The stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green last week appears, at last, to have jolted the nation out of its denial about the threat that extremism and hatred pose to the Jewish community.
For over two and a half years, Britain’s Jews have faced a steady escalation: mass marches steeped in hostility, intimidation outside synagogues, harassment across workplaces, the NHS, unions and campuses, arson attacks, and even terror on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Each incident registered briefly, then faded; none seemed to provoke the wider awakening that was needed – until now.
The response to Golders Green has been different. Politicians across the spectrum have not merely denounced the attack but acknowledged a harder truth: that something darker has taken hold and cannot be allowed to continue unchecked. Public figures have lent their voices to a growing recognition that the present climate of antisemitism is intolerable.
Within the Green Party, though, rhetoric that casts Israel as a singular moral evil has become a central plank of its political identity. Not every Green voter subscribes to such views, still less to antisemitism. Yet the political taboo that once existed around endorsing candidates who espouse them has plainly weakened.
But beyond this outlier among mainstream parties, there are signs that the country is beginning to confront not just the symptoms but the causes of antisemitism. The Prime Minister’s condemnation of the chant “globalise the intifada” as racist was a necessary corrective. The last Intifada was a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians that claimed more than a thousand lives and left many more maimed. To call for its globalisation is, plainly, to legitimise racism and violence here in Britain. In saying so, Keir Starmer identified an uncomfortable but essential truth: that hostility to Israel is fuelling antisemitism at home.
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has been equally candid, noting how too many people excuse hostility towards Jews on the basis of Israeli policy. “Debate about international affairs must never be allowed to slide into hostility towards Jews,” as he writes in these pages.
That link – between the demonisation of Israel and violence against British Jews – has too often been dismissed. Legitimate criticism of any government, including Israel’s, is a feature of a free society. But what Britain has witnessed goes far beyond that: it is the transformation of a foreign policy dispute into an all-consuming moral crusade that casts Israel as an absolute evil and, by extension, its supporters – which includes the vast majority of Britain’s Jewish community – as morally suspect or worse.
Part of the solution must come from concrete government action, such as addressing the relentless marches. Freedom of speech is a crucial British value, but it must not be exploited to menace a minority or upend the daily life of wider society. The cumulative impact of repeated large-scale protests – whatever their stated intent – cannot be ignored when they disrupt communities and foster an atmosphere of intimidation.
Nor should the state hesitate to act against those who propagate extremist ideologies and plot terror in our cities, whether foreign or domestic. The proposed proscription of the IRGC is a necessary step; it should not be the last. Islamist movements that promote or legitimise violence merit the same scrutiny.
Yet beyond the attacks themselves, what has most unsettled the Jewish community is the lack of broader public outrage – the absence, until now, of visible solidarity from wider society, as Sir Mark Rowley has also noted (with some notable exceptions, such as Kemi Badenoch and Lord Walney). That silence has cut deep in a community that is not only longstanding but unmistakably British: proud of this country’s traditions of parliamentary democracy, fairness and civil discourse, and deeply invested in its future.
If this marks a genuine turning point – if British society begins to redraw the boundaries of what polite company will accept and refuses to remain silent in the face of anti-Jewish racism – this country and its Jewish community can yet forge a different future. The Prime Minister’s summit urging all of society to confront antisemitism, alongside new measures to tackle Jew hatred in the arts, academia and the charity sector, marked an important step in this direction.
No one is under any illusion that pushing back against this entrenched wave of antisemitism will be easy. What has been allowed to fester for years will not be removed overnight. But Jewish families who have quietly begun to ask whether they still have a future here may think again – if they see the decent British majority doing what it has so often done at its best: standing firmly, and without equivocation, on the side of justice.
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