A little local difficulty

This piece was written in November 2023, a month or so into the Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza, in response to the 7th October Hamas terrorist attack at the music festival close to the Re’im Kibbutz. I was covering the Manchester street protests in support of Gaza and a free Palestine as part of a documentary photography project about the tradition of protest in Manchester, UK. At the time, of course nobody knew how long it would all go on for, and a few weeks in I wrote this piece - there are some Manchester photographs at the end. Unusually, I wrote it complete ‘on spec’ and it wasn’t published anywhere at the time (then I was writing mainly about environment) though I must admit I didn’t try very hard to find it a home. It was just something I felt the need to write, which reminded me why I had started writing in the first place - that is all too easily forgotten in this game. Having a clear out recently I re-read it and thought that it had quickly become of interest as a ‘historical document’ if nothing else (first draft of history and all that) so I thought as I wanted to be able to link to it publicly, it could finally see the light of day here:

A woman stood at the curb waiting to cross the side street. She had a shopping trolley in front of her, one of those on four wheels so it stands upright while you push it along. Behind her a man was selling meat from a makeshift trestle-table. Around the corner, along the main road, a handful of disinterested shoppers picked at the fresh vegetables on the pavement stalls outside the grocery mart, lingering because its canopy provided welcome shelter from the squally Manchester rain.

The woman eased the trolley down from the curb and into a puddle. It dropped with a ‘clunk’ as one wheel of its chassis became completely submerged. For a moment she looked down in puzzlement, then set her face and rocked the sunken wheel out of the hole with some difficulty. The scene was faintly absurd, like one of those old, silent films where someone steps into an innocuous looking puddle then glugs right down over their heads. Back on dry land she knelt beside it in the middle of the street.

“It’s alright,” she said fiddling, as I crossed over to see if she needed help. “The wheel comes off it.” It sounded like a familiar job, she clicked it back into place and I left her to it.

I had come to Cheetham Hill to visit the Manchester Jewish History Museum. The terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas on 7th October had left 1400 Israelis dead and 240 taken as hostages. This provoked Israel to launch a bombardment of Gaza that continues. The Hamas attack that began with the slaughter of those young festival goers just north of the Kibbutz Re’im seems like an age ago now, whereas the retaliatory Gaza bombing, which at the time of writing has left an estimated 10,000 dead, 4000 of which are reported to be children, is served up on a minute by minute basis by a voracious media both old and new.

I covered the first march in Manchester organised by the local branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign when the Israeli air strikes began as part of an ongoing documentary photography project about street protests, and I have covered the three others since. I was struck by their size, largely peaceful nature, and in particular by the number of young families there. I photographed Mothers with their children, to resonate with the images of dead and injured children coming out of Gaza.

Meanwhile, many from the Jewish community cowered in fear at this sea of Palestinian flags on the streets of our major cities, at chants they heard as calling for the eradication of their homeland, and they remembered October 7th.

I should say at this point that I am a white, male, working class lapsed protestant and religion has played no significant part in my life other than its no doubt less overt cultural influences. But a radio news broadcast left tears in my eyes. It was the October storming of the airport in Russia’s Dagestan region by Islamists intent on attacking a plane that had just landed from Tel Aviv. It was the phrase ‘hunting Jews’ in a report that so affected me: surely this was something we learned about at school as ‘once happening’, as a warning never for it to be repeated? That Fukuyama was right, and that history was dead? Outside the dry walls of academia though, history is very much a living thing, and right now it is kicking hard.

So it was a combination of guilt and curiosity that had brought me to Cheetham Hill.

Manchester Jewish Museum is part of a recently completed development built onto the first Sephardi Jewish synagogue, built in Manchester in 1874. Sephardi Jews were persecuted and driven out of the Spain and Portugal regions and became part of a Jewish wave of immigrants into Manchester in the late 19th Century, following the Irish and fuelling the industrial revolution. They moved the two miles or so up the River Irk valley from the centre, to Cheetham Hill, and as their prosperity grew, on to towns such as Prestwich. At one time there were 9 synagogues in Cheetham. Next came the Polish, then in the 1950s and 60s, immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean and then mosques began to join the urban cultural landscape. Cheetham Hill ‘village’ is now what the council sign beside the main road refers to as: ‘A celebration of culture’ - all while being amongst the most deprived areas in England, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

The Sephardi Jews brought with them the culture of their Spanish and Portuguese origins and the synagogue forming part of the museum has been restored to the beauty of its Moorish influence.

“A Jew always has a suitcase packed,” a woman told me, as we stood in the dim preservation light before a display cabinet holding the simple possessions brought by those first immigrants in their own suitcases; a sadness at the smallness of them then, a celebration of what they had become.

This woman had been in Israel when the terrorists attacked and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza began. Her friend had a granddaughter who had been at Re’im. As she spoke I could feel the tendrils of world events reaching out and wrapping around us. She was profoundly shaken by the protests taking place in the UK. She said that even though Israel was at war she had felt safer there walking down the street, despite the Hamas rockets, than her home here. If things didn’t improve, she said, she wanted her and her family to return to Israel.

Solving the seemingly intractable Israeli - Palestine question is way beyond me, far better minds than mine have tried and so far failed. But an end has to be found to this and it has to be political.

Modern warfare is fought as much in the communication rooms and social media channels as on the battlefield. Hamas has learned that lesson well from the war in Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden articulated Jewish frustration that the appalling Hamas atrocity, the trigger for this latest cycle of violence, seems largely to have been forgotten while all the sympathy and rage is with the suffering children of Gaza.

The cynic in me agrees that this was the deliberate Hamas strategy; their one despicable strike conducted swiftly and with deadly effect, to provoke an entirely predictable horror and yes, desire for revenge from Israel. So now we have the dystopian soap opera of Gazan suffering and destruction that is fed into our social media channels on a daily basis versus the single horror film that recedes towards the dot of a fickle world’s media attention. (Fickle? Yes, ask the Ukrainians about that.) A communications war where information and misinformation is employed on both sides, where battle scenes from computer games vie for position with real guns and rockets, for an audience who cannot differentiate between reality and fakery, so used are we to experiencing life through a screen.

The suffering though is real enough - as the mothers taking to the streets of Manchester who are losing family beneath the rubble of Gaza will tell you. We have just had week 4 of this and my own, admittedly anecdotal experience has been that the predominant chant has changed from the controversial ‘From the river to the sea…’ to an increasingly broad range of people making up the crowd gathering outside the Central Library in St. Peter’s Square, loudly demanding a ‘Cease Fire Now’.

It is the moving sound of the power of assembly, but walk around the corner and it is surprising how quickly the buildings dampen the noise. In fact, cross Albert Square, in front of a town hall wrapped in ghostly white sheeting during a lengthy restoration process, and you can hardly hear it at all.

ENDS

Andrew Griffiths

(Written November 2023)

Manchester Gaza protests - 5 photographs