Attacks on Diaspora Jews are spiraling out of control.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a young Israeli man was beaten and kicked “like an animal” when he stepped outside his apartment in London’s heavily Jewish area of Golders Green to make a phone call.
“Are you Jewish?” asked the group of Arabic-speaking men who dragged him across the road, tore his trousers down and beat him until he almost lost consciousness.
On Wednesday, an incident was captured on video in which a car deliberately tried to run down a visibly Orthodox Jewish family who had started to cross a busy road in a heavily Jewish district of Manchester, England.
Physical attacks on British Jews are now almost a daily occurrence. Verbal and physical attacks across the Diaspora have been off the charts ever since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In America, federal prosecutors said last week that they had thwarted an Iranian-backed plot to kill Jews and others in Los Angeles, which had also targeted a synagogue in Manhattan.
Last year, 330 of the 576 recorded hate crimes in New York City targeted Jewish people, who make up around 12% of its population. “In my 18 years in government, I have not seen a threat environment quite like this one,” said the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
Shockingly, eye-watering Jew-hatred is now on brazen display in mainstream politics. In Texas, Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo pledged on social media to “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” She added: “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Thomas Massie, who has just lost a Republican congressional primary election in Kentucky to his Jewish opponent, Ed Gallrein, had posed for a picture with a supporter wearing an “American Reich” sweatshirt and said in his concession speech that it “took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”
Jews reeling from this onslaught ask themselves repeatedly why it’s happening on this scale.
One obvious reason is the influence of Islamists, who have penetrated deeply into British society, and who, in the person of New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have created a beachhead in America’s largest and most significant city. But this is far from the whole story.
To help understand why Britain is at the forefront of this chilling phenomenon, the acclaimed British Jewish historian Simon Sebag Montefiore appeared on Haviv Rettig Gur’s podcast, “Ask Haviv Anything,” to talk about the history of the Jews in England.
Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography and many other stellar books of historical scholarship dealing with revolution and dictatorships, provided an overview of the checkered history of the Jews in Britain who were extorted, slaughtered, expelled and then allowed to return in the 17th century under social restrictions that weren’t finally lifted for another two centuries.
Sebag Montefiore provided much useful cultural context for today’s horrors. However, he made one significant error, which has implications for all Diaspora Jews. He said, correctly, that there had been a “golden age” for British Jews after the Holocaust. But this had lasted, he said, until Oct. 7, when it had come to an abrupt end.
This is simply untrue. The rot set in decades ago.
As Sebag Montefiore rightly acknowledged, it took root in the universities. This was largely in response to the 1975 U.N. declaration that “Zionism was racism,” itself a response to a radicalized global south whose influence at the United Nations was increasing.
But he was wrong to say it was of relatively little consequence until the Oct. 7 attack.
It first bared its fangs in Britain in 1982. Israel was at war in Lebanon to stop the Palestine Liberation Organization from using that country as a base from which to attack Israel.
Like today, Israel’s defensive war was represented falsely as aggression; its defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was called a Nazi; and all kinds of people started brazenly spouting in public the now all-too familiar slurs of Jewish cruelty, sinister influence and covert control of America.
Subsequently, this venom went underground during the Oslo peace process. But in 2000, it roared back with the Second Intifada.
While Israelis were being blown to bits on buses and in pizza parlors, the five-year struggle by the Jewish state to neutralize the terror networks in the “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria was represented in Britain as a violent oppression of the Palestinian Arabs.
Out of the woodwork once again crawled the antisemites with their poisonous slurs and conspiracy theories. As of today, the BBC led the media pack as the Palestinian Arabs’ echo chamber.
And British Jews were told in terms that they had a devastating choice to make. If they supported Israel, then they would no longer be entitled to be thought of as properly British.
In 2001, I myself was accused on TV of having “dual loyalty” because I supported Israel, even though I had only visited it for the first time the previous year.
So bad was the hostility at the time that shaken Jewish community leaders talked about the end of the “golden age” that had started after the discovery of the Nazi extermination camps. It was now obvious, they said, that they had merely had a 50-year holiday from antisemitism in Britain.
So how did Sebag Montefiore, a storied scholar of power and its abuses, miss all this? How did British Jews, once the intifada was finally suppressed and the anti-Jewish obsession subsided again, seem to forget that the “golden age” had ended and, like Sebag Montefiore, were subsequently shocked to the core when Oct. 7 fired the starting gun for the unprecedented global onslaught on the Jewish people?
The answer is that Israel is now a dividing line among Diaspora Jews. An unsettlingly large number of them are either indifferent to Israel’s existence and well-being, virulently hostile to it or fit into neither of those categories but believe some of the lies and distortions because they don’t know enough about Judaism or the Middle East to counter them.
Too few of them are aware of the day-to-day reality of the unceasing attacks on Israelis and the heroic measures they take in defense of their country against genocidal enemies.
Too many, particularly in America, themselves support intersectional ideologies that falsely cast Israel as colonialist, racist and oppressively white.
Those Jews either tune out the news about Israel and the Middle East because they aren’t interested, or else they are either mildly or strongly antipathetic to the Jewish state.
So they’ve never noticed that the Palestinian Arabs—whom many such Jews support, in a “two-state solution” kind of way—have been laundering medieval and Nazi antisemitic tropes for decades.
Those Jews did notice Britain’s terrorist-sympathizing former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Democratic Party’s far-left, Israel-hating “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives, but believed that these were outliers on the fringes of these parties.
They didn’t realize that the entire progressive world was succumbing to a civilizational cancer. And that was because they were themselves part of that world and regarded all beyond it as extremists who could safely be ignored.
Appallingly, some of those Jews are now blaming Israel for the antisemitism tsunami. Others — so-called “October 8 Jews”—have been shocked into greater realism by the Oct. 7 attacks.
A number of them have publicly joined the horrified denunciation of the Jew-hatred that’s erupted. But much of that pushback takes the form of protesting, “Don’t blame me for what Israel is doing.” Those Jews are themselves swelling the flood of defamatory hatred.
Diaspora Jews cannot properly be defended against the onslaught if a number of them can’t or won’t understand the full monstrosity of the scapegoating and demonization of Israel.
Jews are one people and are being attacked as one people, in both Israel and the Diaspora, and have been for years. It’s high time they all realized it.
