Golders Green is the beating heart of Jewish life in London. It is a neighbourhood bursting with kosher bakeries and restaurants, synagogues, Judaica stores and generations of Jewish families who have built vibrant communities. The high street, Golders Green Road, is lined with Union Jacks, the national flag of the United Kingdom, to exemplify that this is a community that is fiercely proud to be both Jewish and British.
Golders Green is also minutes away from where I was born and spent many of my most formative years. It is far from a battlefield, and yet in recent weeks and months it is increasingly being treated like one.
On Wednesday, I happened to be on Golders Green Road when a barbaric, crazed terrorist, armed with a knife and irrepressible hate, carried out a frenzied stabbing attack, seriously injuring two visibly Jewish men.
I had been eating brunch at a Kosher restaurant surrounded by Jewish families doing something profoundly quotidian: eating brunch, shmoozing, living. There was nothing remarkable about it – except, that in today’s Britain, even that feels precarious.
Moments into this brunch, that sense of normalcy was shattered. Droves of helicopters, ambulances and police cars converged on this predominantly Jewish neighbourhood.
Police tape cordoned off streets I have known my entire life. Sirens pierced through the familiar hum of the neighbourhood. And as the news spread, it became impossible to ignore what many have tried to downplay for far too long: this is not a series of isolated incidents. It is a pattern.
That night, I had been scheduled to speak at London’s main Jewish cultural centre, JW3, on the topic of “Israel/Iran Unpacked”, alongside an illustrious panel that included a distinguished war correspondent currently posted abroad. It now feels bitterly ironic that he may soon need to return to Britain – not to cover a distant conflict, but to report on the war unfolding here, against Jews, in plain sight. In 2026, not 1940.
This Jew hatred did not begin this week. We have seen synagogues firebombed. We have seen Hatzola ambulances torched. We have seen Jews murdered in Manchester on Yom Kippur. We have watched mobs take to the streets chanting “Globalise the intifada” within hours of Jewish blood being spilled. To globalise the intifada is to bring violence against Jews into cities like London, Sydney, and elsewhere, and that is precisely what is happening.
If the stabbing of Jews in Golders Green does not force a reckoning, it is difficult to imagine what will. How many more wake-up calls are required? How many more attacks are needed before we accept that something deeply corrosive has taken hold in British society?
It is painful to write these words, but they must be written: a virulent strain of Jew-hatred has taken root in Great Britain.
An hour after the stabbing took place, I kept a prior commitment to speak at the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Golders Green. The symbolism was impossible to ignore. I had the honour of a lifetime to speak to a group of survivors – individuals who had endured the worst horrors in human history – about Iran's historic 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolt, and about the Islamic Republic’s malign actions in the Middle East.
And yet, as I spoke, I could see the present pressing in on the past. Through one window at the Survivors’ Centre, police tape marked the aftermath of the stabbing attack.
Through another, there was a large “memorial wall” which had been erected in the wake of October 7 to display images of deceased Israeli hostages and has since then morphed into a memorial for the thousands of extraordinarily brave Iranians who had been killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic. It became the site of astonishing allyship between diaspora Iranians, Jewish people and Israelis. That memorial wall had, too, been vandalised in recent days.
We often speak of “Never Again” as if it is a settled commitment defined in absolute and non-negotiable terms. It is not. It is a choice that has to be made and one that has to be backed by sufficient action.
What happened in Golders Green is not just an attack on Jews. It is an attack on the kind of nation Britain claims to be. A country where minorities can live openly and safely. A country where hatred is stamped out. A country where violence is unequivocally condemned.
War has been declared on British Jews. The question is whether Britain is prepared to respond.
Jonathan Harounoff, born and raised in North West London, is Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations. He is also the award-winning author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt
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