Dear Donald… thanks, but British Jews are safer staying put

Dear Donald Trump,

I’m told by the Daily Telegraph that your “personal lawyer” (you seem to have so many!), Mr Robert Garson, late of Manchester, England, but now a resident of Florida, has urged you to allow me to come to the US as a refugee, along with all other Britons of Jewish descent.

In the absence of any other decision-making body in the US, it seems it’s up to you whether to add British Jews to white South Africans as the special beneficiaries of your compassion. Some of us might have a few aesthetic problems with that association, but that’s not the reason for my refusing, in advance, this kind suggestion.

It has been a tough 28 months for Jews here in Britain, as for Jews in other countries. The deadly attack on the synagogue in Manchester in October, the heightened number of recorded antisemitic incidents, the “Death to the IDF” chants at the Glastonbury Festival (many British Jews have relatives who serve in the Israeli military), and the constant agitation over Gaza have left Jewish communities feeling raw and exposed.

But does that amount, as Mr Garson claims, to Britain being “no longer a safe place for Jews”? Most Jews go about their business in the UK as they ever did. I know this because I live in an area with a significant Jewish population. So as evidence for his contention, your personal lawyer gives two kinds of evidence – one conjectural and the other not really relevant; both are based on fear of Muslim dominance.

The first is that sharia law will become the law of the land. This is nonsense. No projection puts the Muslim population of the UK by 2050 at above 17 percent (and my guess is that it will be less), and as far as we know there are between 30 and 85 sharia councils in Britain, and up to 90 percent of their clients are women, usually seeking divorces. This mirrors the batei din used by Jews to adjudicate similar cases in the Orthodox community since the early 18th century.

Mr Garson’s second piece of evidence is that the UK has not banned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation. This has more implications for Iranian exiles than it does for Jews, but the IRGC is sanctioned and monitored in Britain. It doesn’t seem like a big reason for becoming a refugee.

But the next question is whether Jews would be safer in the US. Jewish communities here have suffered nothing on the scale of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre of 2019. This was carried out by a right-wing extremist who believed – as many white nationalists do – that Jews are responsible for encouraging non-white immigration in order to promote race-mixing.

The Anti-Defamation League calculates a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents in the US since 2022, and a 2024 survey of American Jews had significant minorities experiencing overt antisemitic sentiments during the course of their ordinary lives.

Also, it hasn’t escaped the notice of many British Jews that some of the most vocal and influential new media supporters of your administration have either given themselves over to overt, old-style antisemitism or have shown themselves happy to tolerate others who have. One wonders what Mr Garson made of the famous Mar-a-Lago event when you hosted the Holocaust denier and Jew-baiter Nick Fuentes and Kanye West? Fuentes has over a million followers on Elon Musk’s X, and the equally Jew-hating Candace Owens has seven million subscribers on YouTube.

British Jews wouldn’t be safer in the US, simply because no one is

Given all that, it seems amazing that Mr Garson, who was appointed to the US Holocaust Museum board when your administration fired all the Biden appointees, is not doing more to combat antisemitism in the US, not least among your own supporters. Or maybe it doesn’t.

But, Mr Trump, even if none of that were true, British Jews wouldn’t be safer in the US, simply because no one is. The homicide rate in your country is six times what it is here; in fact, in Mr Garson’s new domicile, Miami-Dade County, it’s over 20 times the rate here in London. So whatever the risk to us as Jews in the UK from harassment, we would still stand a significantly greater chance of being murdered in the US just in the normal course of events.

And not just by criminals or fanatics. Some British Jews are famous for their protesting. I have a possibly anachronistic view that citizens should be allowed to protest without running the risk of being shot to death by masked immigration agents and then blamed for their own murder by the government. So no, I’m much safer here.

Finally, if we were all to come over, I worry that you’ll be disappointed. Mr Garson is quoted as saying that British Jews are, from a US perspective, “certainly not an unattractive proposition. It is a highly educated community… It is a populace that speaks English natively, that is educated and doesn’t have a high proportion of criminals.”

Not that are caught anyway. But I am afraid that I have to tell you, from experience, that there are some stupid British Jews and some venal British Jews.

And if I were you, I would be worried that these might be disproportionately attracted by any such offer as Mr Garson is pressing upon you.

Zay gesunt,

David

• David Aaronovitch is a British journalist and broadcaster