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EXPERT OPINION / PERSPECTIVE -- Less than three months ago, two people were killed in a terrorist attack on Jewish people in a synagogue in Manchester, UK, on the most solemn day of the Jewish religious calendar.
Three days ago, a large crowd of Jewish people in Sydney, Australia, celebrated Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. Two Islamic terrorists, father and son, fired at them from a nearby bridge. Sixteen innocent Jewish people were murdered, including a Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old child.
The point of a terrorist attack is that even a relatively contained engagement spreads widespread fear. This is particularly the case with the Jewish community. The background for Jews is centuries of persecution culminating in the indescribable horror of the Holocaust. Even since then Jews for many years have lived in fear.
I was friendly with an Israeli diplomat in Turkey thirty years ago. He could not travel in his own car, hopping around Istanbul instead by taxi (dangerous enough), and no one knew where he lived.
Synagogues and Jewish schools in the UK have the sort of security I was used to in Kabul. There is even a charity trust, CST, dedicated purely to the security of Jewish people here. When a terrorist incident happens, most Jews ask themselves “Are we safe here?”
So, terrorism is working well against Jewish people and western governments need to show that they are serious about opposing terrorism. You can’t have a democracy when terrorism against one community is tolerated. Not least, because assuredly if we give up on the security of Jewish people others will be next. That is why anti-semitism must be seen as a national security imperative.
When the UK united against Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of the murder of 52 Londoners in 2005, we realised that it was not enough simply to pursue possible terrorists and to be prepared for possible attacks. We realised that we needed to understand and combat the hatred that drove these attacks and to stop it infecting vulnerable people who might be tempted by the Al-Qaeda message.
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Much of the focus on the Jewish community since the Sydney attack – and it has been gratifying to see the media at last seriously focused on anti-semitism – has been about the need to “protect” Jews. That was the message of British prime minister Keir Starmer. That is fine but the solution for Jewish people, as the terrorists know, is not about even more security systems around their synagogues and schools, about armoured cars transporting schoolkids around north London or about how safe it is to be publicly identifiable as Jewish. “Safety concerns” have been used to ban an Israeli football team from playing in Birmingham, and non-political Jewish entertainers from appearing in Edinburgh. Jews are likely to conclude that this is no life, and there must be safer places to live: and you have lost your battle against terrorism.
The only solution to defeat this terror is declaring war on anti-semitism. Lots of people will tell me how difficult this would be. How do you distinguish “legitimate” criticism of Israel from criticism that uses conscious or unconscious anti-semitism? Couldn’t a state-backed campaign against anti-semitism have the opposite effect to the desired one, leading to even more isolation and hatred of the Jewish community?
These are serious risks: no one is saying this is easy. But the status quo is no longer acceptable.
One more mass casualty attack – let's say in some European or American city on Passover, 2026 – and the Jewish community is going to be packing its bags. And you have lost your battle against terrorism. Anti-semitism is a national security priority.
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