I grew up with Cable Street.
I was born only a few miles away in London’s East End. My father grew up in that part of London and so did my grandfather. For my family, the Battle of Cable Street wasn’t some distant episode of British history.
It was part of the story I grew up with.
On October 4, 1936, Oswald Mosley’s antisemitic British Union of Fascists planned to march through the East End, then home to a huge Jewish population. The march was regarded as a deliberate provocation. Jews, dockers and other East Enders came out to stop them.
The Blackshirts didn’t get through.
As a Jewish boy growing up in London, I loved that story.
These were Jews who fought back. And standing beside them were ordinary East Enders who weren’t prepared to watch their Jewish neighbors be intimidated.
That stayed with me. It helped form my Jewish pride and, much later, the work I do today confronting antisemitism and the obsessive demonization of Israel.
So I looked at the pictures from Sunday’s 90th anniversary march rather differently.
There is Jeremy Corbyn at the front of the march. Behind him is an enormous banner.
“NO TO: ANTISEMITISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA, ALL RACISM.”
Underneath:
“1936 – THEY DID NOT PASS. 2026 – THEY WILL NOT PASS.”
It is quite a photograph.
Because according to ITV News, people at the same march were chanting:
“Zionists are not welcome here.”
And:
“Zionism is fascism.”
The Independent and The Irish Times reported the chants too.
Corbyn later addressed the rally and declared that anti-racism meant opposing “every form of racism.”
I keep going back to the photograph.
NO TO ANTISEMITISM.
And somewhere around that banner, Zionists are being told they are not welcome.
For me, this gets considerably harder to dismiss as a matter of terminology when I read journalist Nicole Lampert’s account.
Lampert says she was filming when people turned on her. After she identified herself as a journalist, she says somebody looked at her Star of David and told her:
“You aren’t a journalist, you are a Zionist.”
Lampert says she replied that she was both.
According to her account, she was surrounded, told to stop filming and repeatedly ordered to leave. She says a steward wearing a “Stand Up to Racism” high-vis jacket poked her with a placard and told her:
“If I wanted to hurt you, you wouldn’t get out of here alive.”
That is Lampert’s account, and I have not independently verified every part of the confrontation.
I don’t need to.
The chants at the march were reported by the mainstream media.
There is another part of Sunday’s commemoration that I find particularly telling.
Before the march, Jewish News reported that Jewish activists were forming their own bloc. They planned to carry photographs of the Jews who had actually stood against Mosley 90 years earlier.
There was a reason.
According to Jewish News, when the anniversary march was originally announced, Jewish activists were horrified to discover that the Jewish community and antisemitism had been left out of the story being told. Organizers subsequently amended the publicity.
Imagine that.
A commemoration of Cable Street where Jews had to make sure the Jews of Cable Street weren’t forgotten.
Perhaps this affects me more than most because Cable Street was never just history in my family.
I heard about that East End from the people who had lived there.
I grew up proud of the Jews who refused to be frightened off their own streets, and proud of the dockers and other East Enders who stood alongside them.
That story helped make me the person I became.
Ninety years later, people returned to those streets to commemorate a victory over antisemitism.
Some of them told Zionists they weren’t welcome.
My grandfather would have understood the irony perfectly well.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
