Why, this Remembrance Sunday, I’ll be wearing a poppy – and a Star of David

According to the art critic Arthur Danto, “we erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget”. But what of an edifice that is both a monument and a memorial? That is the mystery and – to my mind – the magic of the Cenotaph.

Dedicated to “The Glorious Dead” of the First World War and others, the Cenotaph can be seen, on the one hand, as a symbol of heroism and sacrifice, and on the other, as a reminder of the terrible toll that wars exact on soldiers and civilians alike – something we should “never forget”.

But, as became evident in 1920 – when, during the acute political tensions that culminated in the General Strike six years later, an estimated 1.2 million Britons flocked to the Cenotaph to pay their respects to the war dead on the second anniversary of the Armistice – the Cenotaph is also the closest thing Britain has to a national holy site.

The Cenotaph’s enduring attraction lies in its simplicity. Originally intended by then prime minister Lloyd George and the architect Edwin Lutyens as a temporary wooden catafalque for dead and missing servicemen whose bodies could not be repatriated to Britain after the First World War, its unexpected popularity with the public saw it rapidly transformed into the commanding Portland stone structure it is today.

As the historian Jay Winter observed: “It says so much because it says nothing at all. It is a form on which anyone could inscribe his or her own thoughts, reveries, sadness.”

I thought of Winter’s words this week as I read Suella Braverman’s extraordinary broadside against the police, an intervention seemingly calculated to fan Britain’s deep political divisions and pour fuel on our incessant cultural wars. Her invective was directed at pro-Palestinian demonstrators – “hate marchers”, as she put it – whose planned protest this weekend will be the fifth since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7.

As an advocate of the right to free assembly, I do not support Braverman and Sunak’s calls for the Armistice Day march to be cancelled – though, as a British Jew acutely sensitive to the way that Hamas’s action and Israel’s brutal, asymmetrical response to it has unleashed a new wave of antisemitism, I wish our police would come down harder on the antisemitic chants and hate speech exhibited by some of the protesters.

And as someone who instinctively recoils from all wars, I am no fan of ceremonial militaristic displays, with their uncomfortable echoes of empire and militarism. Indeed, for many years I boycotted the two-minute silences and refused to wear a poppy in my lapel.

That was short-sighted.

If ever we needed a two-minute silence and a break from the hysterical shouting and toxic name-calling it is now. At a time when Brexit, the political fallout from Covid-19 and the war in Palestine has split the nation as never before, I believe Sunday’s ceremony presents a unique opportunity to bring us together and start the process of healing our divisions.

Nor do I believe that the poppy, which has come to mark the observance of Armistice Day and the solemn occasion at the Cenotaph, is necessarily a symbol of colonialist oppression, as many on the Left seem to believe. Or that we should adopt the white poppy favoured by Jeremy Corbyn and the Peace Pledge Union in “remembrance for all victims of war”.

By all means let’s remember the terrible impact that wars always exact on innocent civilians but we should also remember that not everyone in war is innocent – sometimes, those who die in wars are aggressors. And, as with the Nazis and the crime of the Holocaust, sometimes the genocidal intent of the aggressors negates any claims they might have to victimhood, much less our sympathy. The same goes for Hamas, an Islamist organisation inspired by the very same Hitlerian ideology and consuming hatred of the Jewish people.

I first visited the Cenotaph in 2009, on the 90th anniversary of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic, when I was researching a book on the British experience of the pandemic, which coincided with the last months of the First World War, and learnt that 228,000 Britons had perished in the global viral onslaught – nearly as many as had died taking Passchendaele from the Germans in 1917.

This year, as a British Jew, appalled by the failure by some people in our society to unequivocally condemn the October 7 attacks and Hamas’s murderous antisemitic ideology, I will attend the ceremony at the Cenotaph again. The difference this time is that I will be wearing a poppy in one lapel and the Star of David in the other.

There, I will remember not only those who perished in the killing fields of northern France and Flanders but the casualties of the Zion Mule Corps and the Jewish Legion who fought alongside the British during the First World War at, respectively, Gallipoli and the Battle of Megiddo.

And I will also use the two-minute silence to remember the British-Israeli soldier Yosef Guedalia killed confronting Hamas gunmen during the deadly assault on the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel, as well as the 13 other British victims of the Islamist terrorists.

That is my prerogative and my choice. Others must make theirs.