God Save Our Queen

“I got a pressie for you, Luv. From your Nan. She meant to give it before…you know. She couldn’t wait for today.”

Nan passed away last week. Nothing dramatic. She was old and died in her sleep. She was looking forward to the Jubilee. She loved the Queen.

I took the gift from Auntie. It was wrapped delicately in white paper with a corgi motif. The dog smiled and wagged its tail obediently. I carefully unwrapped the present one corgi at a time. Inside was a small wooden horse. A rocking horse.

“She said it was ‘ers when she be growing up.”

I turned the horse around in my hands. A fiery red saddle sat astride the white mare. Painted blue jewels bedecked the saddle. A golden mane flowed from the head. Her eyes were dark - the last sparkle of life left long ago.

“She’d be so ‘appy today. She was really looking forward to it. The bunting. The cake. She loved cake AND the Queen.”

I nodded.

Above me, the bunting swayed in the breeze. Union Jacks fluttering with promises of a land united. The decorations led to a DJ stand with posters of the Queen splashed all over. Her gummed smile aching from overuse. A fat man in a cheery loyalist costume spoke heavily into the mic. He introduced himself as Stanley from number 46. His Union Jack top hat threatened to plunge into the trifle.

Our road had been closed for the festivities. Merry tape of celebration had been strung across either end. Kids rode their bikes up and down and around in circles eyeing the festive offerings that lay stranded on a row of tables. The centrepiece was a large triple-layered cake in red, white, and blue. A miniature Queen was placed delicately on top.

I tried to imagine what England felt like when Nan celebrated the last Jubilee in 1977. She was a young woman of colour. A timid wife to an immigrant husband. A man who had fled the devastation of the Indian divide only to discover his adopted homeland was no land of promise. How did she feel raising a cup with her racist neighbours who taunted Father with their bigoted slurs? He didn’t understand why they continued to call him a ‘paki’. “I’m from India, not Pakistan,” he would explain to them.

I remember the night Father returned late from work. His nose bloodied and bent. His white shirt torn. His face bruised and battered. He was crying. Confused. Scared and angry. I sat on the stairs watching the spectacle of my strong Dad breaking down in front of his children. Us kids were sent to our room. A claustrophobic den squeezing five bodies into a small space.

The horse glared at me. Was it feeling abandoned? Left out of the celebrations? Had this country changed? Had this nation really grown up?

Our street is full of white faces. Only a small smattering of people has lived in this row of houses all their lives. The die-hards. The Little Englanders. There were new arrivals from Europe. Polish descent. East Europeans with sparkling blue eyes and dark hair. They frightened the old guard with their strange language and cultural baggage.

At least they blended in. Our little family never did.

Somewhere a party popper exploded. Confetti spewed over the cucumber sandwiches. A pensioner was explaining the significance of the food to her Polish neighbour. The scones had history. The trifle layered like Grand Britannia. Her neighbour, in perfect English, repeatedly told her she had been living in this street, in this country, for the last twenty years. Her children were British. She was British.

The national anthem began and we all stood to attention.

“She would’ve loved this your Nan; God rest ‘er soul.”
“Yes. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

---

After reading the results of the By-Elections in the UK, I thought about this piece.

Antisemitism is on the rise and we Jews are being gaslit.

“The streets are safe,” they tell us.

“No one is protesting against Jews,” they say, “Only Zionists.”

“No one’s attacking openly Jewish-looking people or barring their entrance to campus.”

On social media, there is video after video of protests on the streets of London (and worldwide) where Israelis and Jews are villainized.

“Not Israelis! It’s the Zionists!”

And now they are burning the Israeli embassy in Mexico.

Can anyone honestly tell the difference between a Zionist, an Israeli, and a Jew? The Palestinian mob call them white settler-colonists. European Zionists in Israel are the ones they want to leave. The Europeans. The Americans. The Brits. The Canadians. The once-fled holocaust survivors and their relatives. The Zionists who turned Tel Aviv from a desert into a thriving city. Those are the targets.

There are no Jewish Terrorist organizations¹…unless you vilify Zionists.

We all need somebody to hate.

White European settlers are 20% of Israel’s population. The majority of Israelis are Mizrahi.

Facts shouldn’t interfere with your hate.

We are all children of immigrants in the UK. Even the Royals are descendants of Germans. Why shouldn’t we all be accepted into society even if we fail to assimilate sufficiently, like the Chasidim (Orthodox Jews)?

Who is driving the rise of antisemitism?

No matter what ‘immigrants’ do or how well they assimilate, there will always be a part of society that will never accept them.

Hiding is no longer an option. We are all Zionists now.

1. There are and have been Jewish terrorist organizations whose main purpose is to either destroy Palestinians or establish a Halakhic State (one where Judaism dictates governance). They are not known for their homicidal rampages.