“An attack on lifesavers cannot stop lifesaving.”
So reads the homepage of a new charity appeal for Hatzola’s Northwest branch in England. In less than 24 hours, more than £1 million has been raised after four of its ambulances were firebombed in Golders Green – one of London’s most vibrant Jewish communities, and a place just minutes from where I was born and raised.
Hatzola is a volunteer-led emergency medical service. It exists to save lives, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and is one of the fastest and most effective first-response networks anywhere. To target it is not only an act of arson. It is an attack on the very idea of care and humanitarian service.
This antisemitic arson attack is also, tragically, no longer shocking.
Responsibility for the attack has reportedly been claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya, an Islamic Republic-backed terrorist group linked to recent attacks elsewhere in Europe, from Rotterdam to Liège and Greece. The message could not be clearer: The Islamic Republic’s war and destructive foreign policy is not contained by borders. It is bleeding into the streets of cities like London.
After the attack in Manchester last Yom Kippur, at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, this should have been a moment of reckoning. Instead, it is yet another warning. The question is no longer whether antisemitism is escalating into violence. The question is how many such warnings and how many acts of egregiously violent terrorism are required before that reality is confronted.
Not all warnings arrive in flames.
In London and Edinburgh, among other major cities, Jewish people have been advised by police to remove their yarmulkes and conceal their Star of David necklaces so as not to “trigger” pro-Palestinian protesters marching through the city. These incidents might seem benign when compared against firebombed ambulances. It is not. It is part of the same trend centred on the quiet normalisation of the idea that Jewish identity itself is provocative and that it is something to be hidden for one’s own safety.
What makes this particular moment even more bitter is what Golders Green has represented over the past two years. Since October 7, it has been a refreshing example of solidarity: Jewish and Iranian communities standing side by side, holding vigils together. On commemorative walls where hundreds of Israeli hostages posters were once plastered, one can now see the faces of some of the tens of thousands of Iranians killed by their own regime in recent months.
And hours after the antisemitic ambulance attack this week, you saw Iranians communities once again rush in support of their Jewish brothers and sisters. The attack on Hatzola certainly does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader pattern in which complaints lodged against the Israeli government are increasingly allowed to blur into hostility toward Jews worldwide. Too often, that line is crossed surreptitiously with a shrug and rationalised as justifiable anger.
We have seen such examples in the recent response to antisemitic vandalism, where businesses like Gail’s Bakery are fashioned by delusional pundits as nefarious “symbols” of “aggression” and attacks against them are explained away as somehow explicable. We have seen it in the musings around why Jewish institutions require their own security or community-based services at all – questions that would be unthinkable if directed at any other minority. And we are now seeing it in moments where the burden of de-escalation is placed, absurdly, on Jews themselves: hide your necklace, remove your kippah, keep your head down, don’t provoke.
Words of condemnation have and will of course come, as they always do, by politicians. Statements will be issued. Talking heads will talk and condemn in the strongest possible terms. Panels will convene. And then, too often, attention will move on.
But if this moment is to mean anything, it must mark a shift from language to action.
That means treating antisemitic violence with the seriousness it demands. Antisemitism is not an unfortunate and insurmountable byproduct of geopolitical tension. It is a shapeshifting and reprehensible form of hate that must be expunged in all its incarnations. This also means media institutions must exercise judgment and take responsibility in how they frame and contextualise attacks on Jewish communities. And it means refusing, at every level, to normalise or “contextualise” the logic that makes such attacks conceivable.
Because the truth is simple: when ambulances are firebombed, when people are told to hide symbols of their identity, when communities are made to feel unsafe in the places they call home, something far larger than a series of isolated incidents is at stake.
This is not only a test for the Jewish community. It is a test for the society around it.
And it is a test that cannot be passed with words alone.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations, was born and raised in London and is the award-winning author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt.
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