It’s past time to acknowledge that for Hamas and its allies, the pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, yielded one enduring, transformational success.
To find it, don’t look to Gaza, most of which has been reduced to rubble as a result of the two-year Israeli war to defeat Hamas in the coastal enclave.
Look instead to those Western countries that are home to significant Jewish communities: to the United States, to Canada, to Australia, to France, to Germany, and especially, given the terrible events of the past week, to the United Kingdom.
In all these countries, Jews have been seized by a fear and an uncertainty they haven’t known since the Shoah. At least three generations of Jews, my own included, grew up regarding Jew-hatred in the democratic West as largely a historical relic, even if we did on occasion encounter antisemitic barbs.
Now we are faced with arson attacks on synagogues, day-care centers and kosher restaurants. The “visibly Jewish” among us—those who wear traditional clothing, kippahs, tzitzit, Star of David necklaces—are the subjects of assaults and insults on a near-daily basis. Social media has become the nerve center of antisemitic propaganda. Politicians now toy with antisemitic tropes in the expectation that it will win them votes.
All of these developments can ultimately be credited to Hamas. Whether or not its leaders, many of whom were subsequently eliminated, realized it at the time, the international impact of the pogrom was to affect a sea change in public opinion. Almost three years on, the world contains far more believers in the libel that Israel committed “genocide” than there are actual Jews on the planet. Not a few of those believers are convinced that the Jews in their midst are legitimate targets for revenge.
Thus do we come to a corner of northwest London, no more than a few square miles, where perhaps 40% of the United Kingdom’s 250,000 Jews reside. This month alone, seven attacks have been recorded here, including the April 29 stabbing in Golders Green—long the heart of Jewish London—in which two Jews were badly wounded in a terrorist attack executed by a knife-wielding Islamist, Essa Suleiman.
That attack, which generated predictable and increasingly tiresome reassurances from Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other politicians that antisemitism has “no place” in British society, occurred less than a week after a Pakistani immigrant viciously assaulted a Haredi Jew who was carrying out his job as a building inspector in the satellite town of Slough, west of London. That episode generated similar hand-wringing statements but no concrete action.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, was absolutely correct when she said, while visiting the scene of the assault in Golders Green, that there is now “an epidemic of violence against Jewish people.” She went on to define it as a “national emergency” that needs “to be treated as such by the government and public authorities.”
The problem is that, for all the good intentions that get articulated in the immediate aftermath of one of these attacks, there are no votes to be won by politicians who pledge to fight antisemitism unless they are competing in the handful of districts with a sizable Jewish electorate.
Sadly, but in common with other countries where anti-Jewish and anti-Israel outrages can also be said to have reached epidemic proportions, the British public has remained pretty much silent in the face of the upsurge. This is perhaps why those politicians, like Badenoch, who want to address the problem, describe it as a “national” crisis, asserting that attacks on Jews are attacks on the very fabric of British society. But the brutal truth is that this message has failed to move the mass of Britons or dislodge the widely held opinion that, as reprehensible as these attacks are, they can ultimately be blamed on Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.
There is much that could be done in practical terms.
The British government could finally designate the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has directed terrorist attacks against Jews, Iranian dissidents and critics of the Islamic Republic both in the United Kingdom and across Europe. It could ban the pro-Hamas hate marches that have been staged in towns and cities across the country, where blatantly antisemitic slogans about Jewish wealth and influence nestle comfortably among more established forms of incitement, such as the call to “globalize the intifada.” It could expand hate-crime laws to encompass the antisemitic agitation that camouflages itself in an “anti-Zionism” supposedly rooted in human-rights concerns. It could impose harsh custodial sentences on offenders, instead of essentially letting them off with fines or with suspended jail terms.
Again, though, such a program of action is not a vote-winner. Indeed, as the country heads to local elections in May with the ruling Labour Party likely to be subjected to an unprecedented thumping, Starmer and his ministers may calculate that prioritizing a response to antisemitism will make them even less electable.
Worst of all, we may not have reached the peak of attacks at this point. Gaza has been relatively quiet since the ceasefire was announced last October, but the portents emanating from there are not good. Hamas is refusing to disarm and is strengthening its grip on power. There is every possibility that, should the stalemate continue, the Israel Defense Forces will again be mobilized to try to finish the job it started.
If that is the outcome, then we can expect a swift return to multiple demonstrations in support of Hamas every week, more petty acts of vandalism and renewed energy behind antisemitic messaging on social media. In such a climate, more of our fellow citizens—whether in the United Kingdom or other countries—will be willing to engage in violent assaults and even terrorist acts.
The outlook is grim, and it is hard to see from where any relief might spring. The lifeline that Israel represented in the wake of the Shoah may turn out to be the most practical solution of all. In the last year, about 900 British Jews decided that they’d had enough and moved to Israel. If the Hamas cult is given a new lease of life, many more are likely to follow in its wake.
Will the Jewish Diaspora continue to be gradually yet steadily drained, through aliyah to Israel, Jews hiding their identities or some other pathway? Will politicians wave them goodbye with hypocritical tears in their eyes, bemoaning the loss of an affluent, loyal minority before moving on to more pressing issues? Twenty years ago, as the scourge again began to rise in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, such scenarios were regarded as outliers by many Jews, among them myself.
Now, with all credit to Hamas, they are on the cusp of becoming reality.
