Josh Breslaw was looking forward to a homecoming gig with his band of two decades’ standing. Oi Va Voi, a predominantly Jewish collective mixing traditional eastern European folk tunes with drum’n’bass and dance, were due to conclude a spring tour of Turkey with a gig in May at Bristol’s Strange Brew club, plus one in Brighton where Breslaw lives. But then, after protests from local activists about both the band’s past performances in Israel, and with Israeli singer Zohara, Strange Brew abruptly cancelled, citing “the ongoing situation in Gaza”.

To be told they hadn’t met the venue’s “ethical standards” was devastating, says Breslaw, the band’s 52-year-old drummer: “It felt so unjust.” But worse came when his home-town venue cancelled in solidarity. “It changed how I felt about the city, how I felt about parts of the music industry. And it changed how I felt about the political home I always felt I lived in.” Although the Brighton promoter swiftly apologised, only in November did Strange Brew issue a statement saying it had “made a mistake”, adding that the band likely only attracted scrutiny because they are “a Jewish band performing with an Israeli singer”.

Feelings clearly remain raw when I meet Breslaw and fellow band member Steve Levi in north London’s JW3 community centre. It offers everything you’d expect from a neighbourhood arts venue: posters advertising a panto, children’s craft – and one thing found only in Jewish spaces, namely thorough airport-style security frisking at the gate.

Since the Manchester synagogue attack, in which two worshippers died in a car and knife attack on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the community has stepped up already tight security, says Breslaw: buy tickets for a small Jewish play or book reading, and the location may be disclosed only 24 hours before. Levi, the band’s 49-year-old clarinet player, hates the fact they had to hire extra security for a recent gig at north London’s Islington Assembly Hall: “Musicians shouldn’t have to look over their shoulder when they’re on stage.” Although this interview was conducted before the 14 December terror attack on Jews celebrating Hanukah on Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia, at the time of writing the Gaza ceasefire is fragile and the climate in Britain remains febrile.

Against this backdrop, Oi Va Voi aren’t alone in their reservations about a regalvanised cultural boycott campaign, which asks artists to sever links with Israeli counterparts in solidarity with Gaza. This longstanding campaign, echoing tactics used against apartheid South Africa, insists it’s strictly peaceful. But the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood – who recently played Tel Aviv – had two UK gigs with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa cancelled after credible threats to the venue. There are signs, too, of the line between boycotting Israelis and targeting Jews blurring. Two British Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger – whose show is about motherhood – and Philip Simon, had shows cancelled at this year’s Edinburgh festival fringe, over what the venue called staff safety concerns over additional security measures needed. Simon had a second run of shows cancelled after the venue cited his “views concerning the humanitarian situation in Palestine”, including social media posts criticising the actors’ union Equity’s support for a Palestine march. (Simon said he had “never expressed support for anything other than freeing the hostages and finding a path for peace” and that he was being “cancelled just for being Jewish”.)

What worries Breslaw is what he sees as the creeping normalisation of the idea that British Jews are somehow suspect. Although he stresses he isn’t in any sense comparing cancellation to the Manchester attack, for him there’s a connection: “It’s deciding that this group of people is responsible for something and they’re a threat, when they couldn’t be further from a threat; they’re a vulnerable group of people that are under attack in this country. And the people who are putting us under attack need to take a look at how that’s happening, because it leads to Manchester.”

Oi Va Voi were, he argues, subjected to scrutiny that other musicians aren’t “because we were known as a Jewish band”. And it’s the singling out of a minority on ethnic grounds, in an arts scene that prides itself on inclusion, that he fears.

Oi Va Voi formed in the early 00s out of a group of friends experimenting with combining klezmer melodies – folk tunes from their grandparents’ time – and the sounds of their own era, from drum’n’bass to breakbeat, soul and jazz. Breslaw and Levi are the only enduring members of a lineup that was “basically people discovering music that their parents thought was a bit naff”, says the former. But it was also, says the latter, about keeping the old songs alive. Across two decades they have played Glastonbury, won two BBC Radio 3 World Music awards, featured a young KT Tunstall as guest singer and even gigged at the Kremlin (though not for Vladimir Putin, they stress; “I think it was Russian Jewish man of the year or something”). Until May, they’d played across Europe without incident – including in predominantly Muslim Turkey, where some fans went so far as getting Oi Va Voi tattoos. Their music often addresses feelings about exile and migration, with resonance well beyond the Jewish community.

