This morning, in Golders Green, Jewish ambulances belonging to Hatzola were set on fire. This is a Jewish community emergency service, and that alone explains why it was targeted. The fact that it serves anyone who needs help is incidental to the attackers, not central. What matters is that it is Jewish.
While commentators speculate whether the joint US-Israel campaign against Iran could spiral into World War Three, a global war has been unfolding for years: a war against the Jews.
This war does not resemble most wars. There are no declarations, no defined battlefields, and no single front line. Instead, it unfolds through a convergence of ideology, propaganda, political activism, and violence. It appears in demonstrations in Western capitals, in the rhetoric of activists and academics, in media narratives that frame Jewish self defence as aggression, and in the growing number of attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals across the diaspora.
What we are witnessing is not a series of isolated incidents but a global pattern. Across continents, synagogues are attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods threatened, Jewish students harassed, and Jewish institutions forced to operate under levels of security once unimaginable in democratic societies. From Europe to North America, from Australia to Latin America, the same phenomenon appears again and again. Jewish buildings require armed guards, community centres reinforce their entrances, and police patrols outside synagogues have become routine. These measures exist for one reason: Jewish people are under attack.
The geographic spread is striking. In city after city, Jewish communities face vandalism, arson, assaults, and threats directed at synagogues and schools. Cemeteries are desecrated, businesses are targeted, and students report intimidation on campuses. Demonstrations that claim to address international politics frequently become spaces where hostility toward Jews becomes explicit. What is often presented as political protest increasingly functions as a vehicle for antizionist Jew-hate, where opposition to the Jewish state becomes a framework through which hostility toward Jews themselves is expressed. This is not about Israel. It is about Jews daring to live as Jews.
What makes this moment distinctive is its simultaneity. In recent weeks, anti-Jewish incidents have been reported across multiple countries, from European cities to the United States. These are different societies, different political contexts, and different Jewish communities, yet the pattern is recognisable in each case. Whether these acts are coordinated or emerge from grassroots actors is secondary. The fact is that they are happening across the world.
This is not coincidence in the sense of randomness. Even when actions are not centrally directed, they are shaped by the same ecosystem of ideas, narratives, and incentives that operates across borders. The result is a pattern that is global in form, even when it is local in execution. The intifada has been globalised.
The state sponsors of the war
At the centre of this ecosystem are regimes such as Iran and Qatar, whose political and financial influence extends far beyond the Middle East. Their investments in media networks, political movements, Islamist organisations, and advocacy infrastructure help construct a global narrative in which hostility toward the Jewish state, and toward Jews themselves, is normalised and legitimised.
Iran has long treated hostility toward Israel and Jews as a central pillar of its ideology, with its leadership invoking rhetoric about eliminating Israel while its military and intelligence apparatus funds proxy organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. These groups do not operate solely on the battlefield but are embedded within a wider network of propaganda, mobilisation, and ideological production designed to sustain hostility toward Jewish sovereignty.
Qatar plays a complementary role. Through vast financial resources, it has positioned itself as a patron of Islamist movements and influential media institutions. Funding flows into universities, advocacy organisations, think tanks, and news networks that shape global discourse about Israel and the Jews. These relationships are often framed as diplomacy or humanitarian engagement, but they also contribute to an environment in which narratives delegitimising Jewish sovereignty circulate widely.
Taken together, the modern war against the Jews operates on multiple levels at once. It is geopolitical, ideological, social, and personal, expressed through states, movements, and individuals alike.
The street mobilisation: Al Quds and the global protest movement
Nowhere is this mobilisation more visible than in the Al Quds rallies that take place across Europe and North America. These demonstrations originated with the Iranian regime following the 1979 Islamic Revolution as part of a global campaign against Israel, conceived not merely as protests but as rituals of political mobilisation centred on the elimination of the Jewish state.
Since October 7, cities across the Western world have witnessed an unprecedented and sustained wave of demonstrations centred on Israel. Week after week, in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, Sydney and elsewhere, tens of thousands gather under the banner of solidarity with Palestinians. In many cases, however, these demonstrations become spaces where hostility toward Israel and Jews is openly expressed, with chants calling for the destruction of Israel, slogans invoking “intifada,” and imagery linked to organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah appearing repeatedly.
