The anti-Zionist contagion

The anti-Zionist contagion

Melanie Phillips

It was a reaction to two things. Last week, two Jews were stabbed in separate attacks in the streets of London’s largely Jewish area of Golders Green. This week, the insurgent Green Party very publicly sank into a sewer of Jew-hatred during the run-up to Britain’s local government elections.

Dozens of Green Party candidates, whose supposed environmental concerns have given way to a hard-left, anti-Israel agenda, were revealed over the past few days as having a record of blood-curdling Jew-hatred. British Jews are under increasingly aggressive siege from abuse, intimidation, discrimination, arson attacks on their institutions, street violence and terrorism that left two Jews dead in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.

The Golders Green stabbings last week provoked a huge outpouring of revulsion and concern. There was a fusillade of bromides about “no place for antisemitism in Britain” from the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and other Labour Party politicians.

The media suddenly started publishing accounts by deeply distressed British Jews about the state of fear in which they were being forced to live. Commentators produced outraged and horrified diatribes against a society that was forcing its Jews to consider emigrating.

Yet some of those voices had previously produced outraged and horrified diatribes against the State of Israel, recycling defamatory falsehoods about the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.

This discrepancy alone should have sounded a warning that, for all the public breast-beating, the real point was still being lost.

This is because attacks on Jews are still deemed to be in a separate category from attacks on Israel or Zionism. The assumption is that attacks on Jews are very bad indeed because they are against people, but attacks on Israel or Zionism are absolutely fine because they are merely against a country or an ideology.

The distinction is false, and itself helps fuel the hatred of both Israel and Jews.

The point was illustrated this week in Manhattan. At Park East Synagogue on New York City’s Upper East Side, where an event marketing Israeli real estate was taking place, hundreds of masked Islamists and their supporters chanted from behind a police barricade: “We don’t want two states. We want ’48!”

The mob, which flew a Hezbollah flag, was spearheaded by a branch of Al-Awda, which is linked to Samidoun, a US-designated terror organization.

The police thankfully prevented a repeat of what happened last November at Park East, when anti-Israel demonstrators blocked people from entering and exiting the synagogue. That intimidation helped motivate city legislators to tell the police to establish a protest-free “buffer zone” around houses of worship.

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