LONDON — Thousands gathered outside the prime minister’s office at No. 10 Downing Street May 10 in response to a call by Jewish organizations and other opponents of antisemitism to show their determination to fight escalating Jew-hatred in the U.K.
The action was sponsored by the Campaign against Antisemitism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Rally speakers included Pat McFadden, the Labour government’s Work and Pensions Secretary, and Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party opposition.
On April 29 two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, a well-known Jewish area in north London. Moshe Shine, 76, and Shloime Rand, 34, had to be hospitalized with serious injuries.
“After the horrors of the terror atrocities in Heaton Park [in Manchester] and Sydney last year have come a succession of attacks on our community in the past few months,” the Jewish News and Jewish Chronicle said in a joint editorial building the protest.
On March 23 three masked thugs set fire to four ambulances belonging to Jewish charity Hatzola in Golders Green. Then there was an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green covered with photos of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom and of repression in Iran. Elsewhere synagogues have been targeted by arsonists as well.
The deadliest attack so far was the one at Heaton Park synagogue last October. A jihadist rammed his car into a Yom Kippur gathering there, then assaulted Jews with a knife, killing a Jewish man. A second defender of the synagogue was accidentally killed by police gunfire.
Responsibility for some of the recent attacks has been claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, a group reported to be linked to the regime in Tehran. The U.K. government seized on this to dismiss the attacks as coming from a foreign threat. “Our message to Iran, or to any other country that might seek to foment violence, hatred or division in society, is that it will not be tolerated,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.
In fact the Labour Party itself has promoted the growth of Jew-hatred. Starmer has suspended arms sales to Israel, supported the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and resumed funding the Hamas-ridden United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
Antisemitism has become an increasingly central part of bourgeois politics in the U.K. The Green Party put the demonization of Israel at the center of its campaign in the May 7 local elections, winning 587 council seats, up from 146. Dozens of the party’s candidates came out with blatantly antisemitic, pro-Hamas statements. Less than a dozen were suspended by party leaders.
At the same time, the U.K. Labour government has used the recent violence to attack political rights and present the capitalist state as the protector of Jews. It has provided millions of pounds for more cops, made it easier to ban “pro-Palestine” — i.e. anti-Israel — protests and to charge people with “hate” speech.
Sara Kahn, the government’s former counterextremism commissioner, and 11 other prominent Muslim academics, political figures and others spoke out against the attacks. “Antisemitism in the UK has worsened dramatically since October 7, 2023,” they wrote. Some forces are using legitimate protests to “normalize slogans, symbols and rhetoric that glorify violence.”
“No other community endures the indignity of private security outside almost all of its communal buildings, places of worship or, perhaps most appallingly, schools,” the letter says, calling on fellow Muslims “to both challenge and change such hatred wherever it exists in our communities.”
Some trade union leaders have also spoken out. Eddie Dempsey, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union, condemned the knife attack in Golders Green. “Antisemitism must be confronted with the same vigour and steely determination as any other form of racism and our union will always be at the forefront of that fight,” he said.
“Jew-hatred is a poison which must be confronted and combated in all its forms,” Dag Tirsén and Julie Crawford, Communist League candidates in London in the May 7 elections, said in a statement they distributed at an emergency protest the night of the attack.
“It falls to the working class and our unions to take the lead in defending Jews from assault,” they said. “Jew-hatred is integral to the times we live in dominated by imperialist powers such as the United States and the U.K. that have never, and will never, act to protect Jews. Our campaign defends the right of Israel to exist as a refuge for Jews and to defend itself.”