The scale and persistence of these protests reveal something significant. The mobilisation against Israel is not episodic but sustained, forming part of a global movement that has embedded itself within democratic societies. At the same time, their existence exposes a troubling double standard. Governments that would never tolerate demonstrations aligned with other extremist movements often permit marches explicitly connected to organisations committed to Israel’s destruction, reflecting a broader reluctance to confront the ideological sources of contemporary Jew-hate.
The war across society
The hostility Jews face today does not exist only in the streets but permeates multiple layers of society. At the political level, movements increasingly frame Israel as uniquely illegitimate, with language once confined to the margins now appearing in mainstream discourse. Calls for boycotts often extend beyond criticism of government policy into the rejection of Jewish sovereignty itself, while the growing visibility of politicians openly hostile to Israel reflects how these ideas are entering formal political institutions.
Within academia, Jewish students encounter environments where antizionist activism has become a defining feature of campus life. Jewish identity becomes suspect when linked to a state activists have declared illegitimate, and students who openly identify as Zionists may face exclusion, intimidation, or pressure to disavow core aspects of their identity in order to participate fully in campus life.
In workplaces, Jews increasingly report pressure to soften or conceal their identity in environments where hostility toward Israel is normalised. Social media amplifies these pressures, exposing individuals to harassment whenever they express even basic Jewish perspectives. At the grassroots level, the consequences are visible in the streets, where demonstrations spill into intimidation outside synagogues, neighbourhoods experience harassment, and schools face threats that force closures or heightened security.
Each of these arenas reinforces the others, with political rhetoric legitimising ideas, academic discourse providing intellectual frameworks, activist movements popularising them, and social media spreading them globally within minutes.
A message beyond the Jewish world
The resurgence of hostility toward Jews is not only a Jewish problem. It is a problem for the societies in which it appears.
What happened in Golders Green makes that unmistakably clear. When a Jewish emergency service like Hatzola is targeted, it demonstrates that the hostility is not contingent on what Jews do, how they behave, or how they contribute. It exists independently of all of that and is directed at Jews as Jews, which should concern any society that believes it has moved beyond this kind of thinking.
Jew-hate has never been created by Jews. It has always been produced within the cultures, institutions, and political movements of the non-Jewish world, which means confronting it is not a Jewish responsibility but a responsibility of the societies in which it exists.
That responsibility requires more than sympathy. It requires clarity and courage, recognising when hostility toward Jews is being normalised in public discourse, activism, and political movements, and refusing to excuse it, minimise it, or disguise it in language that makes it appear morally justified.
Because once a society reaches the point where Jewish institutions can be attacked simply because they are Jewish, it has already crossed a line that history has shown is difficult to reverse.
Above all, it means speaking and acting when it appears. Every generation must decide whether it will tolerate hostility toward Jews or confront it, and that choice ultimately belongs to the non-Jewish world.
The task ahead
For Jews, the task is not despair but clarity. The modern war against the Jews operates through ideology, politics, activism, and violence, and recognising this requires an honest understanding of the scale of the challenge and the forces mobilising against Jewish existence. It also requires rejecting the comforting illusion that Jewish security depends on silence, accommodation, or the approval of others.
What happened in Golders Green should remove any remaining ambiguity. When Jewish ambulances are burned, not because of anything they have done but because they are Jewish, the nature of the moment becomes impossible to deny. This is not a misunderstanding or a miscommunication, but hostility directed at Jewish existence itself.
Jewish history teaches something else entirely. We are still here, an ancient people in a modern world, an indigenous civilisation that endured exile and returned home. Empires have risen and fallen around us, and those who sought to erase us have disappeared into history.
The attack in Golders Green is part of that same long story, but it is also a warning in the present. It shows how quickly hostility can move from language to action, from abstraction to reality, even in societies that believe themselves immune. The forms change, but the pattern remains.
But the Jewish people remain, and our civilisation continues.
Ben M. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride, Reclaiming our Story and The Jews: An Indigenous People
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