What the year ahead will bring – and what we should hope for

Tonight, Jews around the world will gather around tables, dip apples into honey and wish one another Shana Tova U’Metuka, a good and sweet new year. This morning, the world is remembering something else.

Twenty-five years ago today, 19 jihadists boarded four aeroplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people. Americans watched the Twin Towers collapse and the world understood, in real time, that something had changed.

So today, 11 September 2026, 29 Elul 5786, begins with remembrance and ends with renewal. It begins with images of smoke, falling buildings and mass murder and ends with apples and honey, candles, family and prayers for sweetness.

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Somewhere between those two things, I find myself struggling with a question I never expected to find quite so difficult.

What, exactly, am I hoping for from the year ahead?

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I looked back this week at what I wrote before Rosh Hashanah in 2024 and 2025.

In 2024, almost a year after 7 October, I was still trying to comprehend not simply the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but what came afterwards. The speed with which sympathy evaporated, the demonstrations, rationalisations and conspiracy theories, the inversion of victim and perpetrator.

In 2025, something had changed. I was less interested in persuading other people and more concerned with our children, ensuring the next generation of Jews did not inherit our fear without also inheriting our pride.

But beneath both pieces I realise now that I was harbouring a secret and deeply naïve hope. I thought this might pass. Not antisemitism, I have never been naïve enough to believe that, but this antisemitism. This explosion of it, this extraordinary social permission to say things about Jews and the Jewish state that would be immediately recognised as hate-fuelled prejudice if said about anybody else.

I hoped the silent majority would eventually say enough is enough. I hoped those who had been manipulated would recognise that their compassion had been exploited, their ignorance weaponised and their certainty harnessed in service of people and ideas fundamentally at odds with the values they believed themselves to be defending. In short, I hoped normality would return.

Nearly three years after 7 October, I no longer believe that.

The most frightening development of the past year is not another antisemitic placard, smashed window or Jew abused on the street, it is permanence. The exceptional has become structural.

The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, monitoring countries containing more than 90 per cent of the Jewish diaspora, recorded more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025. Incidents were 136 per cent higher than in 2022; violent incidents 97 per cent higher. Twenty Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks. It was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the diaspora in more than three decades. This is no longer a surge, it is the new normal and that new normal is no longer confined to the street. It has entered our institutions, infected our culture and increasingly shapes our politics.

In 2024 we could see the direction of travel, but in 2026, I fear we are beginning to see the destination.

Britain provides an uncomfortable example. The rise of the Greens under Zack Polanski, alongside his deputy Mothin Ali, has demonstrated that rhetoric about Israel and Zionism need no longer be an electoral impediment, in fact quite the opposite, it is a magnet for an otherwise disparate collective. More disturbing is what happens when established parties decide not to resist that politics, but chase it, hello Andy Burnham and our very own Ed Miliband.

This week Britain’s Jewish Foreign Secretary stood at the despatch box and announced new measures directed at Israeli settlement activity. He began by describing himself as a “proud British Jew”. He spoke movingly of his grandmother finding sanctuary in Israel after the Nazis murdered her husband and 60 members of her family. Then he announced the sanctions.

I find that juxtaposition profoundly disturbing. Not because Jews must agree with the Israeli government or because Israel should be immune from criticism. But because Miliband invokes his Jewishness and his family’s direct experience of the Holocaust while his government contributes to the escalating isolation of the world’s only Jewish state.

Surely the lesson of the Holocaust cannot simply be that Jews required sanctuary once. It must include understanding why Jews required a sanctuary of their own in the first place. Jewish history had already demonstrated the danger of outsourcing Jewish survival to the goodwill of others. Israel was the answer to that lesson.

Miliband knows British Jews are frightened. Our schools require guards, our synagogues need protection, Jewish children increasingly think about whether it is safe to advertise who they are. Yet his government insists that the political demonisation of Israel and what British Jews experience here are essentially separate phenomena. Nearly three years of experience tells me otherwise.

We have watched the demonisation of Israel bleed into the demonisation of Zionists and from Zionists into Jews. We have watched the vocabulary migrate from demonstrations to universities, workplaces and cultural institutions, then into electoral politics and government policy. Jewishness does not provide immunity from scrutiny for participating in that process and family history is not a moral blank cheque. Beginning an argument “as a Jew” does not determine whether what follows is good for Jews.

Nor is Britain unique, the US has its own set of problems. In New York, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, Zohran Mamdani’s election represented another profound moment. Whatever one believes about Mamdani personally, his victory demonstrates something larger, that in parts of progressive politics, hostility towards Zionism is increasingly not an electoral embarrassment, it is a credential.

Perhaps we are not waiting for the pendulum to swing back, perhaps this is where the pendulum has swung and it is this which makes today particularly resonant.

I don’t pretend that September 11 predetermined 7 October or that history moves in straight lines, but it is impossible to look at the quarter-century since 9/11 without seeing connections. Somewhere along the way, much of the West became confused about what it was defending and whom it was defending it from.

Then came 7 October, another morning, another group of jihadists. Before Israel had even buried its dead, the Western world was marching against it. Nearly three years later, I don’t think we can pretend we misunderstood what we were seeing.

So what do I hope for as 5787 begins? Do I believe antisemitism will collapse over the next twelve months? No. Do I expect the silent majority suddenly to discover its voice? No. Do I think politics will rediscover nuance when demonising Israel has proved electorally useful? No.

Yet tonight I will dip an apple into honey, because I think I have finally understood something about the ritual.

The honey isn’t a prediction.

We don’t dip the apple because we have been promised sweetness. Jewish history would make that an absurd proposition. We do it because, despite everything history has taught us, we still choose sweetness. Jewish hope is not optimism, optimism says things will get better.

Jewish hope says that whatever happens, we will still be here.

We were Jews through exile, expulsions, forced conversions, ghettos and pogroms. We were Jews when Europe industrialised our murder. We were Jews when neighbouring armies attempted to extinguish the reborn Jewish state at birth. We were Jews after Masada, Munich, Entebbe, 7 October, Bondi and Manchester and we will be Jews tomorrow.

That carries an obligation for those of us raising Jewish children today. We must teach them to be more Jewish, not less. To know their history, to understand that our connection to the Land of Israel runs through our prayers, festivals, texts, language and collective memory. Our responsibility is not to persuade them that the world will always love them, it won’t. Our responsibility is to ensure they never require the world’s permission to love themselves.

So tonight I will sit with my wife, my children and my family and wish them a sweet year, even though I cannot honestly promise that the world awaiting them will be sweeter.

We will choose family, community, faith and Israel. We will choose Jewish children and Jewish grandchildren. We will build when others would have us disappear. We will dance again when others demand that we mourn forever. We will choose life.

The honey isn’t a prediction, it’s an aspiration.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 and nearly three years after 7 October, I cannot promise my children a sweeter world in 5787. But I must promise them that we will not surrender our place in it.

Am Yisrael Chai.

The people of Israel live.

Shana Tova.