Over 100,000 French citizens marched peacefully through their cities on Sunday. They did so to show their support for the country’s 500,000 Jews, a growing number of whom have been harassed physically and verbally since Hamas attacked Israel last month.

In the Mediterranean city of Nice many of the 3,000 demonstrators chanted ‘we’re all Jews’, a facile and frankly offensive refrain. It’s become a habit in recent years to virtue signal one’s solidarity with victims of terrorism or religious persecution: not only do we share your pain but also your identity. One suspects that had those non-Jewish demonstrators in Nice been confronted on their way home by a group of Hamas sympathisers they would swiftly have shed their new-found Judaism.

The most effective way we can show our solidarity is to stand up to the anti-Semites

‘Je suis Charlie’ echoed across the West in January 2015 in the aftermath of the slaughter by Islamist gunmen of the staff of Charlie Hebdo. The political and media class declared their commitment to free speech but who now dares mock or criticise Islam in Europe? When a Yorkshire teacher showed a caricature of the Prophet in 2021 he was forced into hiding in fear of his life. In hiding he remains, abandoned by Britain’s political class. Je suis chary, more like.

When a French schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, was murdered by an Islamist in 2020, Parisians gathered to emote. Some brandished placards on which was written ‘Je Suis Samuel’, which I described at the time as ‘a grotesque new low in this age of infantile self-absorption’.

It happened again last month after another schoolteacher was killed. ‘Je Suis Prof’, people proclaimed. If only these people really were professeurs [teachers], then France wouldn’t have a critical shortage in the classroom.

But who wants to be a teacher in this day and age? Low pay, poor working conditions and the threat of being stabbed to death by an Islamic extremist.

At the same time on Sunday that people in Nice were declaring ‘We’re all Jews’, I was at a lunch in London where the majority of the 150 guests were Jewish. It was a golden wedding anniversary party and the Jewish couple were celebrating in the presence of family and friends who had flown in from nine countries, including France, America, Switzerland, Turkey and Israel.

The person on my right at lunch was a Turkish Jew who had lived in the United States for a number of years. Many of his family still lived in Istanbul. They feel relatively safe, he told me, but there are some districts in the city in which they are not welcome. The same now goes for Jews living in France, particularly in the Parisian suburbs where tens of thousands have fled to avoid the rising anti-Semitism.

Jews are also disappearing from some parts of London. In Tower Hamlets, for example, they represented 7.7 per cent of the population in 1970; in the 2021 census this figure stood at 0.4 per cent. The largest religious group in Tower Hamlets are now Muslims, who make up 39.9 per cent of the borough’s residents.

Such a demographic transformation has consequences. In 2011, Tower Hamlets’ council declared its intention to ‘do everything in its power’ to support a boycott of ‘the pariah state’ of Israel. Three years later, a Palestinian flag was flown from the town hall on the orders of mayor Lutfur Rahman. Last month, the Metropolitan Police announced that they have stepped up patrols in the borough to protect the small number of Jews brave enough to still live there.

And one must be brave to be Jewish in Britain and France in 2023. That’s why a non-Jew like me has no right to flippantly proclaim ‘we’re all Jews’. I’ve never been spat at or kicked or threatened. Nor am I afraid to visit some neighbourhoods of Paris or London because of my religion. I’ve never gone to church worried that, like the worshippers at the St John’s Wood synagogue on Saturday, I might encounter a group of thugs upon leaving. Nor have I ever listened as an elderly relative recalled the horror of the Holocaust.

I hope that if I witnessed a rabbi being assaulted in the metro, as happened last week in Paris, or yobs vandalising Jewish schools in London, as was the case in October, I wouldn’t stand idly by. I hope every decent non-Jew wouldn’t. The most effective way we can show our solidarity with our Jewish friends and fellow citizens is to stand up to the anti-Semites. Their bigotry must be challenged, exposed, recorded and reported so that it can be punished by the authorities.

Lustily bellowing that ‘we’re all Jews’ will do nothing. It might make that person feel virtuous for a fleeting second, maybe even endow them with a frisson of victimhood, but it’s cultural appropriation of the most dishonourable kind.