Jews dread the news. Maybe the entire population feels that way these days: waking to a morning bulletin consisting of wars abroad, recession at home and Donald Trump would make anyone want to turn off the radio and pull the duvet over their head. But for many Jews, the current news comes with a particular sting. They can hardly bear to hear it – not least because they’re in it so often.
On Thursday, they woke to new figures showing that late 2023 brought a 589% increase in antisemitic incidents in Britain compared with the same period in 2022. Overall, 2023 saw more than 4,100 episodes of anti-Jewish hate across the country – at least one recorded in every police region in the UK. Most of that huge spike came after 7 October, following the Hamas attacks on southern Israel and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. Some of the incidents involved knives, others saw Jews struck with metal bars. Some victims were punched or kicked or spat on, others had stones, bricks or bottles thrown at them. Some had religious clothing – say, the kippah, or skullcap – forcibly removed. Some of the abuse happened online; some of it was physical and personal. Some of it comprised attacks on buildings, slogans daubed on walls, windows smashed; hundreds of incidents involved children, whether making their way to or from school or inside it. The numbers, gathered by the Community Security Trust – the same body that helps organise the volunteer guards who’ve long been required to stand outside every synagogue and Jewish school in Britain – are the highest since the CST began collecting data four decades ago.
This news came a day or two after Labour’s decision to drop Azhar Ali as its candidate in the Rochdale byelection. A tape had emerged of Ali suggesting that Israel had deliberately allowed the 7 October attacks to happen – had allowed, that is, the murder, torture, mutilation, rape and kidnapping of nearly 1,200 of its own citizens – as part of a secret plot to reconquer Gaza: a new version of the centuries-old notion of Jewish conspiracy, of a Jewish deviousness so diabolical that it is prepared to sacrifice its young to advance its schemes.
Later Labour suspended a candidate for a nearby Lancashire seat, also for comments about Israel. That coincided with an apology from London’s Soho theatre, after a standup comedian at the venue told an audience member who had failed to show sufficient appreciation of the Palestinian flag to “get out”. The audience reportedly chanted “get the fuck out” and “free Palestine” as the performer, Paul Currie, insisted that the man – who is Jewish – leave.
You can see the pattern here. Many want there to be a clear, bright line between antisemitism – obviously appalling and to be condemned – and the loathing of Israel that has felt especially intense these past four months. They want the two to remain in neat, separate boxes, so that the latter can be regarded as safely uncontaminated by the former. But those stats, like the week’s events, suggest that when it comes to antisemitism and hatred of Israel, things get messy.
That’s partly because when some people want to express their apparent anger at Israel’s actions, they direct it at Jewish targets – daubing “SS IDF” on the walls of a former synagogue in Sussex, for example. They are holding a British minority responsible for the actions of a foreign government several thousand miles away, a response that does not seem to happen with other distant conflicts: after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian Orthodox churches in Britain did not brace themselves for attack.
Though even that may not be quite right, in the sense that putting this latest wave of hatred down to rage at Israel’s conduct may be giving those wielding the spray can, or throwing the bricks, too much credit. An arresting fact about the latest numbers is that the biggest surge in anti-Jewish activity came immediately after the 7 October attacks, when Israelis were still reeling – still counting their dead and missing – and had scarcely responded at all. As the CST put it: “In the week following 7 October, CST recorded 416 anti-Jewish hate incidents, higher than any subsequent week. It indicates that it was celebration of Hamas’ attack, rather than anger towards Israel’s military response in Gaza, that prompted the unprecedented levels of antisemitism across the country.”
Viewed this way, when Israel is in the news – whether as villain or victim – it acts as a kind of bat signal, summoning either the antisemites from their caves or, more subtly, the antisemitic feelings that lurk even in the most seemingly blameless hearts. Azhar Ali was someone who had worked well with Jewish people and made a career fighting extremism. Yet not too far below the surface lay medieval views of Jews.
But there is another, more awkward reason why it’s hard, if not impossible, wholly to disentangle antisemitism from Israel. It is that most – not all – Jews feel bound up with the country. They may be enraged by it, they may despair at the direction it has taken these past few months – or even these past 57 years, since the occupation that began as a result of the 1967 war – but they are deeply connected to it. Given the central place of the land of Israel in Judaism’s holiest texts, as ancient as the Jewish people itself, it could hardly be any other way. Even if they don’t have family there, they recognise that Israel is the world’s largest Jewish community, the world’s only Jewish country. More deeply, they hold to the idea that underpins its existence: that after two millennia of endless and deadly persecution, serial expulsions and massacres across Europe and beyond, culminating in the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews, the Jewish people need one place, a haven, where they can govern, and defend, themselves.
I’ve long believed that the fact of this connection should weigh a little on Israeli decision-makers. Too few are willing to concede that, whatever actions they take, diaspora Jews will feel the consequences too. And that, perhaps, is the main reason why so many Jews can no longer bear to see or hear or read the news. It’s not only the human response to the death and destruction wreaked in Gaza, and the killing of thousands of Palestinians, which is agonising to witness bulletin after bulletin. It comes with an extra layer of dread: the knowledge that we will be blamed.
This week, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, one of the clearest moral voices in British Jewry, joined the chorus of those warning of the consequences of a full-scale ground operation in Rafah. He spoke of his “horror” at the “unimaginable suffering” that could ensue for the people of Gaza. But he also said he was writing “out of dread at the future hatred this is likely to engender, and out of fear that these actions may haunt us, and the good name of Israel and the Jewish People, for generations.”
But if Israel should be mindful of this connection, so too should Israel’s opponents. I have no doubt that that Soho comedian thought he was taking a righteous stand for an oppressed people. But the effect of his action was to expel a Jew from a public space, a fate inflicted on Jews down the centuries. When Jews online are hounded and abused, when Jewish students and school pupils are screamed at or harassed, when Jewish gravestones are smashed and synagogue windows broken – you’re not striking a blow for the Palestinians and against Israel. You’re placing yourself alongside the antisemites and racists who have always treated Jews this way, reminding Jews why they needed a refuge in the first place – and why they need it still.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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