Yesterday in Manchester, the intifada was globalised

But what happened in Manchester was much predicted and entirely predictable and probably preventable. We warned it would end this way, but we were ignored or shamed or gaslit. It could have been worse, too. Our great security services have foiled many such plots. But let us hope this atrocity is a moment to reset our ways.

This was the inevitable result of two wild years of anti-Jewish racism and radicalism, dehumanising anti-Jewish slogans and repulsive, disgraceful images, blood libels, calls for killing, support for terror, “globalising intifada” and “decolonise Israel now”, unleashed on the streets and media, barely policed either by actual policemen who have stood by nor by politicians who have swung between crowd-pleasing Manichaean hyperbole and sensible, balanced reassurance; nor by the TV media anchors who have disgraced the noble vocation of journalism by rabid hostility, irresponsible exaggerations and actual mistakes that are never corrected; nor by the NHS doctors openly keening to kill Jews who are still working in hospitals despite the comments of Wes Streeting; and I don’t even need to mention the keyboard missionaries whose propagation of factual lies and vicious amplifications now include telling the suffering Gazans not to accept a workable peace deal that is on the table, supported by Israel and the entire Arab world and will – we pray – bring peace and save many lives.

Today, it is not a pretty sight seeing those same politicians, same anchors on Sky and the BBC, same Twitter missionaries pumping out self-serving messages of sympathy, adopting their well-practised multicultural-community-in-danger faces – days after propagating easily disprovable disinformation and wild Manichaean hyperbole.

Of course, they are not guilty of killing those people in Manchester; only the murderer and his accomplices are actually guilty. But that is the point: the inciters congratulate themselves on being good people but take and show no responsibility for promoting the bloodcurdling Manichaean credo of good and evil imposed on a faraway real war in which there is guilt and innocence on both sides. Here, they have helped incite a whirlpool of hatred and they have contributed to an atmosphere that has of course, proved lethal. It is other ordinary people whether here or there who pay the price for their exciting, transcendent parades of easy piety (that turns out not to be cost-free).

If one of them had said one thing that recognised that maybe their misuse of a thesaurus of emotive, hyperbolic Manichaenism had contributed to this vortex, I would respect them. But it is one of the distasteful characteristics of our time: many are rigidly convinced of their ironclad virtue, indeed sated and swollen with sanctimony – as they rush out their pro forma denunciations of antisemitism: the very definition of hypocrisy. That is why on X, you might notice Jewish people saying ‘not now, thanks’ to the worst humbugs.

The protests started immediately and revealingly on October 7, and the line between acceptable criticism of the Israeli government and Israeli war (and yes, there is much to criticise) immediately morphed into bloodcurdling calls for terror and a frenzy of anti-Jewish racism. The government, mayors and police were overwhelmed by a Manichean delirium or terrified of the aggression of these activists (or their electoral power in vulnerable constituencies) before sometimes making reassuring, sensible comments.

The result has been – to say the least – mixed messages that have been clearly understood by malevolent people in an unmixed way. Yesterday the intifada was indeed globalised and Britishised and Mancunianised. Words and bulletins have effects on real people in the street next door and far away, too. They bleed, they die. Like the real people they are.

Last night, ghoulish demonstrators celebrated the killing of British people in bloodthirsty fiestas in London and Manchester. They took over the whole of Liverpool Street Station. In our Britain? The one my forefathers came to in 1904 to seek refuge from Lithuania and the pogroms of Kishinev? The Britain that the Sebags and Montefiores were welcomed into, even though they were born in Morocco and Italy, and yet they thrived here? The one my dear late parents revered for its tolerance and moderation? Yes, that one, that Britain.

And no one stopped them. And no one has stopped their weekly frenzies, nor their ones planned for next week, nor their disgraceful calls for Jewish blood.

It was heartening to see the PM, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor in synagogue last night: thank you. To her credit, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood called these ghoulish celebrations “fundamentally unBritish” and recognised the problem ordering the celebrating demonstrators: “show some humanity”. Thank you, Home Secretary. Such comments are two years overdue, and it has taken murders to get British politicians to say those two phrases.

The pro-Palestine demonstrations always contained decent people making just points but their tone was brazenly set by racists bigots and terrorist sympathisers who were indeed fundamentally unBritish in their calls for violence against an entire faraway nation and the small, frightened community of Jews right here. Everyone has the right to criticise Israeli governments and their many faults – as I do myself – just as they have the right to criticise Hamas and terrorism, but they must recognise and acknowledge that any Israeli government is different from the state and its people just as Hamas are very different from the Palestinian right to self-determination and to the people whose civilians deserve the same safety and peace as the Israeli people. That is it.

The Home Secretary also said, “I take my lead from the police” but that is the entire problem. You give the orders to the police: that is why we elected you with your huge majority. Thanks to confused fashionable guidance that has created a hierarchy of grievances in the last five years, the fuddled police especially the Met, more at home policing comments on computers, have lost the ability to make moral decisions on law and order, terror and protest, life and death on our streets. Hence pro-Palestinian demonstrators are permitted extra space and latitude to promote killing, global intifada, and anti-Judaism that would never be permitted to any other cause, and Jews are exposed as no other ethnic minority would be – time to redress that balance.

The government now needs to give explicit orders to the police to enforce laws against terror and hate in the streets; they have ceded and surrendered to vicious activists whom they supinely watch. If that means police enforcing control of the streets, as Italian and German police do every day, please begin. Jews are rightly frightened.

This aggressive, intolerant radicalism is not just about anti-Judaism, it is also a threat to our liberal democracy. The terrified reactions of our ministers in the last two years are evidence of that: you regain their courage now. These murders are a sign for responsible people, politicians, and media to “dial down the rhetoric” as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said last night, that created “a climate of fear and aggression” for British Jews. “Get a grip on these demonstrations,” the Chief Rabbi has demanded.

B rit ain is suddenly a flimsy once-grand ship tossed helplessly on a storm, partly of its own making, its own captain and crew (I don't just mean politicians but police and media too) often unsure, scared and confused; its course, its British values, its moral structure are being tested. Now we have a chance: regain your courage, take the helm, steady the ship before the rigging falls, before more lives are lost.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the updated revised Jerusalem:the Biography. He has just published a new illustrated book for children and adults Jerusalem – the city that changed the world.
 

An earlier version of this article described Adrian Daulby as a security guard, this was inaccurate and the article has been changed to describe him as a congregant.