Reduced to one word – Jew

Matt Lucas wasn’t alone. Last week, a Holocaust survivor and other visitors were called “child killers” and harassed by people in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum because they were visibly Jewish. Instead of receiving assistance, a senior official instructed staff to remove them, saying others were “disturbed” by their presence. The Reina Sofía is considered one of the world’s leading cultural institutions.

Across the west in 2026 Jews are being excluded from museums, harassed on public transport and confronted on the street. And now, incredibly, antizionists could be coming to your home.

In cities including Brighton, Bristol, London and Sheffield, people are going door to door checking whether residents accept their “truth” about Israel – like racist Jehovah’s witnesses. They want people to sign pledges boycotting the world’s only Jewish state. The door-knockers compile lists of those who don’t pass their purity test. What will they do with this information?

Footage from Sheffield appears to show one door-knocker physically attacking a woman who confronted him. When an ideology becomes part of your identity, criticism feels like a personal attack. The door-knockers in Brighton were filmed having a rally by Sky News, with one speaker revealing what appears to be the campaigners’ ultimate goal: to harm Israel “until it shrivels and dies”.

This is the aim of antizionism – the destruction of Israel and the Jews who live there. Some hide behind the fantasy that Israel would be replaced by another democracy, but the Middle East isn’t known for democracy, particularly when it comes to Palestinian leaders. We know what would happen to half the world's Jews in this scenario. October 7, 2023 showed us, when Hamas attempted to implement it.

Obsessing over destroying the only Jewish state in the world is racist by definition. Yet antizionism has long masqueraded as legitimate political discourse, making it difficult to expose its inherent hate. But antizionists have become emboldened, and are now so extreme that they are doing the job for us. By openly holding Jews collectively responsible for crimes – whether real or imagined – they're exposing what they truly are.

But it should never have had to get this far. Antizionist campaigns have a long and terrible history. There are now only about 27,000 Jews left in Muslim countries, down from an ancient community of millions who predated Islam. Meanwhile over two million Muslims live in Israel. In 1968, many of Poland’s surviving Jews were persecuted and effectively expelled because of “antizionist” campaigns. Jozef Dajczgewand said “the police ordered me to take off my pants, screaming ‘f*****g Jew” and he wondered if it was “the same Nazis who had persecuted my parents”. When he was released, all his friends had fled the country. Some victims didn’t even know they had Jewish roots until a few weeks beforehand.

Today the orders don’t come from institutions demanding ideological conformity. They come from grassroots organisations and institutions voluntarily conform, sometimes just by inaction. But what does it even matter which way round it happens when you end up in the same place?

Racist bullies now demand Jews justify their existence, even when going about their day-to-day business. No one should have to justify their existence, and certainly not because they are Jewish, Black, Indian, Kurdish or anything else.

If you find the very existence of Jews offensive and controversial, then you are a racist. And you should be excluded from polite society, not the other way around. You should be barred from travelling on the Tube if you are unable to do it without harassing Jews.

But it won’t stop once Jews have been bullied out of museums or off the Tube. There is a fight to keep Jews acceptable in public life, and we’ve already lost so much ground. Soviet-era totalitarian racism is literally knocking at the door. Meanwhile, Green Party activists are reviving racist campaigns from the totalitarian Soviet state crafted in the 1970s: “Zionism is racism”.

It doesn’t matter that there is a “silent majority” once the vocal minority hold some control. British Jews are being made to jump through hoops to justify our presence in society. There is a backlash, but it has taken such severe examples to create it that you have to wonder if this is just a blip.

Comedian. Actor. National treasure. None of it protected Matt Lucas on that escalator. He was reduced to one word: Jew. And until that stops being enough to justify harassment, British Jews will remain legitimate targets, not citizens.