An eerie sense of calm filled the air in Golders Green after the terror attack on Wednesday which left two Jews in hospital.
I was not only one of the first journalists there, but one of the first people, arriving just after the stabbing happened. Because I arrived at the scene so promptly, I got to see the crowd grow.
People didn't turn up running, however; no one was in a panic, and no one tried to jump the police tape which had sectioned off the place where Shloime Rand, 34, and Moshe Shine, 76, had just been attacked in broad daylight.
People arrived calmly. Some stood in silence, others chatted, and others sipped coffee bought from the nearby deli. It was as if they had come out to see a daily occurrence – but then again, some Jewish residents who talked to me told me they see it as just that.
As I walked around the scene speaking to locals, some told me: “We knew this was coming,” and others said: “This was always going to happen.”
I realised this sense of calm was because nobody there was remotely shocked.
One person told me explicitly: “I'm definitely not surprised. I knew something like this was going to happen.”
Between the noise of two helicopters hovering above, I overheard a woman on the phone. “There has been an attack,” she said – then silence while whoever she was on the phone to way speaking. Then the woman replied: “Yes, they were Jewish.”
It seemed to me that it is fair now that when one hears of an attack to simply presume it was on Jews.
I even, disturbingly, found that there was almost a sense of quiet relief that it had finally happened and no one had died.
I can’t state this feeling as fact; nobody said anything about being relieved – but the looks on people’s faces told me something else. ‘Maybe now that this has happened we will be given a few days respite’, it felt like they wanted to say deep down.
45-year-old Essa Suleiman from Camberwell has now been charged with two counts of attempted murder, one count of carrying a blade in public – and also a third count of attempted murder for an unrelated incident the same day in Southwark.
Despite the lack of shock in Golders Green and resident’s calm demeanour, there was still a palpable sense of fear radiating through the community.
One resident who was standing on the side of the road told me that this is “just how we live now”, but asked me: “What do we tell our kids?” I didn’t know how to respond. How do you tell children that they are no longer safe?
Another told me that what they are feeling isn’t “perceived” fear, citing recent comments by Zack Polanski that there is “perceived antisemitism” amongst British Jews. “This is REAL fear,” the resident told me. “We are in REAL danger.”
By the evening, this fear had turned to anger as protesters gathered at the memorial wall. They chanted: “Enough is enough” and the speaker, Max Royston, from Jewish campaign group Stop The Hate, shouted at the top of his voice that “the time for solidarity marches is over” and that the Jewish community “needs action”.
It was hard to concentrate on what was being said, however, as the place where his speech took place – the memorial wall - was itself, having been burned just days earlier, a symbol of the vulnerability of the very people standing there. It is 20 metres away from the stabbing, and about 120 metres away from the charred ground where the Hatzola ambulances were burned.
Standing there listening to Royston speak and the crowd chant, it felt like we were literally surrounded by terror.
I thought to back to my coverage of the Villa Park protests last November when anti-Israeli thugs descended on the stadium to protest the Maccabi Tel Aviv team which had come to play. There, I spoke to a masked-up gang member who told me that he wanted to “[kill]” all Jews on site and that he was simply waiting for them to turn up. I had kept my Star of David firmly tucked inside my shirt and my kippah in my bag.
The following sentence is how I ended that story which was published in the JC on November 9.
“I was glad to make it to Birmingham New Street Station in one piece. I caught the train with a minute to go and slumped down on a seat. I felt safe.”
Things have changed since then, as I saw in Golders Green on Wednesday, with some residents telling me that “Jews are not safe anywhere”.
Before the gathering, at around 1pm, when the hordes of journalists from pretty much every national newspaper and TV channel descended on the scene of the attack, many asked Jewish residents: “Do you feel safe?”
Everybody knew that this was not even a question.
There was in fact only one question on everybody’s minds, and many residents were asking me it -
“Where will it happen next?”
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