Truth about dual threat facing British Jews: there is hostile-state terror and everyday, online terror

It has no identifiable headquarters or physical base, no leader or apparent personnel, and no structure as such. Its propaganda is designed to represent HAYI as an Islamist militant group with international reach that has somehow emerged, supposedly fully formed from nowhere. Unsurprisingly, security officials dismiss this as implausible.

HAYI launched a first wave of violence in early March, ten days after the US and Israel began strikes on Iran, targeting Jewish community sites in Belgium, the Netherlands and a US bank in France.

It then shifted its focus, with a second wave of violence mainly in the UK, where it has claimed a series of arson and attempted arson attacks on synagogues, Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green and the offices of an Iranian opposition TV network in London. The Israeli embassy seems to have been targeted with a hoax chemical or biological weapon threat. Further planned attacks have been thwarted by a series of arrests of alleged plotters. A very recent attack on a memorial wall for Iranians killed in protests against the regime in Tehran in January is likely to be the work of the group too.

The evidence that Iran is behind HAYI is circumstantial but very strong. Tehran has a long history of pursuing a form of “hybrid” warfare that relies on the use of highly unconventional means to achieve strategic aims against principal enemies, of which Israel (and by extension Jewish communities anywhere) is considered one.

This goes back to the days of the Iran-Iraq war. The radical regime in Tehran was convinced by the challenges it faced during that conflict – which included in its latter stages confrontation with the US – that straightforward conventional strategies and tactics were insufficient to mount a successful defence against superior forces. Instead, they would fight as revolutionary insurgents, just on a global scale.

Since then, Iran, sometimes working through Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist militant movement that it helped found in around 1983, has been behind bloody attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets across much of the world. The most notorious involved mass casualty attacks in South America in the early 1990s but there have been hundreds of others. Israeli tourists have been shot, sticky bombs placed on Israeli diplomats’ cars in distant capitals, and much else.

In recent years, Tehran has turned to sub-contractors among criminal underworlds in Europe and the US to target its enemies.

British officials have been diplomatically circumspect in recent weeks but Laurent Nuñez, the French interior minister, made a “direct link” to Iran after the attempted bombing in Paris of the Bank of America. Nuñez pointed to the nature of the attack, which involved a teenage petty criminal recruited by an underworld contact on social media and paid a relatively small amount of money to leave an oversized firework outside what they had been told was the home of the unfaithful girlfriend of an invented “Mr Big”. This was typical of Tehran, he said.

On April 29, two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green. Police have charged Essa Suleiman, a 45-year-old of Somali heritage who came to Britain as a child, with attempted murder and have declared the assault a terrorist incident. HAYI claimed it had organised the stabbing but among the series of their attacks, this was an anomaly. The supposed group has already claimed attacks for which it has no responsibility whatsoever.

But beyond the immediate threat to the British Jewish community from Iran, there is another possible danger: that the activities of HAYI, which are linked to the exceptional circumstances of the Iran war, will distract from the much broader and more depressing reality of rising antisemitism. Despite frequent claims that this surge began in 2023 with the Hamas attack of October of that year and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, the Community Security Trust has been recording rising numbers of antisemitic incidents in the UK for well over a decade.

Years of investigating and reporting has taught me that terrorism, when not organised and commissioned by states like Iran, is a social activity. True “lone wolves” are extremely rare. Even when they do appear, they usually have some connections to like-minded others, even if just online. They may well be outliers in terms of actions and intent but are still always steeped in ideas and values and prejudices that are shared by many more who may not feel the need to turn to violence but who tacitly or explicitly back those who do.

For much of the last decade, I have been researching terrorism in the 1970s for my recently published book, a fair proportion of which targeted Israel or Jews around the world. Then, as now, those who bombed or shot or hijacked were the minority of a minority, but their values reflected others much more wildly held.

Then as now too, attackers only acted if they believed their violence would receive the approval of their communities, however defined. Some thought that would only come from immediate peers. Others that it would only come posthumously. In both cases, this was sufficient.

The logic of this is obvious. The fewer who are likely to feel their antisemitic acts will be well-received, the fewer the antisemitic acts. Sarah Sackman, Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, called last week for the moderate majority in the UK to stand up not just in solidarity against acts of terrorism, but also against ambient, everyday antisemitism. This call is not just one against discrimination and prejudice but in the hard-nosed world of counter-terrorism, essential to fight back against violence. To blame everything on HAYI would be to do exactly what those behind the group want.

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Jason Burke is the author of The Revolutionists: the Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s, and the international security correspondent of The Guardian