Escalation in anti-Jewish violence exposes a wider breakdown in moral clarity

On 2 October 2025, Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue was attacked, leaving two dead. On 23 March this year, four ambulances run by the Jewish charity Hatzola were destroyed in Golders Green. On 15 April, there was an attack on Finchley Reform Synagogue. On 17 April, attempted arson in Hendon, on a building that formerly housed a Jewish charity. On 18 April, there was an arson strike on Kenton synagogue in London. And last week, two Jewish men were stabbed, again in Golders Green.

This wave of assaults on synagogues, property and people comprises not isolated cases of antisemitism but an expression of a broader climate of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Many of the attacks have been claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, a group that suddenly appeared in March, seemingly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and reportedly using social media to recruit disaffected young men radicalised by Islamism to carry out acts of terror. It is able to do so because beneath the antisemitic attacks lie three often interwoven themes that inspire hostility to Jews: old-fashioned conspiratorial antisemitism; the blaming of all Jews for the actions of Israel; and the growth of nihilistic jihadism.

The attacks have inevitably created fear and outrage among Jews. The government has pledged more money for greater security and legislation to restrict marches for Palestine and slogans deemed hateful. It cannot, though, be left simply to Jewish communities or to the state to respond.

Security is important. In the 1980s, I was organising street patrols for Asian families under attack. Thankfully, Britain is a different place today, even if racist attacks continue, particularly on Muslims. But higher walls and stronger gates – in effect creating new ghettos – cannot be the answer for Jews today.

During previous waves of racism – in the 1930s, in the 1970s – the left was vocal in its opposition to bigotry, often leading the fight. It needs to be again in response.

The idea of the left challenging antisemitism strikes many as deluded. The left in the old sense barely exists, either ideologically or organisationally. The universalist traditions that fuelled antiracist movements have largely frayed. The organisations that embodied those traditions lie mostly in ruin. There is scepticism, too, because sections of the left have embraced antisemitic tropes.

From celebrating the 7 October Hamas attack to describing the Golders Green stabbings as “blowback”, too many on the left are willing to condone, even applaud, anti-Jewish bigotry. Randomly stabbing Jews is not “blowback” for Israeli policy; it is the use of Israeli policy to justify bigotry. The blindness of many on the left to this comes not just from the conflation of Jews with Israel but also from the view of Jews as “white” and privileged, and so unworthy of antiracist solidarity.

It would be wrong to suggest that such views are representative of the left, or that they exist only on the left. In any case, new universalist traditions cannot be built unless those on the left do confront antisemitism. Supporters of Palestine should be challenging anti-Jewish bigotry, too. Otherwise, such support becomes sectarian, rather than being part of a broader defence of rights and freedoms.

It is not just Palestine campaigners, though, who conflate Jews and Israel. From the chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis praising the IDF as “our heroic soldiers” as they were obliterating Gaza, to the insistence that any form of anti-Zionism is antisemitic, supporters of Israel often do so, too. It cannot be that such conflation is deplorable when made by critics of Israel but acceptable in the hands of those who are supportive.

If increased security is one official response to antisemitism, the other is further restrictions on civil liberties, with calls for bans on Palestine marches and promises to criminalise slogans such as “globalise the intifada”. There is no evidence that marches or slogans are responsible for the surge in antisemitism or have led to the attacks. It is an assumption presented as a fact. Certainly, many Jews oppose the marches. Others join them.

Most Jews remain Zionists. But a survey last year by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research showed that while almost two-thirds of British Jews identified as “Zionists”, less than half of young Jews did, with almost the same proportion calling themselves either “non-Zionist” or “anti-Zionist”. Attitudes are not monolithic.

Jews should be able to be visibly Jewish, to worship and to live their lives without feeling menaced. The left needs to take this issue seriously, to see it as intimately linked to the wider politics of freedom and equality. Otherwise, it will not just help sustain antisemitism but betray the possibilities of building anew any form of universalist politics.

Photograph by Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images