Looking back over the year month by month, there were glimmers of hope amid the violence, terror and hate
December 22, 2025 12:19
JANUARY
Members of the Palestine “Solidarity” Campaign are arrested in London for breaching protest conditions and marching towards a synagogue conducting Saturday services, because they cannot help themselves: it’s just less fun when Jews are not afraid. The Brutalist, a film about a Holocaust survivor and architect, opens in London. It is a rare thing, a film about the Shoah that isn’t stupid. There is a ceasefire in the war with Hamas; 33 hostages are released. In protest Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s leading maniac, resigns.
FEBRUARY
The BBC release the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. When it transpires that part of the documentary is narrated by Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the child of a Hamas official, the documentary is pulled. The Bibas children – Ariel, aged four on abduction and Kfir, aged nine months on abduction – are returned to Israel for burial. Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, says, the “hearts of an entire nation lie in tatters”.
MARCH
Gal Gadot becomes the first Israeli to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, though not the first Jew. The Gaza war resumes. Ben-Gvir returns to government, which is a tragedy.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 18: Gal Gadot attends her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony in Hollywood, California on March 18, 2025. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)Getty Images for Disney
APRIL
On the first night of Passover Cody A Balmer, an arsonist, sets the mansion of Josh Shapiro, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, alight while the family sleep inside. According to court documents Balmer told the 911 handler that Shapiro “needs to know that he ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people’”. The family escape unharmed.
The Maldives bans Israeli citizens from entering the country unless they have dual citizenship. Numbers of Israelis with dual citizenship who choose the visit the Maldives are unknown. Israel’s population passes ten million.
MAY
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a couple who work for the Israeli embassy in the USA, are murdered by Elias Rodriguez outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. Rodriguez shouts: “Free, Free Palestine,” as he is arrested. Perhaps anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
Israel’s Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Supernova massacre, competes in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song New Day Will Rise. In Eurovision’s complex judging formula, Raphael came 14th in the jury vote, but first in the popular televote to finish second. Antisemites cry foul, as they always do.
BASEL, SWITZERLAND - MAY 11: Yuval Raphael representing Israel attends the Turquoise Carpet of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest Opening Ceremony at Messe Basel on May 11, 2025 in Basel, Switzerland. (Photo by Harold Cunningham/Getty Images)Getty Images
JUNE
A vigil in honour of the Gaza hostages in Boulder, Colorado, is attacked: Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an asylum seeker from Egypt, shouts “Free Palestine” and throws two Molotov cocktails at the crowd. (He has 18 incendiaries with him in all, and is dressed as a gardener). He wants to, “kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead”. Twelve people are hospitalised; Karen Diamond, 82, later dies.
The Global Sumud (“steadfastness”) Flotilla masses and heads to Gaza to break the blockade carrying aid that is the equivalent of a few weekly shops, and smartphones to record their boiler-plated narcissism. Greta Thunberg is aboard: after Israeli forces take the vessel and prepare to return the – what? – sailors home, Thunberg describes herself as a “hostage”, which is repulsive. Iran and Israel have a 12-day war. Israel wins.
At the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset Bob Vylan, a band named after the Zionist Jew and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan chants, “Death, death to the IDF”. The BBC broadcast it. The following day sees the biggest surge in antisemitic incidents in the UK on record. The year 1290 not included.
JULY
Two Jewish comics – Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon – are told they cannot perform their shows Ultimate Jewish Mother and Jew-O-Rama at Whistlebinkies at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, due to their Jewishness. Whistlebinkies staff, who have internalised Vasily Grossman’s dictum, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of,” say they feel “unsafe”. That is, they are worried about protest, even though they are, functionally, the protest. Simon is also told that his show Shall I Compere Thee in a Funny Way? is no longer welcome at the Banshee Labyrinth due to his “views concerning the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine”. Both are offered space at other venues. Even so, comedy is no longer the bravest of art forms: few comics speak publicly in Creeger and Simon’s defence.
AUGUST
Jeremy Corbyn refuses to answer when he is asked if he is an anti-Zionist by people who are more anti-Zionist than he. Or perhaps just more honest. He looks hurt when they ask him but, then, when doesn’t he look hurt?
