Three years ago, Jews around the world woke up to the deadliest day for our people since the Holocaust. On October 7, 2023, 1182 people were murdered and 251 were taken hostage. They were killed in their homes, at a festival, and in their cars trying to flee. Families were slaughtered together. Women were raped. Elderly people and babies were dragged into Gaza.
Just over a year later, I visited Kibbutz Be’eri and the site of the Nova music festival. Much of Be’eri had been left as it was. It was eerie to see the contents of someone’s fridge still sitting there, a domestic life frozen in time. In one house almost everything had been consumed by fire, yet a pack of toilet paper remained in the corner, covered in debris.The very ordinariness of these objects was devastating.
The one thing that had been removed was every trace of blood. ZAKA, Israel’s voluntary post-disaster response service, had painstakingly collected human remains so the victims could receive a full Jewish burial. Their work expressed something fundamental about Judaism: the sanctity of every human life and the dignity owed to every human body, even after death. It is difficult to imagine a starker contrast with the terrorists who descended on those communities celebrating murder and glorifying death and “martyrdom”. Judaism sanctifies life. The ideology behind the October 7 attacks made a sacrament of death.
Almost immediately, people insisted that the accounts were exaggerated even as the atrocities were being livestreamed to the world. One particular horror of October 7 was that the terrorists did not seek to conceal their barbarity. They recorded it, broadcast it and celebrated it. One even used the phone of an Israeli woman he had just murdered to call his father and brag about how many Jews he had killed. Still, Hamas apologists demanded that Jews prove what had happened. It was a form of Holocaust denial in real time.
Our lives have not been the same since. The trauma of October 7 itself would be difficult for any community to bear, but the speed with which the death of Jews and Israelis was celebrated and justified compounded the pain we all feel. Before Israel had mounted any substantial military response in Gaza, there were celebrations in London and other cities. Posters of kidnapped children were torn down. Calls for intifada became commonplace. Jews were expected to account for a foreign government before they could be granted any sympathy.
This was not a passing spike in hatred. It was a new normal for British Jews. Antisemitic incidents logged by the Community Security Trust remain at record levels. Synagogues and schools require even more security. Jewish students think twice before wearing a Star of David. Employees calculate whether it is worth revealing they are Jewish at work. This is not paranoia. It is our reality.
Week after week, we saw our streets filled with protests where the line between solidarity with Palestinians and hostility towards Jews was too often blurred. Gaza helped reshape the makeup of Parliament, with independent MPs elected on explicitly pro-Palestine platforms at the 2024 General Election. A war thousands of miles away has altered voting patterns, policing, campuses and workplaces here at home. Nothing comparable followed the slaughter in Sudan, the persecution of the Uyghurs or the crimes of the Iranian regime. Israel is subjected to a unique obsession and British Jews are made to live with its consequences.
Those consequences were most acutely felt on Yom Kippur last year, when a terrorist drove at worshippers outside Heaton Park Synagogue and then attacked them with a knife. Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed, and three other men were seriously injured. The attacker pledged allegiance to Islamic State. He chose a synagogue, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two months later, an ISIS-inspired attack targeted a Chanukah celebration in Sydney. In April, two visibly Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green. Again and again, Jews around the world have been attacked while practising their faith, gathering as a community or simply going about their day, simply because they were Jews.
Each incident was condemned. Extra police were deployed. Politicians promised that Britain would stand with its Jewish community. But for too long, antisemitism has been treated as a security issue. We urgently need to find the courage to name the ideology behind the attacks in Sydney, Manchester and Southern Israel: Islamism. It must be said clearly that Islamism is not Islam. It is a political ideology that twists religious belief into a mandate for totalitarian politics, and justifies extreme violence to achieve that end. The overwhelming majority of Muslims reject terrorism and want the same safety and dignity as everyone else. It is more important than ever to be precise because collective blame is wrong and refusing to name an ideology does not protect social cohesion. It protects the extremists and damages trust.
The same honesty is required in progressive spaces, so many of which routinely exclude Jews. Criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic. But obsessive demonisation of Israel is dangerous. When Jews everywhere are treated as legitimate targets; when Hamas symbols are worn as badges of resistance; when “globalise the intifada” is defended as harmless rhetoric even as Jews are attacked around the world, the result is the normalisation of hatred against Jews with absolutely no benefit to the Palestinians.
Jewish grief does not compete with Palestinian suffering.The hatred unleashed and legitimised after October 7 must be confronted. The test is not whether institutions issue statements after Jews are murdered. It is whether they act before the next attack. That means enforcing the law against incitement and support for proscribed terrorist groups; confronting radicalisation both online and in physical institutions; excluding hate preachers; protecting Jewish schools, synagogues and communal events; and expecting universities, employers, political parties and cultural organisations to treat antisemitism with the same seriousness as every other form of racism. Extremists who murder Jews despise the free and democratic society that makes Jewish life possible. Until we understand that antisemitism is an issue for all of us, Jews will not be safe. In the end, neither will anyone else.
Claudia Mendoza is the Chief Executive of the JLC
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