Lori Hudaly was once so shy she would not walk into restaurants on her own. Last weekend she helped organise a party for thousands, wearing a T-shirt that said, “Zionist bitch”. And when some “pro-Palestine” women attempted to barge into the Jewish bloc’s after-party at Pride this month, she used her new Krav Maga skills to keep them out.
The 44-year-old South African-born mother of three didn’t expect to find herself gaining confidence when she first held up a placard for hostages, but this has been one consequence of being one of the four key organisers of the post-October 7 protest group Stop the Hate.
If you’ve been on any pro-Israel demonstrations since the massacre, the chances are it was organised by them. They are impossible to miss with their loud music, their loudspeakers, their unashamed Zionist merchandise, and their friendship with an Iranian diaspora who have been at all their events. The “Starmer, Jew harmer” placards after the Golders Green stabbing? That was them. As were the fightbacks outside the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley, in May 2024, and at Edgware Synagogue last month.
Controversially, it was at one of their hostage events that Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy, joint CEOs of Progressive Judaism, were booed and eventually ushered off the stage.
In the past few weeks, they’ve hosted the Jewish Pride bloc (attended by Rabbi Baginsky) and after-party, a sold-out comedy evening and have seen off the antisemites outside showings of the play Allegra, starring Dame Maureen Lipman.
It is no exaggeration to say they have shaken up the entire Jewish communal establishment, which has traditionally kept its head down hoping that backroom discussions and the odd letter would make a difference to antisemitism in the public realm.
Instead, they’ve taken the fight to the streets with their mantra that whenever the Israel haters are protesting, there will be a counter-protest.
“We set out to be as bold, as contentious, as we could be as we realised very early on that the only people who get things done are vocal and unapologetic,” says Stop the Hate co-founder Itai Galmudy, a 44-year-old publican and father of two. “Look at the other side and what they are doing. We didn’t invent anything. To a certain extent, we copied them. We decided that we are going to be everywhere and every time they come out, we will be there too. It doesn’t matter if there is 20 of us or 2,000 of us. It’s about saying, these are our streets too.”
It is perhaps not surprising that Stop the Hate was founded by Israelis who didn’t grow up in the shadow of antisemitism. It sprung from the 7/10 Human Chain Project set up by Israelis living in the UK in October 2023 to campaign for the release of the hostages. Working with British Jews, they staged vigils and held up and posted images of the hostages.
Yochy Davis, a 63-year-old grandmother and former owner of a fashion company, was a key organiser. An Israeli who has lived in the UK for most of her life after falling in love with a Brit, she has been an Israel advocate since the 2014 war with Gaza when she got her first taste of antisemitism on Britain’s streets.
For many years, her advocacy was carried out with a small band of people who would wave Israeli flags at antizionist events.
But after October 7, her tactics changed. Davis realised the importance of having Iranian allies.
“There was an impromptu vigil outside the Israeli embassy on October 7 and I met this Iranian girl, Lily Moo, who spoke movingly about what it meant. A few weeks later, when we staged an official vigil, I said we had to get Lily Moo on the microphone. She was electrifying, and her speech went viral.”
Stop the Hate honed its identity further still when it became clear the war would be ongoing – and the anti-Israel demonstrations weren’t going to stop.
“A few of us were restless about the inactivity of the police around the marches, which were so hateful,” recalls Galmudy. “The police were patting themselves on the back about what a great job they were doing because they were keeping the peace. But we knew the only reason things looked mildly peaceful was because there were no Israeli flags being waved. So we thought to ourselves, ‘What if they do see an Israeli flag?’ Davis and I spoke about it for a long time, and we decided to go for it.
“I can’t tell you how many people tried to stop us, actively tried to prevent us from doing this. They said we were crazy, that what we were doing was going to damage the Jewish community’s relationship with the police and harm the reputation of Anglo-Jewry. To which we said, ‘We realise you Brits have a way of doing things, but let us try the Israeli way.’ We understood why people were being cautious, and we didn’t want to put anyone at risk, but we were not willing to have another weekend where Jews were too frightened to come to central London on a Saturday.”
Moaning on social media about the antisemitism on the demonstrations had got British Jews nowhere.
“We understand that politeness doesn’t get Jews very far. At our first counter-demo there were about 15 of us being protected by 80 police officers.”
Following that first counter-demonstration, in March 2024, a video emerged showing just how badly the demonstrations were being policed, when a Jewish woman pointed out a swastika and a policeman told her that it might not be antisemitic: that it needed to be considered in context.
At first the organisation was called Enough is Enough. But after the slogan was used on a Tommy Robinson march, the group rebranded to Stop the Hate. The core team of four amassed a large circle of people, from Christian Action Against Antisemitism founder the Rev Hayley Ace and Golders Green shop owners Jack and Dvorah Miller, to members of the Iranian community who they, in turn, supported when the Iranian regime began murdering people in January 2026 in the country’s nationwide protests against the mullahs.
And while there may be a question mark over how much Jew-hate they have stopped, they have certainly exposed an awful lot of it. And, equally importantly, they have restored and encouraged Jewish pride through the parties, celebrations and vigils, they have organised.
