The stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green marks a deeply ominous escalation of antisemitic violence in Britain. It has also transformed the coming local elections into a far more serious test: a bellwether of whether Britain’s silent majority is prepared to stand with its Jewish community under assault and reject the politics of hate and division.
The sectarianism centred on obsessive hostility towards Israel that has corroded national debate has now seeped into even the most parochial corners of political life, distorting elections that ought to concern themselves with little more than bins, roads and housing. Instead these elections have become entangled in imported grievances and ideological campaigns far removed from the responsibilities of municipal office – with consequences not only for democratic accountability, but for social cohesion and the safety of Britain’s Jewish community.
More than 1,000 councillors have signed pledges calling for divestment of pension funds and the severing of commercial ties with companies linked, however tangentially, to Israel. While most signatories come from the Green Party and Labour, they are also joined by Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, independents, and even a handful of Conservatives.
This development is not an isolated local phenomenon but a replication of national politics. While foreign policy properly falls within the remit of government and parliament, even at that level the Israel-Gaza conflict has consumed attention far beyond any rational proportion, at times eclipsing debates about the NHS. At the level of local government, this fixation is even less defensible.
The long-term cost is the degradation of democratic accountability and local services. If councillors are not elected on their expertise and policy ideas for addressing local issues, this will inevitably be reflected in outcomes.
For Britain’s Jews, as the Golders Green stabbings have underscored, the implications are more immediate and more serious. Criticism of Israeli policy is, of course, legitimate. But the intensity and tenor of Britain’s political discourse around Israel – including, at times, from the government – too often depicts the country as uniquely malign, fostering an atmosphere in which hostility and even violence towards Jews is increasingly rationalised.
Following the attack, the Prime Minister appeared, at last, to recognise part of this reality, condemning chants to “globalise the intifada” as “extreme racism” and the display of imagery glorifying terrorist violence. That recognition is welcome, but it does not yet go far enough. It still stops short of acknowledging the central role that Britain’s obsessive focus on Israel and the demonisation of the Jewish state now plays in fuelling the current wave of antisemitism and poisoning public discourse.
The Green Party, under Zack Polanski’s leadership, has conspicuously elevated anti-Israel rhetoric above its traditional environmental priorities. Labour, meanwhile, feels acute electoral pressure. The loss of parliamentary seats in 2024 to anti-Israel independents has sharpened anxieties among its representatives, particularly in marginal districts, that electoral survival may depend on adopting an ever more strident stance on Israel. That impulse will only have strengthened after the Greens’ by-election victory in Gorton and Denton, fought on a campaign urging voters to “punish” Labour for Gaza. The result is a race in which some candidates have sought to outflank one another on an issue far removed from the responsibilities of office.
This preoccupation should not be mistaken for an organic or inevitable response to dramatic events overseas. It reflects a disquieting activism that is carefully organised: the importation into British politics not merely of foreign conflicts, but of the pathologies that have long accompanied them. In the Middle East, anti-Israel – and often antisemitic – narratives have been used by authoritarian leaders to deflect attention from domestic shortcomings, contributing to the region’s socio-economic stagnation.
There is a risk that similar habits take root here, displacing rational debate about Britain’s own pressing challenges and accelerating a drift towards sectarian politics. This is a “national emergency”, as opposition leader Kemi Badenoch rightly said, and it must be treated as such. Political leaders, media, academia and institutions must not only confront antisemitism directly but end the poisonous discourse around Israel that sustains it. The two cannot be separated. Without that baseline of seriousness, attempts to push back antisemitism will fail.
Voters, too, have a role. There remains a large majority in Britain that finds antisemitism abhorrent and in these local elections, they can draw a line: rejecting candidates who import distant conflicts into local politics, who inflame rather than inform, and who divide rather than govern.
And as the Jewish community marches this weekend against antisemitism, it should not be left to do so alone. A country serious about confronting this stain would ensure that it is not. The familiar refrain that antisemitism “has no place in Britain” is repeated after every attack – it now needs to be proved. Not in words, but in action, in numbers, and in a willingness to confront what is too often merely condemned.
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