Mick Hartley

A depressing report in the Telegraph on the rise in antisemitism here:

My wife and I noticed in the first few months after Oct 7 how people we knew felt compelled to take a side, which usually meant talking about “genocide” or how much they hated Netanyahu or posting anti-Israel memes on their Instagram accounts.

In casual conversations we found friends and school-gate acquaintances had swallowed the “apartheid state” and “genocide” narrative because it was a self-edifying idea to get behind. The history was irrelevant. The truth was irrelevant. This can manifest in almost any form from the deadly serious to the absurd.

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2024, my wife, who is a photographer, was trying to book a taxi to the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, where she was due to be taking pictures at an event. Eight times, a different driver picked up the fare then mysteriously dropped the job once they realised what the destination was. In the end, I drove her to work because nobody else would….

My wife asks “What have we done to deserve this?” That could have been asked a thousand years ago, but it still hurts her and her community in 2026.

“We’ve all become constantly vigilant,” says Rabbi Mordechai Wollenberg, the leader of the Woodford Forest United Synagogue where both my daughters had their bat mitzvahs. “We park our cars away from the gates. We check the CCTV more often. We are looking over our shoulders all the time.

“Community leaders don’t want to make our communities anxious. We are not going to be cowed but we are on edge, with very good reason, and we’ve not seen anything like this for a very long time.”

Another thing my wife says is that she can’t see us living in London in 10 years’ time let alone 20, and she can see our children wanting – or needing – to live abroad. She has decided to train with the Community Security Trust, the charity that provides security and advice to Britain’s Jews. Jewish schools and synagogues are already fortresses, a daily burden and fear no other faith or group has to face.

“A sentiment I am hearing more and more is that there may not be a future for Jews in this country, and for someone who values their British identity it’s hard to get my head around,” says Wollenberg. “You can tell how bad it is when the police come to visit us and our members say, ‘I’m so glad to see you, we’re so scared to go out.’”

Candidates at both general and local elections line up to declare their antipathy towards Israel, courting the worst instincts of progressives and sections of Muslim communities who appear to have been inculcated with Jew-hate from an early age.

I have to explain this political earthquake to my daughters as best I can, but I’ve lost all sense of what British politics is for, who it serves and what will come of such a topsy-turvy set of priorities. For some candidates, anti-Semitism isn’t just part of their ideology, it is their north star.

The grim reality is that much of this is fueled by those sections of the Muslim community “who appear to have been inculcated with Jew-hate from an early age”. The tragedy is that this is now backed by large sections of the “progressive” left – and beyond. The oldest hatred was just waiting to be resurrected.