Tag Archives: October 7th

Heaton Park Synagogue

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The open day for the new building of Heaton Park Synagogue felt enlightening, literally. Before that, we had used a narrow, single story building with few windows, which must have been very crowded on high holy days. Aged six, I went with my family to marvel at the modern, tall structure. The front, including the doors, was made of glass that extended far above me, flooding the vestibule with light. Inside, the ceiling reached up two high storeys, above the tiered women’s section. Light streamed in through stained glass windows in the wall which housed the Holy Ark, where the scrolls of the Torah were kept. Then, in 1967, there was no fence between the synagogue and Middleton Road, only a low brick wall; no security guards, nothing to stop anyone from walking in. After services, people lingered to chatter in that open space, clearly visible from the street in our best clothes. I loved the slow, leisurely pace the congregants took on the way home, more than a few along the street where my family lived. These were the streets of our community, where we were safe, where we belonged.

A vigil at Heaton Park synagogue one week after the attack. Crowds (Sean Hansford | Manchester Evening News)

A few years after my Bar Mitzva at the Heaton Park synagogue in April 1974, I stopped attending altogether. My religious phase was over and so my connection to the congregation faded, other than through my parents who emigrated to Israel in 1982. (I followed them two years later but returned to the UK in 1995). But my roots in that congregation and my sense of belonging in that building have never been lost. So when I heard the news of the terror attack on Heaton Park on the morning of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), it was as if the perpetrator, ‘pledged allegiance to Islamic State‘, had smashed the glass front of the synagogue and along with it the warmth of those memories. I did not recognise the names of the victims, Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz, but then a cousin told me that Melvin had lived over the road from them as children and my brother thought he might have gone to King David’s school with him. This was an attack that struck close to home, too close.

But not all of my childhood memories of Heaton Park synagogue are wrapped with warmth. Inevitably, on Yom Kippur my thoughts go back to October 6th 1973, and my feelings touch the tender, pious twelve-year old I was then. I have blogged twice about that day on which Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.

I should remember how tangible my worry was, how the terror of annihilation tasted dry like my fasting mouth, how the anxiety felt like my empty stomach. … Was Israel about to be destroyed? Were the Jews going to be thrown into the sea? Was this somehow God’s judgment? What sin had I or we committed that deserved such punishment?

About the Israeli experience of 1973 I wrote:

My adult, critical understanding cannot undo the horror I felt when I listened to voice recordings of Israeli soldiers in positions on the edge of the Suez Canal as they were being overrun by Egyptian forces. The terror of impending individual annihilation is compounded doubly. First, by a fear that in killing the individuals, the collectivity will also be extinguished and second, by a dread that this surely must not be happening, that now we are strong and able to defend ourselves, if we are attacked, we will vanquish our foes. … the trauma of 1973 lingers, attaching itself to other traumas which cannot be dispelled by critical historical awareness, only by confronting the trauma.

The trauma of October 6th 1973 mingles with the shock of Yom Kippur 2025, which mingles with the trauma of October 7th 2023. So, what to do with the trauma, the fear, the shock, the loss, the deep sense of vulnerability?

For the generation of Israelis who fought the war, their fear gave way not to despondency but to anger at the ineptitude and negligence of the country’s leaders. While for some the Labour establishment remained the focus of their frustration, others came to understand that as citizens they could no longer trust their government to do what is best for Israel. Following President Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1977, a group of the ‘1973 generation’ wrote to then Prime Minister Begin in the famous ‘officers’ letter’ to argue for a path of peace rather than settlements, and the Peace Now movement was born. 

Today more than one generation of Israelis have felt the losses of the failure in 2023 to conceive of and anticipate Hamas’ attack, and more than one generation will feel the consequences of the vengeful, genocidal response of Israel’s civil and military leadership, the damage to Israel’s reputation and the brutalization of its society that led it to perpetrate a second Nakba. And today Israelis do not need to wait several years for the activists who know that they cannot rely on their government. There are all those who, despite their government’s stupidity and stubbornness, campaigned for two years in Israel for a deal to exchange the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, which they knew meant ending the war, some of whom have set up Kumu (Arise), a movement for national renewal. There are those who already knew on or before October 7th that there should be no war, such as the Arab-Jewish Hadash party and the Jewish-Palestinian Standing Together grassroots movement.