Just their being at the demonstrations has led to “peaceful pro-Palestinians” frothing with hatred. I have been at some of the counter-protests and seen how the Israel-haters try to hide Stop the Hate behind huge banners as the “humanitarians” on the other side call for Jewish blood.
“We’ve pursued them everywhere,” says Galmudy. “Sometimes we do four or five events in a week. And we are always there with music; we are always loud. We quickly understood that they hate it when we are happy in front of them. It annoys them more than anything else to see Jews happy. It’s unbelievable.”
Hudaly met Galmudy and Davis at their first vigil for the hostages, at which she stood near the front of a stage holding a poster. Connected via social media – one of Davis’s strengths is amassing huge social media groups – she started to become a regular at their events, volunteering to help steward them. It wasn’t long before they asked if she could be in charge of the stewards for one of the demonstrations and soon after that if she would like to join their core team.
“I felt they were doing an important job but I had no idea how it would end up changing my life,” says Hudaly. “In the end, I was working so hard on all the Stop the Hate events that I had to stop my job in recruitment. This has become a full-time job – even if it’s not paid. I never expected how much the group’s work would change my life or change me as a person.
“I used to be a walkover who just wanted to please people. I put everyone else first. But being part of this group has given me a confidence. Now I can speak for myself and I have learnt how to say no.
“Some might say I’ve become too confident! I helped design the ‘Zionist bitch’ T-shirt, which we sell, and I walk around in it regardless of the comments it elicits.”
Stop the Hate’s core team does have one Brit: 30-year-old property developer Max Royston.
He was in Israel on October 7, on holiday with friends, and recalls how when he returned home “I was in this deep trauma, walking around in a haze for months, seeing the world not only turn against Israel but against Jews”.
He started to go to some of the vigils but it was when weekly anti-Israel demonstrations started in Swiss Cottage, aimed at the nearby home of the Israeli ambassador, that he started to become more involved in campaigning.
‘At first, it was just a few friends and me counter-protesting the antizionist protests in Swiss Cottage, which is near where I grew up, and then Stop the Hate became involved and I got closer to them.” The anti-Israel protests took place every Friday evening in Swiss Cottage for about a year. Eventually, after they started spilling out on to the roads and following a prolonged letter-writing campaign against them, the police banned the “pro-Palestinians” from protesting there.
“It was this encroachment of marches into Jewish neighbourhoods, combined with the general feeling that we should keep our heads down, hide our kippot and our Stars of David, that convinced me,” says Royston. “Stop the Hate felt like antidote to all this – empowering Jews to stand up for ourselves and to stand up for Israel.”
Swiss Cottage was personal for him and, as a gay man, so was Pride. “That year, the main Jewish group withdrew from Pride because the organisation wasn’t being very accommodating to the fact that the Jewish bloc needed extra security, and also they constantly referred to a genocide. The withdrawal was quiet but for me it was unacceptable to be pushed out without causing a fuss.” And so he helped organise a Stop the Hate Pride party. This year, the Jewish bloc was invited back to Pride with the extra security they needed and after the parade they had a party.
“Stop the Hate empowered me to stand up and say, we are proud Jews, we are not Jews with trembling knees and we will fight for what we believe in, we will refuse to be edged out of spaces.
“I think if you go quietly, don’t make a fuss, toe the line of where you can be Jewish or where you can be Zionist you get pushed further and further away and you get more and more ghettoised. We had every right to be at Pride and that first year we had a big loud party in the street where everyone could see us. And we continued to have that party.”
Like the others, Royston is an ordinary person who feels the group fills a gap in the community. “For 60 years the Jewish community has enjoyed what we now know was a golden era, but that has changed. Our communal leadership was designed for peacetime. Now we are at war and we need a wartime leadership. We can no longer keep keeping our heads down for fear that everyone will hate us. We are hated. So we might as well be noisy and demand respect and equal treatment under the law.”
Much of Royston’s work for Stop the Hate has involved dealing with the police. “They are very good at security and counter terrorism but since October 7 they have prioritised public order over policing hate,” he says. “If they actually policed hate on these marches, there would be a serious public disorder issue because they’d be arresting hundreds of people. It is easier for them to stand there with their eyes closed. We insist they don’t.”
It probably does not need stating that misconceptions abound about Stop the Hate. To this end, Royston recently became a deputy with the Board of Deputies and hosted a two-hour “ask me anything” Q&A with some of the more left-wing colleagues. Despite the belief of some, Stop the Hate is not a right-wing organisation – both Royston and Galmudy identify as left-wing. Galmudy and Davis disagree vehemently about Israeli politics, but for them, this is irrelevant; their job is fighting antisemitism in the UK.
“One of the misconceptions around us is that we booed the Progressive rabbis at the hostage event,” says Royston. “But this was a communal event with hundreds of people who booed them. I don’t think we agree internally about whether removing them from the stage was the right or wrong thing to do – I think they should have been allowed to finish – but we are all volunteers who are learning on the job.
“We make mistakes, we move fast, but we move on because we don’t stop. Some don’t like it, but look at any successful civil rights movement, and you’ll find the radicals and the nice men in suits. I think too many organisations mistake access for influence. They feel too grateful when people finally cave in. But as British citizens, we should have the same rights and protections as every other community. And if they are not being freely given, we have every right to demand them, forcefully.”
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