This March, four ambulances maintained by the Jewish community in Golders Green were set on fire. The attack terrorised an already fearful Jewish community because it came just a few months after the fatal Yom Kippur attack on Heaton Park synagogue, when attacks on Jews seemed to be becoming the new normal. Five weeks later, the same Golders Green streets would see the stabbing of two men leaving a synagogue.
Yet half a year later, it’s not the arson attack that haunts me, but the rush by ordinary people to minimise the crime.
When I was young, the only people you could see trying to justify attacks on Jews were the far-right; now things are very different. True to form, Britain First leader Paul Golding chimed in with “But why do Jews have special ambulances?” But this time, Golding’s comments – or words like them – were being repeated and shared by ordinary people up and down the country – many of them people who considered themselves progressives. I couldn’t log into Facebook without people I considered friends repeating some version of his statement: effectively, that Jews offered healthcare exclusively to their own people, and therefore had it coming. British Palestinian NHS doctor Rahmeh Aladwan, whose posts are repeatedly shared by my colleagues even while she faces charges for racial hatred, said the service was considered an “apartheid ambulance service” on X.
None of this is true, of course. In fact, Hatzola ambulances are funded by the local Jewish community but available to anyone in the area who needs them. The world is full of health charities led by faith groups. Nonetheless, other know-it-alls on social media told me that the government’s help to replace the ambulances showed that Jews get special treatment, even though victims of terrorism routinely get support and compensation. Local-level politicians from both the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats repeated a darker lie: that the Jewish community had torched the ambulances themselves. This is an expression of one of the deepest-rooted antisemitic myths there is: that Jews are natural fraudsters.
Attacks on Jews are now routinely met by disbelief, minimisation and conspiracy theories, by those who refuse to admit that Jews are the victims of racism. There are still plenty of people who will tell you that the attack on Heaton Park Synagogue was a “false flag”, because the attacker was killed by police. Or they will claim that the April stabbings in Golders Green did not involve the specific targeting of Jews because the perpetrator also stabbed a Muslim housemate who got in his way as he began his long journey to a Jewish area. These claims are as racist as the attacks they seek to minimise.
Three years ago today, we watched as Hamas launched attacks on civilian targets, killing over 1200 people and taking 254 people hostage. In all the blood, anger and misinformation that has followed since, large swathes of the British population seem unable to grasp the basic point that appalled Jews that day. This was an attack by a group long committed to the violent extermination of Jews worldwide, not just in Israel, and which had just achieved a landmark step towards that goal: the greatest massacre of Jews since the Second World War. This was a day of fear for Jews across the world.
Instead, people across Britain responded by parroting Hamas’ talking points, many downloaded straight from TikTok. In the past three years, I have been told to my face that Jews have a tradition of killing children; control the world economy; invented Covid and faked the Holocaust to claim Israel. These words have consequences. According to the latest figures from the Community Security Trust, antisemitic incidents involving young people at schools or worshippers going to and from synagogues have never been higher.
The atrocities emanating from Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in Gaza and the West Bank have done little to improve anyone’s impression of Jews globally. But there is a clear lack of understanding among British progressives as to why Israelis ended up voting for a military hardman to protect them – and the fear they harboured after years of living under siege from suicide attackers and rocket attacks.
Too many British progressives seem eager to humanise the militarism of Hamas by calling it a trauma-response, but refuse to grant that empathy to the Jewish people with whom they are in conflict. This is racist.
At the heart of this is the refusal to recognise that the Jewish people are an ethnic group, rather than just a religion that people can “opt out of”. Yes, many people who identify as Jewish do practice the religion of Judaism, but Jews have always understood themselves as an ethnicity, a reality that any genetic analysis bears out.
That is why I, despite being a practising Christian, have been abused from the other side of the street for my Jewish “looks”. Antisemitism doesn’t care what religion you practice – it hates your parentage. The fact that I am part of an ethnic minority is why I have to disclose my Jewish ethnicity as a genetic risk when screening for breast cancer; despite that fact, I am now reluctant to do so because of rising antisemitism in the NHS.
This is an inconvenient reality for a new strand of Antisemitism denier: the regular keyboard warriors who pop up to claim that if Jews want to avoid prejudice, all they need to do is drop their religion. This didn’t work for thousands of Jewish converts to Christianity who were rounded up by the Nazis on the basis of their bloodline, including some of my ancestors. The Jewish people’s experience of themselves as a racial minority, regardless of their views on the modern state of Israel, is a major part of why Jews around the world understand themselves as an ethnic group with a shared regional origin.
Criticism of the Israeli government is not just legitimate, but vital, and shared by many British Jews. But contemporary anti-Zionism often bleeds into denial of basic facts about Jewish history in the Middle East that are central to Jewish tradition. Just as “Zionist” becomes our most bitter term of abuse, it has expanded to include anyone who refuses to affirm that the state of Israel should be entirely dismantled. This is why the Green Party’s move to declare that “Zionism is Racism” feels so racist to many Jews. It’s not merely that the title offends, but the small print – which calls for Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state “with equal rights for all” – insinuates that all members should support a one-state solution in which Israelis would either emigrate or live as a minority amongst a larger Palestinian population which has, in parts, sworn for decades to kill them.
Their statement of support for Palestinian “resistance” is itself an embrace of genocide – not by Israel, but by the perpetrators of October 7. No wonder British Jews feel they have a target on their backs.