Three years on from the 7 October attacks, antisemitism has taken hold in Britain: Jews aren’t safe | Dave Rich

On another anniversary of the 7 October attacks, the lasting impact on Britain’s Jews is found in the essential daily decisions we now have to make. Beyond the simple fear that you or your children might get killed the next time you go to synagogue or visit your local kosher shop, Jews are hiding the fact they are Jewish.

This has gone beyond the choice of whether to wear your Star of David necklace inside or outside your shirt. It is found in the job applicants who remove their Jewish community volunteering from their CV; the people who use false names when ordering an Uber; the parents who move their children from mainstream schools to Jewish ones.

The danger for Britain runs deep, for if Jews cannot live an open Jewish life here, then modern Britain as a cohesive, diverse liberal democracy will have failed.

This didn’t begin with Jews. The murder of Terence Carney, a 70-year-old man from Hartlepool, County Durham, may not seem an obvious starting point when trying to understand the impact the Hamas attack and what followed has had on Britain, but it has proved to be a chilling portent of much of what has followed since.

Carney had gone for his regular morning walk in October 2023 when he was fatally stabbed by Ahmed Alid, an Islamist extremist who had arrived in the UK illegally three years earlier. Alid had already tried to kill his Iranian housemate Javed Nouri, who had converted to Christianity and whom he regarded to be an “apostate”. Nouri managed to fight him off, but Carney was not so lucky.

When police asked Alid why he had committed these appalling acts, he said he wanted “Palestine to be free from the Zionists” and that he had murdered Carney, a random passerby with no connection to the Middle East, “because Israel was killing children”. This was just eight days after the 7 October attack on southern Israel – the day on which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Hamas – but already the ripple of that attack had washed on to British shores.

People rarely speak about Terence Carney now, but he was the first victim of terrorism on British soil related to 7 October and the subsequent tragedy in Gaza.

As I describe in my new book, From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7, the Hamas attack and the wars in Gaza and the wider Middle East that followed unleashed a lethal combination of terrorist violence and extremist incitement, street protests and viral campaigns, rising hate crimes and falling social cohesion, with hostile states such as Iran stoking the fire. All of this was both predictable and predicted: it was no surprise that after the atrocities by Hamas in the Be’eri kibbutz and elsewhere in southern Israel in 2023 came the massacre of Jews on Bondi Beach two years later.

At first, Britain largely avoided the wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept world after 7 October. In the past 12 months that has changed. Since the terror attack at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester last year that killed Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, injured others and left a community traumatised, Britain has witnessed the stabbing of Jewish men in Golders Green, arson attacks on synagogues “almost certainly directed” from Iran, and the conviction of two Islamic extremists for a terrorist plot against Manchester’s Jewish community that could have killed hundreds. Just this week, two Iranians have been charged with an alleged plot, also to target Jewish people in the Manchester area. This has gone well beyond a problem for Britain’s Jewish community. In its scale and impact, it’s a threat to our national security.

Why these attacks are occurring is where things get complicated. It has become impossible not to notice that the justifications anti-Jewish terrorists offer for their crimes echo the language and ideas that motivate large numbers of people to march peacefully against Israel. Alid’s desire to expel Zionists from Palestine and avenge Palestinian children’s deaths in Gaza, for example, is more widely held than ought to be comfortable, given how he acted as a result. You can even hear an echo of that desire in the recent Green party vote condemning Zionism to be racism. I am sure most protesters who march for Palestine would never endorse Alid’s bloody methods, but the similarity of slogans is troubling nonetheless.

We think of democratic protest and terrorism as two opposing categories of behaviour, but the world is not so neat. Political violence always draws sustenance from a hinterland of ideas and rhetoric shared by many more people who would never pick up a knife or a gun, but who articulate the same grievances.

The belief that Israel is engaged in a “war on children” is common across the pro-Palestine movement, promoted by major NGOs and found in a thousand Instagram reels about genocidal Zionist baby-killers. Without doubt, it is deeply upsetting that thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, and many feel that Israel could have done more to minimise civilian casualties. But to describe this not as the result of a tragic and unbearable conflict, but as a “war on children”, is to imply that killing children is the whole point: a charge that echoes the medieval blood libel. From that assumption to Jihad al-Shamie yelling: “This is what you get for killing our children” as he tried to batter down the doors of Heaton Park synagogue last Yom Kippur is not as big a leap as some might wish.

I know this reality is uncomfortable for some. It would be far more convenient if the people attacking Jews always wore swastikas rather than, as has happened, keffiyehs. The riposte that British Jews should take more care not to conflate themselves with Israel misses the point entirely. Nobody tells Russians in London not to conflate themselves with Russia, just as nobody threatens to protest outside their local Chinese takeaway about the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs, as some have protested at Israeli-owned restaurants in Britain. It wouldn’t even occur to people to do so. The double standard, the unique demand, is the first stage of discrimination.

We are in an extraordinary period. That the Home Office has had to commit £250m to increase policing in Jewish communities across England and Wales, while also raising the national terrorist threat level, recognising the scale of anti-Jewish terrorism and far-right extremism, shows the staggering cost of failing to tackle antisemitism at its source. The government now has plenty of reviews and recommendations to implement regarding how to reduce the extremism that drives anti-Jewish hatred. Civil society, too, needs to step up: it can’t all be left to Whitehall.

The history of antisemitism is marked by moments in time and place when it has been politically weaponised by dangerous actors who are able to lure millions to its toxic scent. The blending of vengeful anti-Israel sentiment with older antisemitic tropes over the past three years, all while Jews are being murdered on multiple continents, makes me fear we have entered such a phase. Antisemitism matters once more, and we all have a role to play in addressing it.

• Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust. His new book, From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7, is published by Routledge