Antisemitic attacks have doubled

Published on 11 February, the Community Security Trust’s “Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025” records 3,700 instances of anti-Jewish hate in the UK in 2025. This is the second-highest level ever recorded — only 2023 was worse — and double the rate for 2021-2.

The worst of such incidents — such as the murder of Melvin Kravitz at Heaton Park Synagogue or the 23 March arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances in north London — make the headlines.

But there are many more: physical attacks on individuals; desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries; damage to the homes and vehicles of Jewish people; destruction of public chanukiahs; vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses, Jewish schools and the premises of Jewish organisations; verbal threats and abuse; and the circulation of hard-copy and online material espousing Jew-hatred (including support for the Holocaust) and conspiracy theories.

“Everyday hate” such as abuse and attacks on Jewish schoolchildren on their way to and from school, on congregants going to and from synagogues, and on Jews visiting Jewish businesses and venues, does not make the headlines.

The report shows that acts of Jew-hatred breed more Jew-hatred.

The Heaton Park Synagogue murder, for example, was followed by “an immediate spike in antisemitic incidents, an increase of 183% (compared with the previous week)… Violent attacks on Jews sometime generate more anti-Jewish invective from antisemites who feel emboldened to express their prejudice.”

This upsurge is not confined to Britain, as evidenced by the Washington Capital Jewish Museum murders last May, the Bondi Beach murders in December, and the attempted mass murder at the Michigan Temple Israel on 12 March.

In a single week in mid-March synagogues were attacked in Holland, Belgium, Norway, Canada and America.

The rate for hate crimes against Jews in Britain is currently 106 per 10,000. For Muslims, the rate is 12 per 10,000. The hate crimes against Muslims reflect huge reserves of prejudice, and go together with documented job discrimination. But the figures underline the impact of Jew-hatred on everyday Jewish life.

Yet broad sections of the left seem reluctant, or even worse, to confront the problem. The Together Alliance/Stand Up to Racism flyer publicising anti-racist demonstrations currently being held across Scotland, for example, does not even mention antisemitism

Zionism

And flyers distributed on the demonstrations claim: “In many ways, Zionism is worse than modern-day Nazism and fascism. ... Israel has evolved to match Nazi Germany in the ferocity of its state-enforced racism, and surpass it in levels of popular racism.”

Jew-hatred has taken different forms in different historical epochs. In the Middle Ages it was religious in form (Jews as Christ-killers). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was racist (Jews were a distinct, and pernicious, race). Today a dominant strand is antizionism.

Antizionism is something of a different order from any of the many different critiques of historical Zionism or contemporary Israeli-Jewish nationalism. Rather, it incorporates the tropes of classical racist antisemitism into a positive worldview defined by hostility to a fantasy political behemoth labelled “Zionism”.

Zionists are rich and wealthy, they own the media and political parties, they plunge countries into war, they are cold-hearted, arrogant and immoral, they make false accusations of antisemitism, they are worse than the Nazis, etc. — Zionism is the enemy of all humanity.

A political generation ago, such antizionism was primarily the product of Stalinist Jew-hatred, especially its explosion following the Six Day War of 1967. Today, it draws from postcolonialist and decolonialist theories.

In her book addressing the question of why so many on the left praised the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023, for example, Eva Illouz proceeds from French Theory through Critical Theory to decolonialism: “Decolonialism thus produces a ‘transcendental antizionism’ which ascribes an immeasurable power to Israel and extends to all Jews throughout the world.” Stalinism gets only a single passing mention.

At the end of the nineteenth century many socialists saw antisemitism as objectively progressive. According to the German socialist August Bebel in 1893, antisemitism had “a contradictory reactionary-revolutionary nature. … Against its will but of necessity it must become revolutionary, and thereby plays into our hands, the hands of social democracy.”

The same mistake should not be made with antizionism. It is not a misplaced form of anti-imperialism or a wayward expression of solidarity with Palestinians. It is the dominant contemporary form of Jew-hatred, and should be combatted as such.