Three years ago, the world witnessed a monstrosity. The worst terror attack in Israeli history unfolded in snippets of panicked video and then a steady stream of reports across our screens. A pogrom led by Hamas terrorists, murdering and kidnapping people because they were Jewish.
The footage was traumatic. Each passing hour revealed fresh horrors. Hostages paraded through Gaza in front of cheering crowds. The massacre at the Nova music festival. Parents dragged from their homes with the blood of their dying children still on their clothes. I will never forget the image of Shiri Bibas clinging to her children, Ariel and Kfir, or how small they looked.
And yet while the decent majority of British people watched on in horror, a substantial minority in this nation felt something entirely different. While the slaughter was still unfolding, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign notified the police that it intended to hold a pro-Palestine march the following weekend. It symbolised the reaction that was to follow.
We had all seen the threat posed by Islamism. We were all too aware of the number of our fellow citizens who felt nothing in common with us, and who were happy to kill women and children in cowardly terror attacks to make that known. But the aftermath of October 7 made it quite clear how deeply rooted these sentiments were. That a frightening number of those who would not themselves murder children were quite happy to cheer on those who would. And we saw, also, how so-called polite society would go to any lengths to diminish and justify this behaviour.
With the benefit of hindsight, the warning signs were there well in advance. We could pick any number of starting points, but my personal jolt of realisation was on the 18th of June 2002. Less than a year had passed since the horror of 9/11, and British soldiers were on the ground in Afghanistan. We were, by then, painfully aware of the horrors of political Islam.
That morning, a Hamas suicide bomber had attacked a bus full of children and commuters in Jerusalem. A few hours later, Cherie Blair appeared at a charity appeal for Palestine, and said “as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress”.
That, for me, was the moment of realisation. It was a sort of attempt at “understanding” that people who would never have dreamed of extending to terrorists of the IRA or the far-right, somehow made possible by the identity of the attackers and their victims. The oldest hatred, long absent from Britain, had come back in a form which rendered otherwise intelligent people unable to recognise it.
This strange lacuna in our national discussion was to stay in place. People who were alive to the threat of Islamism and able to see with ease through the rhetoric of the BNP were blind when it came to matters involving Israel and Palestine, or Muslims and Jews. In the years that followed, I would see it rear its head again and again.
In 2005, George Galloway won his seat in Bethnal Green in a campaign marked by sectarian abuse levelled against his opponent, a Jewish Labour MP (claims Galloway and Respect denied). In 2020, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party was sanctioned by the EHRC for its treatment of Jewish members. In 2022, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges against men who drove through London waving Palestinian flags yelling “F*ck the Jews” and “Rape their daughters”.
There were so many comparable incidents. Individually, they were horrendous. Together, they formed a distinct pattern: something sinister and fundamentally un-British was corrupting our institutions and politics.
After October 7, this became undeniable. The response to the massacre of innocents in Israel was to call for the destruction of Israel. Tens of thousands of people marched through London chanting “from the river to the sea”. Some were simply blind to what they were calling for, blind to what their new associates stood for, listening to the propaganda repeated by credulous journalists from the BBC – an organisation which has had to correct two stories a week on Israel and Hamas since 2023.
Others, however, were moving in the cover afforded to them by their new comrades. What else to make of those wearing paraglider stickers – by then, a symbol of the previous week’s attack – or the chants of “Khaybar, Khaybar”? It did not take long for Suella Braverman to see these as what they were: hate marches that were bringing shame on Britain. As she said then, what we were seeing were people “chanting for the erasure of Israel” mere days after “the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust”. It was a call for a return to sanity that should have been heeded.
And yet in the months and years that followed, we have travelled further down a very dark path. We have seen antisemitism become routine in the NHS. We have seen the BBC publish, repeatedly, lies and slanders about the Jewish state which serve to fuel the hatred of antisemitism in Britain. And we have seen a craven, sinister strand in our politics which panders to this sentiment.
On the Left, the Labour party, desperate for votes in marginal constituencies with large numbers of Muslim voters, has made its views quite clear: laying sanctions against a state which provides Britain with life-saving intelligence and accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing.
The Greens, meanwhile, have decided that Zionism – the belief that Jews have a homeland and a right to self-determination, just as the British have a homeland in these islands, or the French in France – is a form of racism. That the very existence of Israel is in some sense illegitimate. And that the vast majority of British Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state accordingly have no place in their movement.
This sentiment exists, too, upon the right. Some of the rhetoric from the supporters of Restore has been abominable; the sort of things that we haven’t heard in this country since the 1930s, with calls for the expulsion of Jews from this country. A donor who said they wanted “another Hitler”. People who blame Israel for terror attacks in the West. People who suggest that my hatred of antisemitism is because I am bought and paid for.
It is disgusting. And it is deeply worrying that a fundamental hostility to Jewish people is becoming part and parcel of everyday political life in Britain – a statement which would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. And we are seeing the consequences on the streets of this country. The terror attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester last year, and the foiled attack just two weeks ago; firebombings and arson attacks in London.
My view – the view of Reform – is that Britain is still the country of the Balfour declaration, that the right of Israel to exist is simply not in question, and that the destruction of Hamas and defanging of Iran would be a great boon to humanity. I believe that it is entirely possible and fair to criticise individual acts of the Israeli government, or the Israeli armed forces, just as it is possible and fair to criticise the British government, or to point to cases where British soldiers have overstepped the line. It is almost inevitable in war that there will be cases where this happens.
But these are not the conversations we are having, and the climate of fear in our Jewish communities speaks to this fact. Instead, we seem to be having by proxy, and without any acknowledgement of this fact, a debate over whether Jewish people are still a valued part of our nation. Far too many people seem comfortable with positions – bans on kosher slaughter, expulsion from political parties for Jews who belong to Zionist synagogues, outright hostility and hatred – which are designed to make it increasingly hard for Jews to remain in this country.
When World War One broke out, the exhortation in the Jewish Chronicle was clear: “England has been all she could be to the Jews, Jews will be all they can be to England”. A century on, Britain’s Jewish community has kept its half of the deal while we have broken ours. We must fix this.
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