Manchester’s synagogue attack must be a national wake-up call

The past two years have stripped bare the fiction that antisemitism is marginal. Its intensity, its reach, its seepage into every institution of national life – politics, unions, campuses, even the NHS – are unprecedented.

On the very day of the Hamas massacres in Israel, there were celebrations in Britain. And now, after Jews have been killed on British streets, protesters again marched and shouted eliminationist slogans, some clashing with police, as if Jewish blood shed here were just as irrelevant.

Week after week, demonstrators chant to “globalise the intifada,” glorifying an uprising that murdered over 1,200 Israelis. Jews who go near these marches are told by police they risk arrest because their very presence might “provoke” disorder.

What we are witnessing is not protest but a cult built around the vilification of Israel. Obsession with the Jewish state, and ultimately with Jews themselves, has become a defining feature of people’s identity. The world’s only Jewish state is cast as uniquely evil. Much of the “evidence” is Hamas propaganda, laundered by media outlets that too often jettison basic journalist standards of verification. The result has been mass hysteria and a surge in violence against Jews everywhere.

Parliament itself is gripped by the same fixation. Israel has been debated more often than Russia’s war in Ukraine – a conflict with direct implications for our national security that could yet drag us into confrontation with a nuclear-armed power. Israel has been discussed more than the NHS and immigration, issues of fundamental importance to this country and within government’s actual remit.

Labour has not merely failed to resist this mood; too often it has echoed it. Ministers flirt with the charge of “genocide” which – as the antisemitism scholar David Hirsch warns – acts as an incitement to anti-Jewish violence. You cannot demonise and defame Israel, isolate it diplomatically, and simultaneously claim to oppose antisemitism. These positions are incompatible.

So what needs to happen now? The immediate task is security: enhancing police protection, identifying and eliminating imminent threats. That requires acting against dangers already known. Foremost among them is the IRGC, the Iranian regime’s terror army, which must finally be proscribed in Britain. No serious strategy to defend Jews – or the country at large – can continue to ignore Tehran’s long arm. It also means a much harder look at Islamist networks in general in the UK, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which threaten not only the Jewish community but coexistence and social cohesion itself.

But security alone will not suffice. The government and above all the Prime Minister must set the example for how to talk responsibly about Israel: questioning wild accusations rather than ignoring or echoing them; recognising that Israel is not the aggressor. Yes, the suffering of Palestinians is real and awful. The ultimate responsibility, however, lies with Hamas, which started this war – a war Israel for two decades tried to avoid precisely because it knew the misery Hamas would inflict by using civilians as human shields, and the terrible loss it would impose on young Israeli soldiers. Yet Israel’s war is treated as unique, as if civilian casualties were a Jewish innovation, as if Israel had any choice but to defeat a genocidal movement committed to its destruction.

Nor can government act alone. A society in which every professional body, every student union, every cultural platform treats hostility to Israel as a badge of belonging is not one in which Jews can live freely. Nothing less than a cultural and political shift will suffice. Universities must ensure Jewish students can feel safe and welcome on campus. Union leaders must finally end their obsession with foreign policy – and certainly with Israel – and return to the tasks for which they exist: negotiating better pay and conditions for their members. Church leaders, with two millennia of history of antisemitism, have a particular duty to avoid falling into simplistic denunciations of the Jewish state. The NHS must demonstrate zero tolerance of staff who bring political agitation into medicine, undermining trust in their professionalism and making Jewish patients fear they will not receive proper care.

The killings in Manchester are not a bolt from the blue. They are the most brutal consequence yet of a climate Britain has tolerated far too long. To mourn the dead while excusing or indulging the culture of hate that made their murder possible would be an obscenity. Our leaders must now finally summon the moral courage to confront it. For centuries this proud British Jewish community has flourished here – and it will not be driven from its home now.