The independent review into antisemitism in schools and colleges, led by Sir David Bell, should have stopped everyone in their tracks. It laid bare how institutions have failed to protect Jewish students. Almost three in five Jewish pupils surveyed had experienced or witnessed antisemitism. In one class, every single child described being abused on the way to or from school.
For Jewish schools, security creates a caseload no other schools carry, shaping almost every part of school life. None of this happened in a vacuum. Toxic rhetoric comes from politicians, the media, online and on the streets. The J7 Task Force found that Britain recorded the highest rise in antisemitism of all the Western democracies with significant Jewish communities.
The report alone shows an alarming new normal, but the response to it has been even more telling. Within days, Owen Jones stamped “DEBUNKED!” across its cover in giant red letters, a method of peer review not yet adopted by the Royal Society. Mehdi Hasan, meanwhile, found the good news: antisemitic attitudes aren’t rising, only anti-Israel ones. Jewish pupils, like the 14-year-old called a “Jew bitch” and assaulted, will be relieved to learn that the people abusing them are merely analysing foreign policy. Double Down News went one better, discovering the real victims of a report into antisemitism: non-Jewish pupils and staff.
It is shameful that Sir David Bell has had to take to these pages to defend a report protecting Jewish schoolchildren. He is not the first. Joan Donoghue, former president of the ICJ, had to correct the false claim that the court had found genocide in Gaza plausible. When it comes to Jews, lies go viral but corrections don’t.
Behind every statistic Bell’s critics dismiss is a child and a family. One mother didn’t need a review to tell her. Antisemitism forced her to move her daughter’s school midway through Year 5, then sell up and move area so her daughter could attend a Jewish secondary. She shared this online when the report came out, and the replies poured in. “At least your child can go to school… unlike the children in Gaza.” “I bet you can’t name an incident.” One commenter posted a close-up of her nose: “How’d they notice??” Another wrote: “Get out of our country, we have had enough.”
These replies weren’t unusual. Under almost every post I saw about the review, including my own, the same type of responses flooded in. The report spoke of “external pressures”. We have since watched those pressures in full effect, as the engine of hate roared into life. If the right had answered a report on racism with taunts, denial and whataboutery, the left would be rightly disgusted.
The backlash began before the review had even been released. In July, a pro-Palestine parents’ group backed by the National Education Union (NEU) tried to shut the review down, calling it “not worthy of serious consideration” and claiming it created a “hierarchy of racism”. If there is such a hierarchy, antisemitism sits at the bottom of it – precisely what the review showed.
Remember what triggered the review. Damien Egan, a Jewish Labour MP, was barred from visiting a school after a campaign by activists and the NEU. The union’s Bristol branch didn’t just welcome the cancellation; it claimed credit, celebrating it as “a win for safeguarding” and the power of the NEU.
No wonder Jewish members have been leaving the NEU. Members reportedly shared learning materials justifying October 7, when Hamas massacred and raped civilians in their homes. The union once offered “antisemitism training”, though it seems to have taken the brief too literally – the trainer was the same person who had vandalised the Warsaw Ghetto with anti-Israel graffiti.
So it is no surprise that the NEU has rejected the report’s first and most fundamental recommendation: defining antisemitism. General secretary Daniel Kebede, who told a pro-Palestinian rally it was time to “globalise the intifada”, says a definition would have a “chilling” effect on classroom discussion.
That is not just a rotten excuse. It inverts reality. Antisemitism is what chills free speech, and the evidence shows it is Jewish pupils and staff who have been bullied, abused and harassed into silence. The IHRA definition explicitly protects legitimate criticism of Israel. Fear of it only makes sense if you expect your own speech to be found antisemitic. And if you refuse to define antisemitism, then no one can fight it.
The government has accepted the Bell Report’s recommendations in full. Now the Good Law Project has threatened legal action against the recommendation to define antisemitism. The recent Mann Report into NHS antisemitism, also accepted in full, was rejected by activists and by the British Medical Association (BMA) with similar excuses. The BMA, like the NEU, has had its own antisemitism scandals. Unsurprisingly, those who are part of a problem tend to oppose efforts to tackle it.
The Jewish community does not lack evidence of what we face. We have report after report proving the problem exists, gathering dust. The callous reaction to the Bell Report is evidence of why so little changes. Those who claim they care about the safety of children in Gaza are outraged at the idea of protecting Jewish children in Britain. Unless the government rigorously enforces the recommendations, using tools such as Ofsted, the next report will say the same thing, or worse.
One recent story stayed with me. A man whose mother was taken out of school in Vichy France because of antisemitism has now taken his own son out of school in Britain, for the same reason. I fear our country has crossed a line it once swore it never would.
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