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The activists’ official justification seems to be some convoluted connection between the bakery’s current majority owner and Israel. But I can’t be alone in wondering if their true motivation is rather different. Gail’s was founded by the Israeli baker Gail Mejia. It was then turned into a chain – and a hugely successful one – by the Israeli entrepreneur Ran Avidan.
Neither Mejia nor Avidan are associated with the business anymore. But I’m not sure that would make a blind bit of difference to the frenzied Israel-haters of the noisy activist class. To them, the very fact that Gail’s was founded by someone from the Jewish state they love to hate would be enough to damn it as toxic, morally unclean, and a chain that all good people must boycott.
In either case, they see Gail’s as being stained by the blackest of original sins – a connection with the Jewish homeland.
Rarely has the bigotry of the bourgeois haters of Israel been so graphically on display. If Gail’s was sending delicious sweet treats to IDF soldiers in Gaza, maybe a protest would make sense. That would also make me pop in there more often, to show my support for Israel’s existential war against the Jew-hating terrorists who dream of destroying it.
But as far as I know, it isn’t doing that. Its main crime is apparently that a citizen of the Jewish nation founded it. To rage against a bakery on that basis is to make a spectacle of your own swirling prejudices and irrational hatreds.
The mob stepped up its cruel campaign with this week’s attack in the dark of night. They hurled projectiles at the windows of the Archway Gail’s. In deep red they daubed that foul cry: “Reject corporate Zionism.” Their graffiti also pleaded with the people of Archway to “boycott” this allegedly demonic cafe.
Everyone familiar with the horrors of the mid-20th century will find this attack profoundly unsettling. It felt to me like a woke Kristallnacht. The smashing of windows and hollers for a boycott, all because 30 years ago someone from the Jewish homeland set it up.
We need to talk about the ancient animus that fuels today’s frenzied boycotting of any institution or individual that has a link with Israel. Among the self-righteous activist set, it is de rigueur to ring-fence one’s life from the wares and art of that apparently unholy nation. You prove your virtue in polite society by shunning everything that comes out of Israel. Its fruit, its books, its films, its musicians – you touch none of it, lest the Israel pox should rub off on you.
Hence we see students fuming like a medieval mob whenever an Israeli representative is invited to their campus. And hotheads wearing the Palestine flag like a pashmina smashing Israeli produce in the supermarket aisles so that no poor soul will be ailed by such tainted goods.
Or witness the ceaseless protests outside Erev in Notting Hill, a restaurant founded by Israeli chefs. Listen, if you spend your time wailing for the boycott and closure of cafes and restaurants whose only sin is that Israeli Jews founded them, then you are not one of the good guys.
Making moral cleanliness dependent on one’s willingness to boycott Israel is twisted beyond belief. The old fascists wanted to make Europe Judenfrei – the new lot want to make it Israelfrei. Different words, same vile bigotry.
My advice? Go to Gail’s. Get a cake. Don’t let these losers win.
Smashed windows. Shards of glass on the street. Hostile graffiti in blood-red paint. And that most chilling of slogans: “Reject corporate Zionism.”
No, I am not describing a scene from 1930s Europe but rather an attack that took place in Archway in North London this week. Once again a mob of anti-Zionist imbeciles has roughed up a branch of Gail’s, the upmarket bakery chain. It opened on Junction Road near Archway Tube station last week and was instantly besieged by the usual keffiyeh clowns yelping about Israel’s “genocide”.
The preening fools of the cult of Israelophobia gathered outside the bakery to unfurl a vast banner saying “Boycott Israel for Genocide and War Crimes in Gaza”. Busy patrons hoping to pick up a sausage roll or a honey cake for their morning commute will have rightly wondered what a high-end bakery in North London has got to do with Israel’s war against the anti-Semites of Hamas.