Stabbing Jews in London

Another day, another attack on Jews.

Two men were stabbed in Golders Green: one in his 70s, one in his 30s. This is not even the first time. In January 2024, a man was given a suspended sentence for an attempted stabbing at a Jewish shop in the same neighbourhood.

We have been warning for years that this was coming. Now it is here.

Keir Starmer finds it “deeply concerning” and “utterly appalling”.

Like many Jewish Britons, I find him deeply concerning. I find Zack Polanski utterly appalling. I find the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reprehensible for its part in creating the climate of hate engulfing us all.

This comes after the Yom Kippur terror attack at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, where a car was driven at people outside a synagogue and worshippers were stabbed, leaving Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz dead and three others seriously injured. It comes after four Hatzola ambulances, run by a Jewish volunteer emergency service, were set alight in Golders Green, oxygen cylinders exploding and nearby windows shattering. It comes after petrol bottles and a brick were thrown at Finchley Reform Synagogue; after an attempted firebombing at Kenton United Synagogue; after counter-terror police arrested eight people over suspected arson plots against Jewish-linked sites; after a suspected security incident near the Israeli embassy in Kensington Gardens; after an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green; after Jewish schoolboys were assaulted at Belsize Park station; after a Jewish man was attacked by teenagers in Hendon; after a Jewish father was abused on the Northern line; after Israelis were attacked in Leicester Square for speaking Hebrew; after a man in Wembley was asked whether he was Jewish and then punched in the face; after Jews leaving a West London synagogue were abused and assaulted; and after Gail’s in Archway was daubed with red paint and anti-Israel slogans because a bakery had somehow become another acceptable proxy for Jewishness.

The list is ugly because the facts are ugly.

Synagogues. Ambulances. Schoolboys. Restaurants. Shops. Tube stations. Memorial walls. Men in their seventies. Men wearing kippot. People speaking Hebrew in public.

The country has been given enough evidence to understand what is happening. It has chosen, far too often, to rename the evidence as tension.

Our Prime Minister chose to “recognise” a Palestinian state in the middle of Israel’s war against Palestinians who had brutally invaded Israel and were still holding hostages in the Gaza Strip. Now this country is seeing the fruits of such encouragement and such reward for terror. These attacks are familiar to Jews who have seen Palestinian Arabs carry them out for decades in Israel: stabbings, car rammings, arson, suicide bombings. A repertoire of violence once treated as distant is now present here, in Britain.

Palestinian terror groups historically pioneered hijacking and suicide bombing as techniques of political violence, inspiring imitators far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They also refined the use of knives and vehicles as instruments of terror. The so-called Stabbing Intifada, or Knife Intifada, which erupted in autumn 2015, marked a grim tactical shift. Attacks no longer required a bomb-maker, a cell, a command structure, or even much planning. A kitchen knife, a screwdriver, a car, a bus stop, a checkpoint, a crowded Jerusalem street: these became the architecture of attack.

Between October 2015 and March 2016, the wave included more than two hundred stabbings or attempted stabbings, dozens of shootings, and more than forty car-ramming attacks. The pattern was deliberately primitive and therefore difficult to pre-empt: young assailants, often acting alone, using ordinary civilian tools against soldiers, police, and civilians.

The ramming attacks followed the same logic. They turned the everyday vehicle into a weapon, collapsing the distance between civilian life and battlefield conduct. Jerusalem had already seen this method in 2014, when Palestinian attackers used cars and vans to plough into pedestrians and public-transport stops. By 2015, it had become part of a broader repertoire of low-tech violence alongside stabbings.

The stabbing and ramming intifadas have now been globalised.

They are now in Britain.

It is open season on Jews, and Keir Starmer does not seem to care. Nobody in power does. Statements of concern trip off their tongues reflexively. Money is funnelled to Jewish security organisations as a perfunctory response and to feed the news cycle, as though the message is: here you go, sort it out yourselves, buy some more CCTV cameras.

A serious state protects its citizens before they are attacked, not merely after.

We know the state can act fast when it wants to. After the protests following the Southport stabbings, ministers and police were swift to make examples of people who had expressed forbidden views. Yet calls for death to Jews, chants of “Intifada”, and television reports claiming that the Israeli army targeted medics in a hospital when the opposite was true, go effectively unpunished. They have consequences. They have produced violence and intimidation.

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Jewish women now ask whether they should wear trainers or heels to synagogue in case they have to run for their lives. Many no longer go at all. Shopping, waiting for a bus, walking through Golders Green, speaking Hebrew in Leicester Square: ordinary life has become a risk calculation for Jews.

Mumbled regret after each attack is worthless. What is needed is remorse for having helped create the climate in which this is happening. What is needed is acknowledgement, apology, and action.

What could they do?

Arrest hate preachers who call for Jews to be killed. Investigate religious sermons that spread Jew-hatred or call for non-adherents to be killed. Overhaul systemic anti-Jewish bias in the national broadcaster. Establish proper inquiries to identify and root out extremist funding in universities and wider society. Counter every attempt to intimidate or dominate Jews, and others, by sectarian forces. Take every threat seriously. Ban Iranian regime-linked groups from operating in the UK. Investigate charities that raise money and then funnel it to terrorist or terrorist-sympathising causes.

Speak openly against religiously inspired violence and intimidation. Stand against slurs of genocide, both at state level and in everyday society. Stand up for Israel when it fights barbarism and terror. Support our allies as they confront Islamic terrorism. Stand against Palestinian “liberation” movements that are, in practice, thinly veiled anti-Jewish movements. Face down anti-Western and anti-British ideologies every single time. Fly our nation’s flag proudly. Join forces with those trying to counter these forces in our country. Regain national pride in our free and fair society.

Stop tolerating the intolerant. Stop accommodating movements that seek to undermine our society. Stop grouping Jews with Muslims when talking about anti-Jewish attacks. Stop grouping Jews with Muslims when criticising Islamic practices that run counter to our society’s norms. Expose the “Palestine liberation” cause and narrative for what it really is. End the fashion for treating bogus “anti-Zionism” as a valid movement when, in truth, it seeks only to deny Jews safety in their own land.

It is all pretty simple. Pretty obvious.

Above all else, what is needed is a change of mood, culture, and climate. This country needs to regain confidence in its own values. It needs the backbone to stand against threats that are physical, ideological, and moral.

None of it is fashionable. None of it feels safe to our feeble and frightened politicians.

They are digging their own grave.

Also published in The Spectator.