Amid the cancellation furore, a young Iranian messaged Breslaw on Instagram, saying he had listened to the band’s 2003 hit Refugee daily before leaving to seek asylum in Germany. “And I was like: ‘OK, these people that are cancelling us have no concept of what we have tried to do with our music,’” he says. “Refugee was always about the human story: how does it feel to be on that journey, to be that lost and alone?”

It is against this background that in May, Strange Brew asked them to explain activists’ allegations of playing “occupied Palestinian lands”. (They say they have gigged in Tel Aviv, which isn’t in the occupied territories – though activists who don’t accept Israel’s right to exist sometimes deem the entire country occupied.) There were also objections to the cover of an album Zohara made separately from the band, Welcoming the Golden Age, which featured her naked in a field gathering watermelons in a wheelbarrow. Her bandmates say she meant it only as a statement about “femininity, going back to nature”, and didn’t realise that the cut fruit – whose colours echo the Palestinian flag – has become a popular symbol of Palestinian resistance, especially on western social media.

“I’ve spoken to some Israeli people who have never heard of this watermelon thing,” says Levi. Breslaw points out that there are easier ways of determining Zohara’s politics than reading sinister meanings into album covers: in Tel Aviv she’s been a very active anti-war protester, whose recent single denounced the Netanyahu government’s reluctance to end the war. “She’s being criticised not for who she is, what she stands for, but where she was born.” Zohara herself posted on Instagram at the time that the row was secondary to “the only thing that truly matters: ending the starvation in Gaza, bringing all the hostages home and stopping Israel’s bombardments”.

Yet at the time Oi Va Voi chose not to defend themselves by taking a stance on the war, and even now they won’t say exactly what they think about it: first on the grounds that British Jews aren’t accountable for a foreign government; and second that they don’t see why they can’t just get on with making music. “I don’t understand this need for all the artists out there to make their statement, as if – if they didn’t make it – people would assume that they must really love the war,” says Breslaw. “Come on, it’s ridiculous.” Nor, he says, do they want their cancellation weaponised for dubious political ends. “We don’t want to be dragged into a culture war from the hard right.”

What they will say, to anyone confused as to how British Jews can be offended both by being treated as synonymous with Israelis and by the rap duo Bob Vylan chanting “death to the IDF” on stage, is that diaspora emotions are complicated. Many British Jews, Breslaw explains, have loved ones in Israel. “That doesn’t mean they support what’s going on, it just means they’re more connected. So if you call for the destruction of that place, it’s going to make people feel worried and uneasy.”

Moreover, he won’t rule out Oi Va Voi playing in Israel again. Cultural boycotts can, he argues, isolate and push away the very creatives trying hardest to find solutions. “What does it do to an artist like Zohara who spends most of her time on the streets protesting against her government, fighting really hard, making music that is specifically anti-war? The people in the boycott organisations say: ‘Well there’s got to be some collateral damage’ but no I don’t really see the need.” Although he understands the strength of feeling, “if people think that by cancelling Oi Va Voi or posting aggressive comments [on messageboards] they’re inching closer to solving the Middle East peace process then I think they’re very wrong”.

So do they agree with the Jewish protesters calling recently for the cancellation of a Bob Vylan gig in London? “I’m not into the cancelling of things. But I do think if someone wants to play they should be responsible, and they shouldn’t be calling for hate and death,” says Breslaw. Levi argues that the line is crossed “when you’re inciting racial hatred, because that’s illegal”. But mostly, they’re wary of political statements, preferring the music to do the talking.

It was Levi’s idea to respond to cancellation with exuberant dance track Back to My Roots, built round a klezmer melody. All about “standing proud, restating what you’re about, that we’re still playing as a band”, it includes synagogue-style cantorial singing and a blast of shofar, the ram’s horn traditionally blown at the Jewish new year. “That’s about calling you back to who you are every year,” Levi says.

Through several newer songs – including Dance Again, a response to the Nova festival massacre, and the title single from their new album The Water’s Edge – runs the idea underpinning many Jewish religious festivals, of defying adversity with hope. “It’s about a persecuted minority surviving,” says Levi.

Returning to live gigging is, for the band, also an expression of that desire not to be erased. But post-cancellation, says Breslaw, some bookers seem wary. “I think it’s just they don’t want the heat of the intimidatory tactics of the people that want to see bands like us cancelled. They think: You know what, it’s not worth the trouble.”

He understands the fear of losing business, he says; the sense across the arts world that it may be easier to give in than risk a backlash. “But if everyone does that, where does that leave us?”