Today is Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Synagogues are full to bursting as Jews repent their sins and reflect on the previous year.
A bit like so-called cultural Christians, who go to church at Christmas and occasionally Easter, Yom Kippur is the one day of the year in which even many irreligious Jews will go to synagogue.
So it is all the more sickening that today of all days has seen a serious, violent attack on Jews as they gathered in a Manchester synagogue. But as horrifying as this incident may be, I doubt that any of Britain’s 287,000 Jews will be surprised that such an event has come to pass.
There has long been a sense of impending doom, a feeling that it was only a matter of time before angry rhetoric tipped over into violence.
Last month, the Community Security Trust, which monitors Jew hate in Britain, published figures that revealed there had been 1,521 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2025 alone.
Ever since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, Britain’s anti-Semites have been increasingly emboldened. That accelerated after the October 7 massacre of Israelis two years ago, with figures for the first half of 2024 the worst ever recorded.
Think about that: the immediate response to the worst rape and butchery of Jews since the Holocaust was a record level of anti-Semitism in the UK.
British Jews have been living in recent years in this new normal. The surprise has been that we have not suffered today’s horrors before – as Jews have in France, Australia, the US and so many other countries. It was, I am sorry to say, inevitable.
Why? Because every week sees marches and gatherings of people under the ‘Free Palestine’ banner. Many of them are doubtless sincere in their concern over what is happening Gaza. But many are straightforward anti-Semites who shout slogans advocating death to the Jews – often in Arabic.
One common chant, in a foreign tongue heard on British streets, is: ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Mohammad sawf ya’ud!’. This warns Jews that ‘the Army of Muhammad will return’.
These marches are not, as they would have you believe, driven by concern for Gaza. Remember that the first took place on October 14, 2023, before Israel had begun its military operation.
The so-called ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign’, the lead organiser, made contact with the police on the afternoon of October 7, 2023, to plan that first march – as the massacre was still taking place.
Social media is full of Jew hate. As a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I am a relatively prominent Jew, and I’ve grown so used to being abused that it barely even registers with me. I have had to block over 4,000 accounts on X.
But what is truly galling is when politicians mouth the platitude that ‘there is no place for anti-Semitism in Britain’.
The facts show the opposite. There is a very clear place for it, not least on the streets, on the regular hate marches. They are now so regular that they rarely attract coverage.
Meanwhile, the police stand and watch – a passivity in the face of open anti-Semitism that has actually fuelled it by sending a clear message that the authorities have no issue with it.
In the same vein, when the Prime Minister and his sidekick David Lammy respond to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust by rewarding the perpetrators, Hamas, with recognition of a Palestinian state, without any pre-conditions such as renouncing terror or releasing the Israeli hostages, that sends another message – that Israel is somehow our enemy. And for anti-Semites, the idea that Israel is our enemy is catnip.
That is all in the context of the past year in which our government has responded to Israel fighting terror by criticising and punishing Israel.
The late Rabbi Lord Sacks called anti-Semitism a mutating virus. Today, it takes the form of support for the so-called ‘resistance’ to Israel. Calls on the hate marches to ‘globalise the intifada’ mean – and can only mean – kill the Jews. And such words have hideous consequences, as we have seen in Manchester today.
