Prime Minister Starmer, British Jews deserve better.
Condemnation is the only thing your government has produced at the scale this moment requires.
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This is a guest essay by Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, speaker, and social media influencer who lives in the UK.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Dear Prime Minister,
On Wednesday morning, a man ran down Golders Green Road with a knife. He stabbed a man in his 70s at a bus stop, repeatedly, in the face. He stabbed a man in his 30s outside a synagogue.
The neighbourhood you patrol with high-visibility officers, the one you assured us was protected, is the same neighbourhood whose ambulances were firebombed in March, whose memorial wall was set alight earlier this week, and whose synagogues have become the safest of dangerous places.
You have already condemned the attack, and I believe you mean it. I am writing because condemnation is the only thing your government has produced at the scale this moment requires.
Last October, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were murdered at Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — the first fatal antisemitic terror attack on British soil since the Community Security Trust1 began counting in 1984. You stood in front of the country and addressed every Jewish person directly. You said, “I know how much fear you will be holding inside of you. I really do.” It was the most human thing a British Prime Minister has said to British Jews in my lifetime.
Then the months passed.
Three-thousand seven-hundred antisemitic incidents occurred in 2025, the second-highest annual total this country has ever recorded. For the first time since the Community Security Trust began monitoring, every single calendar month broke 200. The monthly average has doubled compared to the year before October 7th. This week we added two more victims to a ledger that does not stop.
You have provided some funds for the Community Security Trust. You have proscribed organisations. You have deployed visible police to synagogues during the the High Holy Days. Those things matter. They are also not enough.
This is what your country looks like when you are not watching, Prime Minister.
Children leave school and remove their kippahs at the gate. Mothers in Stamford Hill walk the long way around to avoid the corner where, on Saturdays, you can hear chants for their deaths. Eighty-one percent of British Jews told the Jewish Landscape Report last year that they conceal their Jewishness in public — 81 percent. There is no other minority in this country of whom such a finding would be reported and absorbed as background noise.
Jews are the only community in Britain expected to fund and staff the security of our own places of worship through a charity. The Community Security Trust is volunteer-led because the state has decided that arrangement is acceptable. It is the symptom of a country which has accepted a level of risk for Jews it would never accept for anyone else.
Your Crime and Policing Bill contains a clause that would let police restrict protests near places of worship. The opposition to it has been instructive. A section of the British Left has framed protecting Jews at prayer as an attack on civil liberties.
I need you to refuse to lose that argument. I need you to stand up in the House of Commons and say plainly that, when a march chants “From the River to the Sea” as it passes a synagogue on a Saturday morning, the children inside hear it as a message addressed to them, regardless of whatever the chant’s defenders insist it means in seminar rooms.
You recognised a Palestinian state in September. Your Home Secretary has called certain protests “un-British” and “dishonourable.” These are not symmetrical signals. One you delivered to allies abroad, the other you delivered to a specific street in north London.
You cannot send both and pretend the second has nothing to do with the first.
British Jews live in both contexts at once. The community you are entrusted to protect are British, and they are also Jewish. This country asks them to leave one of those at the door more often than you may realise.
Late last year, the Campaign Against Antisemitism asked 4,500 British Jews whether they could see a future for themselves here. Six in ten said they had considered leaving in the past two years. Half said they could not see a long-term future for themselves in this country. Those numbers are not a forecast, Prime Minister. They are a calculation already underway.
I am 35 years old. My grandparents fled Baghdad after the Farhud2 in 1941, when Iraqi mobs murdered Jews in the street while the British presence stood and watched. I grew up on their stories. I grew up doing the calculation every Jewish child learns to do: How long does a Jewish community have when the country starts to lose its will?
I am asking you to refuse the British version of that question.
Here is what I would like from you, in the next month: First, stop calling this “all hate.” Antisemitism is the form of hate in Britain with a rising body count. Name it specifically in every press conference and every line of every bill.
Two, take the funding and the running of synagogue security off the Jewish community. The Community Security Trust should not exist in its current form. Britain has no business requiring its Jews to police themselves. Treat synagogue security as the national security duty it has become.
Third, prosecute. Where chants cross into incitement and where online accounts coordinate threats against identifiable Jews, prosecute. Your government has shown it can move fast on the organization Palestine Action3. Move with the same speed when the target is a Jewish family in Hendon.
Fourth, speak to the British public the way you spoke to us in October. Tell them what is happening to Jews here is a domestic crime wave with its own logic, and it is being permitted by silences your government has the power to break.
Fifth, meet with the Jewish community — and not only the official bodies. Talk to the Jewish women who run mother-and-baby groups in north Manchester. Talk to the rabbis in Hendon who lock the synagogue door at night and check the windows again at 3 in the morning. Talk to my husband, who watched me write this and asked, quietly, whether we should be thinking about where we go next.
