Everyone Hates Us! Really?

I’ve been teaching the chocolate project for some years. It’s suited to the summer term, when students are flagging, and they need something wondrous to wake them up. The class is divided into groups, and each one has to create a new company with a new chocolate bar, with a marketing campaign, packaging, billboard and television advert to boot. My classroom version of ‘Dragon’s Den’, HaKrishim (The Sharks) in the Israeli version. However, I’m certainly not an Alan Sugar or even a Nir Barkat. When it comes to who are the winners, partly because it’s a Waldorf school and encourages a love of learning over winning, and because the students are all wonderfully creative, confident and yet compassionate too, everyone’s a winner. Their prize from the judge? Cadbury’s chocolate, of course, the best chocolate in the world. Every year in Israel, I’ve bought a whole load of fruit and nuts at the airport duty free, and, to the students’ delight, they can scoff it all in the final lesson of the year. (Refusing any of it is one of my more difficult challenges, as a vegan!)

I often invite the homeroom tutors of the students to come and watch the final presentations, where they show their whole campaign and give out the chocolate they have made, in its original packaging, to the rest of the class. This year, I also offered one of the tutors some Cadbury’s chocolate. John Cadbury created his milk chocolate bar in his Birmingham-based factory in 1897. I was born in Birmingham and went to primary school opposite the factory. Perhaps I am a little biased in suggesting it’s the best chocolate in the world (although, believe me, I can still remember smelling that incredible aroma of chocolate wafting into the playground!) but it is certainly one of the best. However, when I told him the chocolate was English, he looked at me like I was mad. ‘No English food is ever good’, he told me. And he wasn’t trying to be mean. He really believes it.

This summer, we went back to England to visit family and friends. But with everything that’s been happening here during the past two years, we also wanted – needed, to relax. So, we hired a narrow boat to explore the canals of Wales and Shropshire. Each evening, we would moor near a pub, and go for dinner and a pint. The food we found was incredible. From the most simple, British meals, like jacket potato with cheese and beans, crumpets with melted butter, scrambled eggs on toast (oh my goodness – our little boy fell in love with this food he’d never tasted in Israel!) to more complex dinners, like giant Yorkshire pudding with vegetarian sausages, vegetables and gravy, triple vegan burger with soft buttermilk ‘chicken’ vegan cheese and chunky chips, mushroom tagliatelle in a creamy quorn and ‘bacon’ sauce, and onto, of course, the pièce de résistance, the puddings: apple and plum crumble with custard and ice cream, home made vegan honeycomb ice cream and hot chocolate fudge brownie cake….

Healthy? Possibly not. Delicious? Absolutely.

Before we left for England, we were also extensively warned about Britain’s population these days: they’re all antisemitic now, Muslims are taking over, et cetera. I told my family we needed to be extra careful whom we told we were Israelis, that people didn’t really need to know.

But my husband would not keep quiet about our homeland, or what we do, bless him. He told me it was important for people to hear what is really going on here. And he was right. (Don’t tell him I said that! He’ll never stop bragging!). At the beginning he was a little tentative when telling people we were Israeli, and I jumped in immediately with ‘and we work for peace’ but after a while it became clear people were not judgmental or hateful towards us. They simply didn’t know anything. On a canal boat holiday you meet dozens of people every day, on the boats, at the locks, in the pubs, and we told everyone who asked that we live in Israel, and we explained the situation here. And they nodded, and listened, and were kind, and told us what essentially every soul wants: we hope there will be peace soon.

We were in England for two weeks, traveling around the country the whole time, and we did not encounter even a whisper of antisemitism. Not from Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, or atheists.

But what on earth do delicious food and antisemitism have in common?

Because it’s all lies.

Don’t believe what you are told, or what you see on the news. Experience things for yourself. Be at peace with your own beliefs in the knowledge they are yours, from your own experiences, and therefore true for you.

The Israelis consider British food disgusting. Believe me, I know that – I’ve been laughed at (in a nice way) by enough of them when I talk about the yummy food there. How many have ever been to England? And how many who have been to England know how to find the right places to eat?

The Israelis here also believe that the whole world is against us right now. That they all hate us. That we are on our own.

The truth is, we are not on our own. As long as we, the people, continue to fight for the hostages to be set free, as long as we, the people, continue to fight for what is right, equality everywhere, for Israelis and Palestinians, exactly how it was originally conceived in the Declaration of Independence, then we should understand there is a whole world of goodness on our side.

A whole world of British goodness, and some delicious chips on the side.