But what about we Jews in the UK? What do we do with our trauma? Jonathan Freedland wrote about “Jews wanting to huddle against the cold, to be among those to whom they do not have constantly to justify or explain themselves.” Emma Barnett, also once a young member of the congregation, felt in the immediate aftermath of the attack that she was ” left with myself and to confront how I choose to respond. … I don’t feel much like being virtuous. While Jews have been fearful for a long time as antisemitic attacks and vandalism ramp up around the world, an attack at a UK synagogue represents a threshold being crossed in this country.” Rachel Cunliffe focused on the context since October 7th:

The actions of a country 3,000 miles away of which I am not a citizen have left me feeling unwelcome in the place I was born. Pick a side. The isolating irony is that I can’t. Two years ago, I was blissfully ambivalent about the need for a Jewish state, a haven of last resort for a diaspora persecuted through the centuries. Now that I’ve seen how a significant portion of the country I think of as home really feels about the Jews, it seems more necessary than ever, even as that haven descends into darkness.

I have felt all of those things too, from upset that all the Manchester synagogues had to be evacuated on Yom Kippur 2025, even though it is decades since I have been to a Yom Kippur service; to wondering if I would be allowed in if I rushed round to huddle with Jews at my local synagogue; to feeling like going to settle in one of the kibbutzim overrun by Hamas on October 7 2023. Like Rachel Cunliffe, I have felt pressure to pick a side, which I have resisted through activism with UK Friends of Standing Together which grieves for both Israeli victims of Hamas’ October 7th massacre and Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Those are comforting feelings, but do they confront the trauma?

Perhaps a better path is indicated by Hadash and Standing Together in Israel, an activist path of solidarity and partnership across national, religious and ethnic boundaries. It will not be straightforward. Many UK Muslims might be repelled by the knowledge that two thirds of UK Jews identify as Zionists, until they hear from us that it does not mean we support Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but the principle of a state of refuge from antisemitism. We Jews will have much to learn too, about the extent and depth of Islamophobia, from which we are not immune. Perhaps, then, rather than huddling alone we could huddle together with one of the traumatized victims of the Islamophobic arson attack on the mosque in Peacehaven who has not left his home since? In Nottingham, I can huddle with volunteers at the Salaam Shalom kitchen, a Muslim-Jewish charity project. And we could huddle with the Manchester Council of Mosques, which declared:

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and the Jewish community at this distressing time… Any attempt to divide us through violence or hatred will fail – we remain united in our commitment to peace and mutual respect… It is vital at moments like these that we stand together as one Manchester – united against hatred and committed to peace, justice and respect for all.

Such expressions of solidarity does not in itself tackle the trauma, but it is a step towards active solidarity that can. And yes, that statement describes a Manchester and British community where I would happily walk the streets, feel safe, and belong.

Who “only understands force”? On the limits of force in politics

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The sudden, rapid and unanticipated collapse of Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria a few days ago is an historic episode that demonstrates the limitations of force in politics. A brutal regime that had crushed dissent for decades by using military and police violence, torture, incarceration and mass executions of opponents imploded in a matter of days. Yes, it did so in the face of an armed offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the north of the country whose success soon prompted other armed rebels against the dictatorship to join in, notably the Southern Operations Room which seized control of Damascus. There were some battles on the roads to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, but the key development was the melting away of the military might available to the regime. Soldiers stripped off their uniforms, abandoned their weapons and blended into the civilian population. The regime’s main ally, the Iranian government, evacuated its personnel because the Syrian government forces had no will to fight. The story here is that the seemingly formidable power of the regime vanished.