Prime Minister, you said in October that British Jews would see “the other Britain, the Britain of compassion, of decency, of love.” They have seen flashes of it: Christian neighbours standing outside synagogues during Shabbat, and officers running toward men with knives.
They have also seen the country that lets the Sabbath become a calculation — the country that teaches Jewish parents which streets to avoid, which symbols to hide, which name to give if the conversation turns.
That country is also Britain. You preside over both.
Decide which one you intend to leave behind.
Yours sincerely,
Hen Mazzig
The Community Security Trust is a British charity whose stated mission is to provide safety, security, and advice to the Jewish community in the UK.
The Farhud (an Arabic term often translated as “violent dispossession” or “pogrom”) was a violent anti-Jewish pogrom in Baghdad, Iraq, in June 1941, during the Shavuot holiday.
Palestine Action is a British pro-Palestinian direct action network founded in 2020. The UK government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization on July 5, 2025, under the Terrorism Act 2000, making support for the group punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
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Keir Starmer is a spineless faceless soul-less bank manager of the country formerly known as Britain. He has no principles, no courage or charisma, no love for his own country or people that can't be expressed in a spreadsheet or an HR handbook. He has been programmed to unravel his nation in the name of the global-corporate state and other vague universalist abstractions and masturbatory performances of colonial guilt, because this is what the market demands and because Europe's leadership class hates its own nations, cultures, peoples, history and won't lift a finger to do anything but prepare their golden parachutes for when the blood starts to flow heavier in the streets.
You have to be blessed with either a magnificent imagination or an infant's credulity to believe that Starmer will ever fight to protect anything except his career—if a man punched his wife, he'd probably call the cops and his lawyer and then deliver a sternly worded lecture after running it by his team of globalist apparatchiks. Imagine you and your family going to bed at night resting easy because Sir Keir is around to protect you—to imagine it is to laugh.
Europe's progressive aristocracy has imported a horde of immigrants who hate and laugh at them (how else do you treat people with no self-respect who won't stand up for themselves?) and their only hope is that their national and civilizational euthanasia is slow and painless. But first, to buy themselves time and postpone the inevitable, the plan is to throw the Jews to the Islamo-Left wolves, in the hope that this might slake their bloodthirst.
The Jewish scapegoat has been a European delicacy for at least a millenium, and while it was shelved for the back half of the 20th century for obvious reasons (I guess 50 years is the half-life of shame and speeches about Never Again!), it is now back on the menu and being served fresh.
Keir Starmer will do absolutely nothing to help or protect Jewish people, and it's deluded to believe otherwise. Europe's leaders will sooner sacrifice their Jews than protect them.
While I appreciate this article and you giving PM Starmer the benefit of the doubt, Hen I’m afraid it is fruitless to write this piece. Keir Starmer does not care about British Jews. He just pretends to, but it was never sincere. He’s done nothing to deal with the problem. Nor the rampant antisemitism that plagues the Labour Party. British Jews feel they have no future in the United Kingdom. This will not change unless Starmer and the Labour Party are booted from office and Britain has a real reckoning with the antisemitism in the streets or with their failed immigration policies. I’m not surprised by what I’m seeing in Britain at all. They are nation with a long history of antisemitism. Whether it be the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists or the hate spewed by the National Front or British National Party. In the 1900s, 1920s and the 1930s, Britain passed laws to limit Jewish immigrants. German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jewish refugees were often treated with indifference or outright hostility.
Many famous British literary figures were antisemitic including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Virginia Woolf, and Roald Dahl. In the 1930s in Britain a law was passed to ensure Jews were never more than 5% of the student body in British schools. Famous British literary figures like
Britain allowed in 10,000 Jews but rejected many hundreds of thousands more and that was only grudgingly they did that. The British authorities in Palestine didn’t want to upset the Arabs. So they implemented the White Paper of 1939 to restrict Jewish immigration but many Jews illegally immigrated anyway. The British Ministry of Information reported antisemitic discrimination and incidents all over the country against both British Jews and Jewish refugees from the Nazis. British post-war immigration policy generally barred Jews as it did not consider them easily assimilable. Though Britain would end up accepting a large number of refugees, few were Jewish Holocaust survivors as the government was worried about the antisemitic backlash that would result from them coming.
But of course, the most famous antisemitic event in the nation’s history would be King Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion in 1290 which expelled all Jews from England. But life has been getting increasingly harder and harder for English Jews before that. In 1253, King Henry III enacted the Statue of Jewry which place a range of restrictions on Jews including being forced to wear yellow badges and would be segregated from Gentiles. In 1275, King Edward I before outright expelling the Jews, would also enact a similar Statue of Jewry. The Jews would not be able to return to England until Oliver Cromwell allowed them to come back in 1655. The persecution of the Jews in England goes all the way back to the reign of King Stephen in the 1100s. This is a problem that is deeply rooted and will take a government that is serious about taking it on for this to change. PM Starmer and his cabinet are not that government.