Like many other people, last weekend I put on a stab-proof vest and stood guard at the metal gates of my synagogue. It's now normal. It shouldn't be.
I’ve heard non-Jewish progressives imagine their fate in Nazi Europe. They usually fantasise they would have been in the resistance, or victims of the Nazis. In truth, they would most likely have collaborated. That's what made the scale of the Holocaust possible. And we have just watched it happen again – not the genocide, but the mechanism that made it possible.
The huge spike in hate-crime attacks came as reports of October 7 emerged in 2023. But what made the last two and a half years remarkable was not the hatred itself but how quickly the rest of the country cooperated with it. Not because a totalitarian government told them to, but because they were so willing to go along with a small, well-organised mob. Antisemitism has become so well established over millennia that it no longer needs a state. It self-organises. The grassroots hate movement has dictated what institutions do, government policy, when we can go to our town centres and where we dine or buy coffee. No directive from above was required – the pattern is old enough to run on autopilot.
Demands of the ideological purity test grew higher and higher. Musicians, comedians and even Chanukah celebrations were cancelled – not by protestors storming the venues, but by the venues themselves, preemptively, to avoid a backlash that hadn't started. The police, CPS and government told us our presence was triggering. Organisations didn't wait for instructions – they volunteered, they collaborated because of the mere possibility of a threat, and in doing so they made it real. Eventually people were going door-to-door, making lists. A racist mob set the terms and the country's institutions fell into line – not because they were forced to, but because compliance was easier than confrontation.
The venues, institutions and organisations complied out of cowardice or convenience. But the anti-racist establishment did something worse: it provided moral cover. These are the organisations whose entire purpose is to hold the line against exactly this. Instead of holding the line, they moved it. When groups whose founding mission is to oppose racism exempt antisemitism, they don't just fail to help – they teach everyone else that compliance is virtuous. That's the difference between a bystander and a collaborator: the bystander looks away, but the collaborator tells you there's nothing to see.
They didn't challenge people waving swastikas, cheering on terrorists or chanting for the elimination of the world's only Jewish state. Instead they made excuses and gaslit us, making Jews the exception to every social norm they claim to defend. “Go back to where you came from” was consigned to the dustbin of history, unless the target was Jewish. Some of the Prime Minister's own MPs marched alongside the hate.
For two and a half years we heard “globalise the intifada” on our streets, and now we see it in practice – our blood on the streets. I reported a socialist outside my local tube station giving out newspapers calling for intifada but the police denied its context and meaning. It is a relief that the Prime Minister finally admits it’s racist, but if he knew it was racist, why did he allow it to go unchallenged for two years?
After the Heaton Park shooting we heard the same platitudes and clichés. "No place for antisemitism" – when there clearly is one. “This is not who we are” when this is clearly what Britain has become. The government did what was easiest: threw money at security. Of course we are grateful for protection but synagogues and Jewish schools have become fortresses and it addresses nothing. Do we build walls around entire neighbourhoods now?
After the Golders Green stabbings, Keir Starmer said the response needed to be “swift, agile and visible”, but the only thing swift and agile was his exit to avoid an angry crowd. I'm glad he was booed – people are rightly angry, frustrated and distressed. We have waited two and a half years for a Prime Minister to act and been let down by successive governments, Conservative and Labour alike.
We are at the stage where doctors spout Nazi-grade racism online, where one in five students wouldn't share a house with a Jew, where a Jewish professor had his classroom stormed and was threatened with beheading. Where being Jewish is “antagonistic”.
There is a war on Jews in this country and it didn't need a Führer. It just needed a population willing to look away, a set of institutions ready to comply, and the world's most durable prejudice.
But if collaboration is the mechanism, then refusing to collaborate is the answer. Not from the government – they have shown us who they are – but from the venues that cancelled Jewish events to appease a mob that hadn't arrived, from the anti-racist organisations that looked away while British streets were filled with hate, from the colleagues, neighbours and friends who went quiet when it mattered most. None of them were ordered to comply – they chose to. Which means they can choose to stop. The threat level is severe but the real danger was never the mob. It was everyone who made it easy for them.
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