The focus on countries that feel far removed from the UK, or events well set in the past, can easily overlook the antisemitism that endures with alarming prevalence in the UK today. This article focuses on the contemporary nature of antisemitism in the UK, notably as a country of Europe less directly affected by the events of the Holocaust.
The Community Security Trust (CST)’s most recent figures show that reports of antisemitic incidents in the UK have hit an all-time high. 2,255 incidents were recorded in 2021, up by 34% from the 1,684 incidents recorded in 2020. A portion of these incidents continue to be carried out with justifications and methods rooted in historic antisemitism; for example in July 2020, the British rapper Wiley, who was awarded an MBE in 2018, posted a series of tweets in which he compared Jews to the Ku Klux Klan as ‘2 sets of people nobody has really wanted to challenge’, alluding to the conspiracy of Jewish domination. In February 2021, a 13-year-old boy became the youngest British terrorist to be sentenced, after having become head of an online international neo-Nazi group.
However, most cases of antisemitic incidents in the UK no longer follow traditional patterns, and are articulated in more contemporary terms. Antisemitic attacks on British Jews have therefore overwhelmingly increased in line with the conflict in the Middle East, and the Israeli government’s policies towards the Palestinian state. This is viewed as the single most significant contributing factor to antisemitic incidents in the twenty-first century, and is a factor that cannot be effectively dealt with through already established methods, such as simply improving education on the Holocaust in schools.
In the summer of 2021, for example, cars draped with Palestinian flags drove through St. John’s Wood in North London, an area known for a large Jewish population, with its drivers shouting an ‘antisemitic tirade’ into megaphones, ‘calling for the rape of Jewish women’. Elsewhere, a Rabbi in Essex was hospitalised after a physical assault. There were hundreds of other reported incidents during this period.
It must be stressed that criticising the Israeli government is not itself antisemitic. However, when Israel’s government is conflated with the entire Jewish population, this criticism becomes inherently antisemitic. In some pro-Palestine discourse, Jews as a coherent group are simply seen as synonymous with, and responsible for, the policies of the Israeli government, and consequently, some extreme pro-Palestine supporters view it as acceptable to commit verbal or physical attacks on Jewish people as part of this protest.
In addition, the term ‘Zionist’ has become key to such attacks, and specifically in attempts to disguise the antisemitic character of these attacks. The term ‘Zionist’ is often misused either to mean someone who supports the Israeli government, or a disguised means to refer to Jewish people. It has become increasingly clear that a great deal of confusion exists surrounding the term ‘Zionist’, which is not necessarily either of these definitions.
Put simply, the term ‘Zionist’ refers to someone who adheres to the belief that there should be a nation for the Jewish people. The movement emerged at the start of the twentieth century, garnering attention after centuries of persecution, in which Jews were repeatedly and violently forced out of their home countries. The Zionist movement reached its climax and gained international support after the Holocaust, as millions of Jews who had been forced to flee, and who were liberated from concentration camps, became entirely stateless.
In this context, the Zionist movement saw its aims come to fruition, and Israel was decided upon as the Jewish homeland. The state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948. From this point, the relationship between Israel and Palestine has been increasingly fractured and violent. This article cannot address the conflict in great detail, though the brief overview of how Israel came to be is necessary to understand the distinction of terms, which are so often misused.
Consequently, what the term ‘Zionist’ does not necessarily refer to is supporting the politics of the Israeli government and its policies towards Palestinians, although this the context in which it is most frequently invoked. It is entirely possible, and indeed widespread, to be Jewish, to be a Zionist (believing that it is legitimate for the Jewish people to have a homeland), and to find the actions of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians unequivocally abhorrent.
For many British Jews, this may be exactly the case. Yet an overwhelming number of antisemitic incidents are initiated by those who conflate Zionism, Judaism, and support of the Israeli goverment’s brutal policies in Palestine. One example is the comment by film director Ken Loach, who argued that if it was the case that antisemitism was on the rise in Europe, ‘it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.’ A clear challenge in regards to antisemitism in the UK today is consequently the inability to separate the actions of the Israeli government, and Judaism. In short, as worded by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in their July 2017 report, ‘anti-Israel attitudes are not, as a general rule, antisemitic; but the stronger a person’s anti-Israel views, the more likely they are to hold antisemitic attitudes…Therefore, antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes exist both separately and together’.
Much of the recent public discourse on antisemitism has been rooted in precisely this ignorance. Whilst antisemitic incidents of a more ‘traditional’ nature, using long-term conspiratorial tropes and references to Hitler and the Holocaust, are generally observed as initiated by individuals of extreme right-wing persuasions, antisemitic incidents relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been observed largely on the Left. Allegations of antisemitism within the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Leader were particularly rife; many of these incidents were rooted in comments or online posts by MPs and Corbyn himself, which related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Labour MP, Naz Shah, for example, stepped down after sharing a number of pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook, in which she compared Israel to the Nazis, saying that ‘the Jews are rallying’, among other comments. She later apologised, recognising her words as antisemitic, and went on a ‘journey’ of education, later reflecting on ‘how stupid I was and how ignorant I was’. Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone was suspended after suggesting that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. Although internal inquiries would technically clear the Labour Party of institutional antisemitism, admissions of an atmosphere of toxicity and ignorance were made, and thousands of members, and even MPs, would defect from the Party as a result.
It is worth restating that many are successful in criticising and commenting on the actions of the Israeli government without any antisemitic language or tropes. Yet the recent increases in tensions, and the rise of social action being articulated through rudimentary Instagram infographics, has highlighted the confusion and ignorance surrounding these terms. These infographics, which are, in most cases, created by non-experts and tend to be emotionally charged, are often the primary source of disinformation for millions of young people, who feel that they are committing an act of social justice in digesting and reposting the information.
However, many of these infographic-style posts inform on the Israel-Palestine situation in ways that are fundamentally rooted in antisemitic rhetoric, or rhetoric which is so dangerously simplified that it can unintentionally, or intentionally, promote ignorance or antisemitism. One such infographic, shared by millions, referred to ‘Israel’ in inverted commas. It featured an illustration of one young person, coffee cup in hand, asking a friend, ‘’Israel’ isn’t a country?’, with her friend ‘explaining’ that Israel existed solely as a colonising country. Such ‘explanations’, which make up a significant portion of the information digested by young people, dangerously simplify and deny historical context to Israel’s existence, to a complex conflict, presenting an opinion – that Israel should not exist – as a fact.
In conclusion, then, it is clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict, which clearly shows no signs of imminent de-escalation, is taught clearly and objectively, with its necessary complexity. This could mean integrating the Israel-Palestine into school curriculums and advocating for a sensitive and objective discourse. We can recognise that the human rights of the Palestinian people are being violated, and we can criticise and passionately condemn the Israeli government accordingly for its policies in doing so. It must, however, be executed in a way that does not invoke misleading terms, that separates the political from the religious, the Israeli government from the Jewish population at large, and should never involve physical or verbal attack.
