by Jonathan Sacerdoti, Spectator
[…] The police rarely visit my house – not when someone smashed my car window (“It’s not life or death,” a bored operator told me), not when shoplifters threatened to strike a local shop worker with a stolen bottle of wine. But one balmy day in June, they found time for me.
The officer said she’d come to ‘invite’ me to the station for a ‘voluntary interview’, so I could give my ‘account’. The allegation: harassment. The complainant, a Green canvasser, had come to my home in April – after I’d already told a previous Green canvasser in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want the party returning.
As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I’d watched the Greens’ trajectory with alarm: a party accommodating a politics around Israel, Zionism and Islamist activism I regard as hostile to Jews. Then, as I was tending to my wisteria, a canvasser arrived with a keffiyeh – inseparable, to me, from arch terrorist Yasser Arafat and the infamous PFLP plane hijacker Leila Khaled who had made the garment internationally famous as a symbol of Palestinian terrorism. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, it felt reasonable for me to defend mine from someone carrying that offensive item. I told her I didn’t want Green canvassers at my house, then told her what I thought of her party’s handling of anti-Jewish racism, and asked whether she, like her leader, thought Jews were worried about the ‘perception’ of danger rather than the real thing – after firebombed ambulances and synagogues, and Jews killed on Yom Kippur in Manchester.
She said she had lots of ‘antizionist’ Jewish friends, and suggested there’d be fewer attacks if Israel ‘stopped killing children’. Ah! The legendary anti-Zionist Jewish friends. The wanton child killings. We Jews were asking for it, right? These two rhetorical grenades thrown, she refused to answer further questions as I walked with her a few doors beyond my own – odd, for someone selling a political agenda door to door. But I had been ‘triggered’ as the kids would say. I felt angry, harassed, targeted because of my Judaism and my opinions. When another neighbour joined in, bemoaning the Reform flyers posted through her door, we eventually all went our separate ways. I went to join my family for Shabbat lunch, shaken that this political tension had breached even my own garden gate.