When it comes to antisemitism, the sound of silence from UK anti-racists is deafening

The past week has brought the shocking reality of anti-Jewish hatred home to a lot of people in this country – but there is one part of society that still doesn’t seem to have noticed.

There have been three arson attacks on the Jewish community in the space of a week, including two synagogues, in Finchley and Kenton, that were targeted with petrol bombs. It is only through luck that they did not go up in flames like the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green last month. All this, six months after Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and at a time when police hate crime figures show that, per head of population, British Jews are 8 times more likely to be the victims of faith-based hate crime than people of any other religious minority.

And the response to this from Britain’s anti-racist movement, that regularly claims to mobilise tens of thousands to march against racism? Zilch. Nothing. No campaigns, no solidarity vigils, maybe a tweet or two, but beyond that? Silence.

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I’ve done several media interviews this weekend and I’m always asked what more police and government could be doing to help. And my answer is always the same: never mind the police and government, what about everybody else? The amount of police resource, focus, commitment and cooperation that the Jewish community has had over the past week is unprecedented. The government pays for security guards across the Jewish community, is tightening laws around protests, and has launched separate inquiries into antisemitism in schools and in the NHS (what a scandal it is, that this is even necessary).

People will always demand more from the police and government, rightfully so. And there is no doubt that mistakes have been made in the past. But right now, it is the silence of so many others that has my attention. Beyond government, the police and the State as a whole, there is a huge civil society-shaped hole where nothing is being done to combat this unacceptable, appalling, shameful rise in antisemitism in our country.

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In past decades, when minorities were targeted for sustained campaigns of racist violence and abuse, the activist left came up with big movements like the Anti-Nazi League or Rock Against Racism to call people to action. Last month a similar movement was launched, the Together Alliance, to campaign against the far right, with lots of celebrities and musicians putting their names to the effort.

But when Kanye West, the music world’s best-known supporter of Hitler and Nazism, was named as headliner at the Wireless Festival, those same famous musicians had nothing to say, just as they showed no support when Jewish bands had their gigs cancelled by venues.

The last time the Jewish community in Britain was targeted by a sustained arson campaign was in the 1960s, and it was Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement that was behind it (that’s what led to the formation of the 62 Group, Searchlight magazine, and ultimately to CST). Everyone who thinks of themself as an anti-racist can get behind a campaign against Nazis. But today, when these latest arsons are all being claimed by an Islamist extremist group with links to Iran, there’s little or no comparable interest or support.

If Israel stood accused of paying local criminals to fire-bomb British mosques in the name of an extreme Zionist group, there would be emergency protests in our city centres demanding action. But when it’s an Iranian-linked group claiming responsibility for petrol-bombing synagogues? Instead of solidarity we get ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories that it’s really Mossad doing the attacks. We shouldn’t be surprised by this: when far right mobs attacked asylum hotels two summers ago, the anti-fascist response was peppered with people claiming that “Zionists” were the puppet masters behind the scenes, pulling the rioters’ strings. This is how politically deformed parts of the left have become, a grotesque parody of the true anti-racist solidarity that previous generations showed Jewish communities.

It emerged last month that one in five students said they don’t want to share a house with a Jew. If one in five students said they didn’t want to share their house with a black student, you can bet that every Stand Up To Racism branch in the country would be campaigning against it. But when it’s Jews? Forget it.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, at an organisational level, Jews have simply been abandoned by the big beasts of progressive, liberal, anti-racist opinion and activism. There are pockets of support that remain, thankfully. But in general, looking at the sector as a whole, most of the trade unions, human rights NGOs, public sector bodies campaigning organisations, student groups and the rest who make up the anti-racist establishment have closed their eyes and their hearts to the Jewish community.

There are plenty of individuals who reach out to express support, and I don’t want to downplay the importance of this. A quiet, sympathetic word to Jewish friends or colleagues goes a long way. But this isn’t reflected in the activism of civil society organisations. Allyship means speaking up within those organisations and pushing them to change, as well as posting personal views on social media.

There are several reasons for this silence. Understandings of racism have changed to focus exclusively on people of colour, so antisemitism, even where it is regretted or condemned, is not seen as ‘real’ racism, and Jews are seen as white, wealthy, powerful and integrated – so not needing or deserving anti-racist solidarity. When much of the anti-racist left looks around society and puts people into different boxes, the Jewish community doesn’t make it into the box marked ‘our people’. Some people mean well but just don’t get it, and need to re-learn what antisemitism is all about.

But beyond that, there is a deeper, more troubling reason: there are large parts of the so-called anti-racist left that accommodate and encourage exactly the hateful, violent extremism that is fuelling this rising tide of antisemitism. Call for death in this movement and you become a celebrity. Claim that the UK is under “Zionist control” and nobody bats an eyelid. Solidarity statements flood in for people who rant about “Jewish supremacy”, rather than for the Jews they are inciting hatred against. And all driven by an obsessive, violent hatred for Israel, and a purifying desire to denounce and destroy anyone and anything touched by the sin of “Zionism”.

Of course this generates antisemitism. How could it not? And of course, the people pushing this hatred, marching alongside it, or saying nothing when the people on the same platform as them express these views, cannot mount a campaign against antisemitism even when synagogues are being fire-bombed. How could they?

They can’t even begin to acknowledge why this antisemitism is happening, because to do so would be to incriminate their own political world. So instead, they do nothing.

Tonight’s Panorama gives a taste of what British Jews are living through right now. It is powerful and important and I hope a lot of people watch it. The defiance and determination of the Jewish community is admirable and makes me convinced that we will stand up to this hatred: but unlike our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, it feels like we will have to do it without meaningful support from the very organisations and people who claim to define what counts as anti-racism. And if that remains the case, it would be truly shameful.