It is not surprising that some compared the regime’s collapse to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when German civilians demolished some of that symbol of the Soviet regime. These episodes in which regimes that rely on force and violent repression dissolve seem miraculous. Yet they are apprehensible according to theories of power that grasp that political power and obedience ultimately come from below, from the consent of those who are ruled. In Gene Sharpe’s approach to these theories, which were part of the playbook for the democratic movements of the Arab Spring, the emphasis is on non-violence as the appropriate strategy to bring down repressive regimes.

That was not quite the case in Syria, but the essence of the theory still pertains. Repressive regimes such as Assad’s dictatorship work only so long as the people believe the regime is to be feared and so long as the government’s agents believe that the people are afraid of them. Without the mantel of fear, statues of Assad, like the idols in Abraham’s father Terah’s shop, are just lumps of stone and metal. When the compact of fear fails for significant numbers of people, the repressive emperor has no clothes. The soldiers’ uniforms no longer signify that they command fear from the population, so they take them off and flee, afraid themselves that what they have done to others will be done to them. And hence the latest episode in the long struggle against Assad’s regime was relatively bloodless.

A truck pulls the head from the toppled statue of late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad through the streets of the captured Syrian city of Hama © MUHAMMAD HAJ KADOUR / AFP

Other autocratic regimes in the Arab world would do well to heed the warning about the limitations of violent repression and follow the example of those who have taken some steps towards democratic reform. But there is another regime in the region that relies on force and violent power, one which has never even sought to make itself legitimate in the eyes of its subjects. The Israeli occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has at best offered some crumbs of its own economic prosperity to non-citizen Palestinians under its rule in return for acquiescence. It has never given them any grounds to consent to Israeli rule, to appropriation of land and resources, restrictions on movement, denial of rights, other than fear of the consequences of resistance, whether armed or non-violent.

The apartheid character of the Occupation becomes daily more evident, more nakedly an assertion of alleged Jewish rights and disregard for Palestinian rights. The Occupation regime becomes ever more dependent on bare force. Ironically, it is Israelis who tell each other that “they” (Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims) only understand force, while subjecting Palestinians to rule that will last only as long as occupied and occupier believe that brute force can sustain Occupation. “We will always live by sword,” repeats Netanyahu and as his words are echoed and enacted, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it in a recent interview with Ha’aretz, when asked if Israel had a real opportunity to break out of the cycle of bloodletting: “It’s been the Iron Wall since Jabotinsky. Force and more force. You’ve been trying to impose a reality that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s.”

The Israeli government’s response to the toppling of Assad’s regime has been a massive unleashing of military violence to destroy as much as possible of Syria’s military capacity. Israel has also occupied the demilitarized buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian positions established by the 1974 armistice agreement between the two countries. Other governments are opening channels of communication with the new rulers in Damascus, but the Israeli government assumes that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its partners will use military force against Israel if they have the means or let them fall into the hands of others who will, such as Hezbollah. We don’t have the luxury of others to get to know these people, an Israeli spokesperson tells Channel 4 news, so first we bomb them. He might as well add: we only understand force.

There is no guarantee of if or when force will cease to work as the compact between occupier and occupied. So far in this phase of violence since October 7th 2023, only a few Israelis such as Soul Behar have refused to put on their uniforms. Most are too afraid that what they have done to others will be done to them, a fear which has also been brought from other places where terrible things were done to their ancestors. Palestinians under Occupation have already shown that they are no longer afraid of the force wielded by the occupiers, notably at the start of the First Intifada when most of the resistance to Occupation was non-violent or unarmed. But what if more Israelis begin to see themselves as Palestinians see them, as inflicting force as violent, merciless and devastating as the Assads’ assaults on their own people? And what if more Palestinians who have survived the violence and are subject to Occupation can see that competing with Israeli violence is not a winning strategy? Assad’s regime has fallen because of the limits of force in politics. The Occupation will end for the same reason.