the words I stand with British Jews. As Charles Moore wrote movingly in the Telegraph recently,

“If you are offended by this, the problem is with you.”

I hope those who read this will join us on 23 July. The badges are easy to order and can be delivered within the next week or so. This is a not-for-profit campaign. We are not trying to make money.

I leave you with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you are sitting on a bus when a group of young men boards and targets a young woman because of the clothes she is wearing. They shout at her, scream at her and spit at her. Would you then demand to know whether she has spoken out against violence against Christians in Sudan? Would you blame her? Or would you blame them?

The answer, of course, should be obvious, but there are far too many, especially young people, for whom it is not.