Keir Starmer has condemned last night’s “horrific antisemitic attack” on four ambulances run by Jewish volunteers in north London. As police pursue three suspects for criminal damage and hate crime, the prime minster said Britons must “all stand together at a moment like this”.
This attack comes less than a week after two men were charged with spying on London’s Jewish community for Iran, and less than six months after the Yom Kippur attack on Manchester's Heaton Park synagogue – renewing fears that antisemitism in British society is on the rise.
What did the commentators say?
“The Jews of Britain are facing conditions not seen in my lifetime,” said Danny Cohen in The Telegraph. “There is a whiff of the 1930s in the air.” The antisemitism “is toxic and it is heart-breaking”. It has “come striding out of the shadows”, and “entered the mainstream” on a wave of social media and “age-old racist hate”. We’re facing constant harassment, “violent attacks on property” and “cold-blooded attempts to kill”. People in positions of power “must speak up consistently and unapologetically in support of Britain’s Jews”.
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“Anti-Jewish hatred is now clear, present and mortally dangerous,” said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Incidents of antisemitism are “through the roof”. Of course, “every minority faces discrimination”, but “next to no other diaspora community goes through this”. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine does not mean Russian Orthodox churches require “round-the-clock protection”; people may “loathe” Donald Trump’s aggression in the Middle East, but “US-branded stores on UK high streets are not smashed and daubed”. Yet “Israel and Jews are the exception”.
At British universities, “campus antisemitism has been a problem for decades”, said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator, but now it is a “critical problem that is out of control”. The “sheer scale of the hate” is borne out by last week’s Union of Jewish Students report that one in five students wouldn’t share a house with a Jew, and that 47% see the 7 October attacks as “justified”. This is “yet more evidence of the normalisation of Jew hate” and a “signal” that “we are heading to a dark place”.
What next?
Counter-terror police are investigating a claim from an Iran-aligned group that it was responsible for the ambulance attacks. “This will raise concerns that Tehran is mounting a concerted campaign of attacks across Europe,” said The Telegraph.
Simply taking “measures to ensure the safety of Jewish people” is not enough, said Prospect. They must be “supplemented by a politics that promotes broad alliances against racism, of which antisemitism is one example, and by the practice of anti-racist solidarity”. This won’t be easy while the Iran War continues and while the politics of Israel/Palestine continues to feed “distance and suspicion”.