Yom Kippur is looming, but this year it doesn’t feel the same. After the Heaton Park attack in Manchester this time last year, many British Jews will have a different feeling walking into synagogue.
Nearly six in ten British Jews now try not to show any visible sign of their Judaism in public. Sixty-one per cent have considered leaving the country in the past two years, up from 50 per cent the year before. We only know any of this because a Jewish charity paid for the polling. The effects accumulate in ways the incident statistics can never capture. Venues have cancelled Jewish comedians and bands. Jewish events keep their locations confidential until the day. West Midlands Police fabricated evidence about Israeli football fans rather than confront the real threat.
It isn’t that the problem hasn’t been acknowledged – we have reports about antisemitism coming out of our ears. It’s that nothing of any significance has been done about it, because there is no political will. A record high in the statistics and Heaton Park were not enough to move the government. It took a string of arson attacks, a stabbing in Golders Green and a raised terror threat level before ignoring it became politically impossible.
So this year we get higher walls and heavier doors, and more police outside. We are being slowly separated from the rest of society and made into more visible targets. Building higher walls lets politicians say they are fighting antisemitism. But nothing is being done to confront antisemitism in the arts, education or anywhere else the problem actually lives.
You might argue the government has made things worse. With impeccable timing before the high holy days, it announced sanctions on Israeli settlements. Whatever you think of the legality or morality of the settlements, the claim that this protects the two-state solution is fantasy. If it were that simple it would have happened long ago. Hamas put the final nail in that coffin on October 7 and still refuses to disarm. The policy ignores a Palestinian Authority in a state of virtual civil war, still operating pay-to-slay, rewarding imprisoned terrorists with generous funds, and still producing textbooks that incite violence against Jews.
Hamas, whose founding charter echoes Nazi ideology, welcomed the announcement. Basem Naim of its political bureau called the sanctions and Ed Miliband’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” important steps in the right direction – but not enough, and called for Israeli figures to be tried as the Nazis were at Nuremberg. Iranian propaganda outlets hailed it as a step towards “the end of Israel”. They claimed Tehran’s proxies had talked a naive British government into it, and accused the Foreign Secretary of plagiarising Khomeini in his portrayal of Israel as an occupier.
I sat in on the online Labour members’ briefing after the announcement, and the tone was celebratory. It added to the suspicion that this was never designed to change anything on the ground, but to secure the backing of Labour members. The one thing I am sure of is that it wasn’t done for British Jews.
MI5 has been explicit about the environment into which it landed. When the national threat level went to severe, the security service specified an “elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions, in the context of the conflict in the Middle East”. It didn’t take a genius to work out what an announcement like this would do a fortnight before Yom Kippur.
The protesters got excited. Gathering outside Parliament, their enthusiasm for criticising Israel knew no bounds. One was dressed as a concentration camp inmate in striped pyjamas, holding a sign reading “Netanyahu why don’t you just gas us”. Another wore a T-shirt saying “Every Zionist loves money, every Zionist hates Christ”. When officers approached him, the group turned on the police and chanted that they were the KKK, had blood on their hands, and were complicit in genocide. Others chanted to “smash the Zionist settler state”.
Many of us will now spend part of Yom Kippur standing outside synagogues, because whatever protection the state provides can never be enough, and because a minority under attack ends up guarding itself. Since the start of 2020, MI5 and counter-terrorism police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots. Many are not well publicised, and don’t change how our community lives day-to-day. They are not why people remove their kippah or their Star of David necklace.
There is no constituency in Britain where the Jewish vote alone decides the outcome. There is no electoral motivation for any politician to deal with what British Jews face – only the fact that it is the right thing to do, and that ignoring it feeds the politics of chaos. None of this makes me feel confident that the British government has the back of British Jews. They may be building us higher walls. But they also look like they are handing those who hate us a step ladder before the mortar is dry.
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