The intifada has arrived in London
At first I thought it was a scene from one of the battlefronts in the Middle East. The hellish glow of an out-of-control fire. A thunderous explosion. And innocents fleeing in terror. Only this was no warzone. It was Golders Green. It was that peaceful Jewish enclave in north-west London. And last night it was subjected to what seems to have been an act of apocalyptic Jew hatred, a fiery pogrom designed to terrify London’s Jews.
This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews
Actually, scrap that – this was a warzone. Last night’s sickening assault was the latest vile strike in a war on the rights of Jews. Four Hatzola ambulances were set on fire. Hatzola is a non-profit organisation that provides emergency medical care to the Jewish community and others. In the dead of night, three masked men approached the ambulances, doused them in flammable liquid, and destroyed them. All that remains this morning is twisted, blackened wreckage – the debris of racial hatred.
The Metropolitan Police are treating it as an anti-Semitic hate crime. If they are right – and there’s no reason to doubt that they are – then we need to speak plainly. This was an act of fascistic savagery. This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews. It was an act of staggering disregard for the sanctity of Jewish life: homes surround the carpark where the fascist fire was lit, and it is thanks only to merciful luck that no one was injured.
Today we will hear much stern criticism of this brutish terrorising of London’s Jews. Keir Starmer has rightly called it “horrific” and “deeply shocking”. Yet condemnation without reflection is worthless. Every decent Brit whose mind and soul have not been fried by the malady of Israelophobia will know this was a despicable act. The question we need to ask ourselves is why things like this are happening in 21st-century Britain.
The barbarous assault on Hatzola did not take place in a vacuum. It follows two-and-a-half years of surging anti-Semitism. In the wake of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom, acts of Jew hatred in the UK reached dizzying and terrifying new heights. Jewish schoolkids were attacked. Synagogues were daubed with bloodcurdling graffiti. And two Jews were slain by a knife-wielding Islamist at a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.
Then there have been the hate marches. Almost every weekend, unholy assemblies of affluent socialists and radical Islamists trudged through our cities to damn the Jewish nation as the most evil nation. From behind their keffiyehs they barked about the evils of Zionism. They called Zionists “baby-killers” – the same words Jews would have heard in twelfth-century England before they were murdered by the mob. They agitated for the destruction of Israel all the way “from the river to the sea”. They hollered for more intifada just weeks after an intifada had laid waste to more than a thousand Jewish lives in Israel.
“It’s just criticism of Israel”, they said. Stop it. The anti-Semitism crisis is too pressing for such slippery moral evasion. The truth is as bright as those fires that engulfed Golders Green: when you demonise the world’s only Jewish nation as the world’s wickedest nation, you endanger Jews. When you brand Zionism as a uniquely murderous ideology, you hang a target sign around the necks of Zionists – and the majority of Britain’s Jews identify as Zionists.
Even more chilling than the rise in Jew hate has been the nonchalance about it in polite society. Self-styled “anti-racists” said nothing as Jewish schoolkids were pelted with bottles and Jews were advised by cops to hide their Star of David necklaces. That section of society that sees “fascism” everywhere – in the vote for Brexit, in Donald Trump’s oafish commentary – has had nothing to say about the truly fascist vibe of this swirling animus for the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people.
For me it was summed up by the events of the past week. At the Al Quds gathering in London a week ago, I saw with my own eyes a mob of Islamists singing the praises of an anti-Semitic tyrant (the late Ayatollah Khamenei) and chanting for the death of Jewish soldiers. And yet what have the chattering classes been wringing their manicured hands over this past week? Nick Timothy’s polite, principled criticism of mass Muslim praying in public. We live under a cultural establishment that is more horrified by criticism of Islamic practices than it is by mob bloodlust for the violent demise of the Jewish state and its people.
Last year I visited the site of the Nova music festival massacre. The young woman who showed me around – a survivor – told me the horrific story of Hamas firing a rocket at an ambulance. The young Jews who had taken refuge in the ambulance were burnt to death. And now we have anti-Semitic ambulance attacks right here in London. Listen. If you said “Globalise the intifada” after an intifada that entailed the burning of Jewish ambulances, then we don’t want to hear a word from you about the burning of Jewish ambulances in London. For here it is, in all its fiery horror, your intifada.
Written by Brendan O’Neill
Image by Getty