SEPTEMBER
It is the fifth anniversary of the Abraham Accords. The IDF fire on Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar, though Qatar is almost an ally. The strike fails. Benjamin Netanyahu apologises to Qatar.
Zack Polanski, an anti-Zionist Jew, becomes leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, with 85 per cent of the vote. He has told women he can enlarge their breasts with his brain, and he is doing the same for the Green Party’s polling figures. They are now on 15 per cent, four points shy of Labour. Today, breasts. Tomorrow – who knows?
OCTOBER
On Yom Kippur the Syrian-born British citizen Jihad al-Shamie attacks congregants gathering at Seaton Park Synagogue near Manchester. He does this in the name of Islamic State, shouting, “This is what they get for killing our children.” Two Jews are killed: Adrian Daulby, who barred the doors against al-Shamie, and Melvin Cravitz, who was run over by him. Al-Shamie is shot dead by police. The artist Michael Smuss, the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, dies in Israel. It is reported that 35 per cent of Jews feel unsafe in Britain, compared to 9 per cent before October 2023.
Samuel Williams, a student at Balliol College, Oxford, shouts, “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground” at a “pro” Palestine march in London. Balliol College calls itself “deeply concerned” – as I am when I drop a fish pie – and suspends Williams.
Keir Starmer orders a review of antisemitism within the NHS. The remaining living hostages, numbering 20, are released from Gaza to Israel.
NOVEMBER
The democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is elected the first Muslim mayor of New York. He has used the phrase “globalise the intifada”, believes that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and denies Israel’s right to exist “as a Jewish state”.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 24: New York mayoral candidate, State Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) speaks to supporters during an election night gathering at The Greats of Craft LIC on June 24, 2025 in the Long Island City neighborhood of the Queens borough in New York City. Mamdani was announced as the winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor in a crowded field in the City’s mayoral primary to choose a successor to Mayor Eric Adams, who is running for re-election on an independent ticket. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)Getty Images
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform Uk [Refuk], is accused of childhood antisemitism and racism by 28 former pupils at Dulwich College, his former school. Peter Ettedgui tells The Guardian that Farage repeatedly said to him, “Hitler was right” and “gas the Jews” at school. Farage denies the claims. Who wouldn’t?
The playwright Tom Stoppard, born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, dies in Dorset. All Stoppard’s grandparents died in the Shoah. His final play Leopoldstadt (2020) told the story of a Viennese Jewish family in the early 20th century: “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you”.
Sally Rooney tells the High Court it is unlikely that her next novel will be published in the UK while the ban on Palestine Action persists, because of her support for them.
The novel “will be unavailable to readers in the United Kingdom simply because no one will be permitted to publish it (unless I am content to give it away for free). My novels have been influential and popular in Britain, where I am among the best-selling literary authors of the last decade.
“The disappearance of my work from bookshops would mark a truly extreme incursion by the state into the realm of artistic expression.”
I try to translate this into [Jane] Austen-ese, get bored, and give up.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 17: Sally Rooney speaks onstage during the Hulu Panel at Winter TCA 2020 at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on January 17, 2020 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Erik Voake/Getty Images for Hulu)Getty Images for Hulu
Maccabi Tel-Aviv play Aston Villa in Birmingham in the Europa Cup. Previously, West Midlands police recommend that Israeli fans not be permitted to attend the game based on invented or non-existent intelligence relating to the Amsterdam pogrom of 2024; call Israeli fans a danger to the local population, many of whom are Muslim; and invent a “ghost” football match – a match that was never played – in evidence.
They also insist that local Jews asked that Israeli fans be banned, which is a lie.
Aston Villa win 2-0.
DECEMBER
Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in protest at Israel’s participation. Frank Gehry, the Toronto-born architect and creator of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, dies. 2025 is the second hottest year since records began.
Jews attending a Chanukah party on Bondi beach, Australia, are murdered by two gunmen. Multiple news outlets neglect to use the word “Jew” at the top of reports, though whether this is from shame or hatred I cannot say.
Philippe Akhion co-wins the Nobel Prize for economics. Forty per cent of economics laureates are now Jewish, from a global population of 0.2 per cent. What will antisemites say to that?
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