A few weeks ago, my teenage son was in a library revising for his exams. A woman sat down opposite, looked at the star of David necklace he has recently started wearing and glared at him. Then she placed her water bottle between them with its “Boycott Israeli Apartheid” sticker turned to face his way.
She didn’t speak to my son. She didn’t ask what he thinks about Israel, Gaza, Netanyahu or Hamas. She doesn’t know whether he has friends or relatives who have been taken hostage or killed (he doesn’t), or if he has been on any pro-Palestine marches (he hasn’t). Whether it is antisemitic or not to boycott Israel is beside the point. She seemed to be triggered by the simple sight of a Jew. There’s no more basic expression of racism than that.
As microaggressions go, it’s not much. However, when Muslim women – for example – are harassed for wearing a hijab, it tends to come from people with far-right sympathies. In contrast, this woman had an “antifa” sticker on display. I’m also an anti-fascist. When the neo-Nazi terrorist David Copeland was planting his nail bombs around London, I was the contact for the mole inside the far right who identified him to the police. Something has gone badly wrong in the intervening years if this is how some young anti-fascists now react to Jews.
The idea that Jews are local proxies for Israel, answerable for its deeds and suitable targets for the anger it attracts, can be lethal. In Zurich, a Jewish man was stabbed repeatedly in the street. In Berlin, a synagogue was firebombed. In Canada, shots were fired at Jewish schools. In London, a group of Israelis were attacked by a gang who heard them speaking Hebrew and asked “Are you Jewish?” Perhaps my son was lucky it was only a sticker.
These violent episodes are the exception. But hostility towards Jews is there in the daily abuse, threats, graffiti and online posts that make up a record rise in the UK in antisemitic hate incidents that began the moment Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October. For younger Jews at school or university, you can throw social isolation into the mix. Fears that Jewish life in Britain is becoming untenable are overblown but, for a community numbering about 300,000, the mood music is full of foreboding.
At the same time, a global protest movement of rare size and emotional potency has filled our streets, social media and campuses. These two phenomena – the anti-Jewish hate crimes and the anti-Israel protests – rise and fall together like clockwork every time Israel is at war, in a way that does not happen for any other overseas conflict. This doesn’t mean that every protester is antisemitic: far from it. Many have honourable motivations, and heaven knows there is plenty to despair about in Gaza. Still, the correlation between the protests and the hate crimes is striking. The Austrian Holocaust survivor Jean Améry wrote in the 1960s that “anti-Zionism contains antisemitism like a cloud contains a storm”. This storm has been raging for months.
This is not where Jews want to be, with this ancient hatred that ought to reside only in history books making headlines every week. A UK home secretary – who accused the police of handling pro-Palestinian protests too leniently - and mealy mouthed university presidents in the US – who seemed unable to unreservedly condemn those on campus who call for the genocide of Jews - lost their jobs in the throes of it. Political and media rows rage for days because of it. Past generations of British Jews have traditionally stayed well below the parapet, getting on with life in a very British way. Now it feels like we are permanently under the microscope.
This is not only a problem on the left, or just about Israel. Last month, a teenage neo-Nazi was convicted of planning to bomb a synagogue in Brighton. Elon Musk described as “the actual truth” the far-right conspiracy theory that Jews incite hatred against white people. Activists with huge online followings get millions of views for social media posts that would not be out of place in the Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer. When this much antisemitism is in the air, it’s hard not to breathe it in.
Why this happens demands a much broader answer. Many of the most common anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes – the association with money and power, of inhumane cruelty and blood lust, the belief that Jews kill children for fun or religion – are centuries old. Together, they offer a way of interpreting our world that depicts Jews as the antithesis, and the main threat, to whatever society deems to be good, moral and humane.
Given this history, it should not surprise us that a protest movement that treats the world’s only Jewish state as a transgressor of all moral and human norms attracts some people who do not like Jews. All those placards alleging a “Palestinian Holocaust”, the “Gaza” graffiti on a sign attached to the railings of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, “SS IDF” daubed in red paint on my late parents’ synagogue: this particular slander is the latest version of the same old charge that frames Jews as a demonic presence that pollutes our world. Those who were once condemned as Christ-killers are now cursed as genocidal Nazis.
Jews know all of this, but it seems that everyone else has forgotten it. Like hikers following a well-trodden trail across unfamiliar terrain, most people who fall for these ideas are not cranks or fools: they are just part of our world where these assumptions and myths about Jews are woven into the fabric. Nor do you need to wander to the wildest fringes to find them: they reside in Shakespeare, Chaucer and Voltaire. There is the writings of Henry Ford. Or, for that matter, the comments of Kanye West (who talked of “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” and praised Hitler, before later offering an apology). Antisemitism is the product of some of history’s finest minds and most talented creators. No wonder it proves so popular and enduring.
There is a well-worn metaphor that Jews are the canary in the coalmine, with antisemitism an early indicator of invisible problems in society. I’m not a fan of this metaphor because it presumes the canary is expendable. Nevertheless, it reflects a deeper truth. Antisemitism has a fluid quality, filling whatever space is opened to it, seeping into the cracks and widening them further. It has dominated conversation among British Jews since 7 October to an unprecedented extent – but really, it is everyone else who needs to think about what it means.
Dave Rich is the author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built Into Our World and How You Can Change It, which is published in an updated edition on 16 May
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
