It’s not about Jews, it’s about Zionism. It’s not anti-Semitism, it’s pro-Palestinianism. It’s not racism, it’s social justice.

These are the mantras and all must accept them. To do otherwise is to ‘weaponise’ anti-Semitism, to level false allegations to ‘silence’ critics of Israel. To demean, they say with the gall of the concern troll, ‘real anti-Semitism’.

So we know that the defacing of the Amy Winehouse statue in Camden Market, that saw the late singer’s Star of David necklace covered up with a Palestinian flag sticker, is a perfectly legitimate protest against Israel’s military operation in Gaza. True, the statue’s necklace is not an Israeli flag, merely a Magen David, a centuries-old symbol of Judaism and Jewish identity, but if Jews don’t want their religious symbols attacked, they shouldn’t include them in the flag of the Jewish state. Better still, they shouldn’t have a state at all.

It is just a sticker and just a statue. Even though anyone knows that if the insignia in question was one belonging to a politically favoured group, the story would lead the Ten O’Clock News tonight. But we should retain a sense of proportion. Stickers can be peeled off. What can’t be detached quite so easily is the symbolism. This is another reminder to British Jews that their holy emblems are not welcome, that they are a target for those who want to remove signs of Jewishness from public view. The person who placed the sticker there was sending a message: over there, it’s Israel versus Palestine; over here, it’s us versus you.

It is not insignificant, I think, that a statue of Amy Winehouse was chosen. The late singer was neither religious nor outspoken about Israel. She was a thoroughly secular London Jew, and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter if your hair is uncovered, you eat non-kosher food, you last went to shul when Moses was floating down the Nile in a bassinet, and your only strong views about Israel is that Noa Kirel was robbed at last year’s Eurovision. They hate you because you’re Jewish. They hate you because you won’t be their kind of Jew, willing to denounce Israel, renounce Zionism and debase your people and yourself for their approval. They want you to submit.

Amy Winehouse did not submit. She was wild and wilful, stubborn and self-destructive, but she wasn’t submissive. She lived life without limits. It gave her music an exhilarating boundlessness to match its soul-deep authenticity, trespassing sound and genre but always being identifiably, inimitably Amy. And, in the end, it killed her. One way or another, limitless lives end up limited.

Another thing Winehouse was is London. Her great-great grandfather, who arrived in 1890 from Belarus, didn’t intend to end up in Britain. As Amy’s brother Alex has written: ‘He came to London by mistake – he was supposed to be going to New York – but now the thought of us being from anywhere else seems slightly ridiculous.’ It does seem ridiculous. Like generations of Jews, the Winehouses made London home, worked their way into the middle classes, and became so essentially London that it is hard to imagine their forebears being from anywhere else. While the journey wasn’t always smooth, London became a place where Jews could flourish, admixing British and London identities with however much of their Jewishness they wished to retain.

Covering up Amy Winehouse’s Star of David is an act of anti-Semitism

The defacing of Winehouse’s statue, and especially the suppressing of her Star of David, reflects a desire to suppress Jewish identity and suppress the London in which that identity has found a home. It is the assertion of a new cultural sovereignty, a declaration that Jewish identity may be articulated only insofar as it is a vehicle for expressing opposition to Jewish nationhood, statehood and self-defence. It is anti-Semites saying, as is implicit in so much anti-Semites in Britain today, that you Jews are here at our forbearance. It’s just a sticker and just a statue but the message is much more sinister.

Covering up Amy Winehouse’s Star of David is an act of anti-Semitism, but many otherwise keenly sensitive to the most imperceptible racism will not consider it as such. Anti-Semitism is the only form of racism where diligent anti-racists abandon the Macpherson principle, which says: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ Whatever the wisdom of that principle, it is the standard applied to every form of racism by police, public bodies, human resources departments and good, fair-minded progressives. Except in the case of anti-Semitism. In the case of anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitic incident is any incident which is conceded to be anti-Semitic by anti-Semitists or their apologists. And because hating Israel matters far, far more than affording Jews the same standards afforded to other minorities, anti-Semitism will not be conceded in this instance. Anti-racism is important but not as important as letting Jews know that, passionate about Israel or indifferent to it, they are the wrong kind of minority.

It’s not about Zionism, it’s about Jews. It’s not pro-Palestinianism, it’s anti-Semitism. It’s not social justice, it’s racism.