Antisemitism picture is more complex

Dale Street’s article in Solidarity 764 reviews the latest report from the Community Security Trust (CST), a Jewish community organisation.

Incidents which CST categorised as “Extreme Violence” doubled from two in 2024 to four in 2025. But “Assaults” decreased by 16%, and “Threats” decreased by 22%. Incidents in other categories rose. The trend is not a simple one of straightforwardly escalating antisemitic violence, but something more diffuse.

The Heaton Park synagogue attack in Manchester, and the arson attack on the ambulances of a Jewish charity in London, show antisemitism still drives deadly violence. But such incidents remain exceptional. This is no cause for complacency, but it has implications for how we confront a bigotry expressed predominantly ideologically, rather than “physically” or structurally.

Street initially states that “antizionism” is a “dominant strand” of antisemitism, but concludes by stating that it is “the [my emphasis — DR] dominant form of contemporary Jew-hatred”.

Antisemitism on the left is often (although not always) expressed in anti-Zionist terms, influenced by an “anti-imperialism of fools” derived from Stalinism. As Street notes, an additional strand is forms of “decolonial” politics which can ascribe an innate moral essence to entire peoples.

Are these “the dominant form” of contemporary antisemitism more widely? Antisemitism is an ideology, based on the identification of a socially-manipulative power explicitly named or coded as Jewish. People can assimilate elements of it in ways that are not easily statistically measured by the reporting of “incidents” to monitoring groups. But if we take CST data on its own terms, over half of all incidents (52%) did not have “explicitly anti-Zionist motivation”, and 47% had no explicit link to Israel or Palestine at all.

Limitations

There are undoubtedly many expressions of antisemitism that the CST’s report does not capture. When instances of antisemitism on the left are acknowledged at all, they are, rightly, generally contested via argument, not reported to the CST. This is one reason why a reporting-based, statistical approach like the CST’s has limitations.

The fact that 47% of recorded antisemitic incidents have no explicit link to Israel at all challenges a common assumption on the left, that antisemitism is “created by” Israeli policy. This was expressed by Tariq Ali at a rally in 2021: “Every time they bomb Gaza [...] that is what creates antisemitism. Stop the occupation, stop the bombing and casual antisemitism will soon disappear.” Events in the Middle East may be triggers, but they do not generate antisemitism out of nothing.

Those who acknowledge antisemitism on the left should not assume its common forms in our own political milieu are necessarily the dominant forms in wider society.

Street’s article also reproduces another of the CST’s flaws, using the term “Jew-hate” as interchangeable with “antisemitism”. If antisemitism is reduced to “hatred”, it becomes a question of individual psychology rather than ideology. Undoubtedly, many antisemites do “hate Jews”. But people can also reproduce antisemitic ideas without conscious animus.

Reducing antisemitism to a historically-transcendent “Jew hate”, which may change form but ultimately expresses something singular and continuous, is harmful to efforts to confront it. Given the history of persecution, it is understandable why many Jews see antisemitism as inescapable. But this approach tends towards a fatalism which treats bigotries as eternal.

For socialists, that is a dead end. Even whilst acknowledging ideology’s relative autonomy from historical conditions, we must retain a perspective that sees reactionary ideas as historically contingent, and therefore capable of being overcome.