The Turbulent State of Britain's Jews

The Labour Party is poised to win the UK election this week. Soon-to-be Prime Minister Keir Starmer may claim to have purged his party of antisemitism, but British Jews remain worried. Rightly so.

A recent billboard in the UK sponsored by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (photo: Gideon Falter/X)

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-turbulent-state-of-british-jews

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After 15 years out of office, the UK’s Labour Party will likely secure a gargantuan majority in elections on July 4th.

British Jews are fretting that the party has not fully shed its old antisemitic skin. These fears look well-founded.

The scale and venom of anti-Israel protests in Britain since Hamas’ October 7th pogrom have been shocking. Antisemitism is at a 40-year high, up 589 percent year-over-year, according to the Community Security Trust, a charity devoted to protecting British Jews. Eleven incidents are reported daily.

Jihadist protestors have barely bothered to pretend they are otherwise. Masked mobs have taken over the streets of many British cities. Policing has been disgraceful. There has been an utter lack of law enforcement. Chants and banners calling for genocide have gone uninterrupted, let alone punished.

In London, police have arrested lone Jewish protestors in front of Jihadist throngs, as if the single Jew — and not the blood-thirsty mob — is the problem.

It is not just street rabble rousers, either. UK universities are hotbeds of antisemitism, including faculty members. Almost 64 percent of Jewish students at UK universities say they have experienced antisemitism on campus since October 7th, another Community Security Trust poll showed.

Fully 96 percent said they have come across antisemitic disinformation on campus in that time. Current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has even had to implore British university administrators to tackle antisemitism more seriously.

University students are quite representative of people aged 18-to-24 years, which is the most antisemitic and radicalized demographic. A Campaign Against Antisemitism poll showed that about half of people in this age group believe that Israel is acting like Nazis towards Palestinians. The figure for Britons overall was disturbing in itself, at about a third.

The survey also found that 46 percent of British adults believe in at least one antisemitic statement.

This data also does not capture the bile and extremism spewing unfettered out of Britain’s 1,700 mosques. They are booming with high immigration and high birth rates, making Islam the country’s fastest-growing religion.

Britain’s media, which includes some of the world’s most virulent anti-Israel and antisemitic outlets, such as the BBC and The Guardian, have provided cover for sick antisemitism disguised as “criticism of Israel.”

Driving this has been the incoherent alliance between the Woke Left and Jihadism. The Woke Left comprises a significant part of the Labour Party, which antisemitism has long plagued. Its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a foul antisemite who entrenched such attitudes. During Corbyn’s leadership, Jewish lawmakers and members fled the party en masse due to Jew hatred and crazed proclamations against Zionism and Israel.

Keir Starmer, who took over the party’s leadership in 2020 and is certain to be Britain’s next prime minister, has made much ado about his efforts to rid the party of antisemitism.

In February, he ditched candidates Azhar Ali and Graham Jones because of antisemitic remarks they had made. Ali suggested that Israel allowed Hamas to attack on October 7th so that Israel would have a pretext to invade Gaza. Jones uttered an expletive about Israel and said that British citizens who had volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces should be locked up.

Starmer has also upset much of party’s rank-and-file by adopting a fairly conventional policy towards the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, instead of a more anti-Israel stance. He said Israel had a right to defend itself, and he withstood pressure to call for an “immediate ceasefire.” He has gradually bowed to this pressure and shifted to calling for a “sustainable ceasefire” — saying that he would recognize a Palestinian state as part an overall peace agreement.

His supporters say this shows he is serious about tackling antisemitism, and that he has reformed the party, dragging it towards the center, and to the cusp of power.

This is less plausible than it sounds.

Especially concerning is the party’s overall Wokeness. Woke types are not known for their diversity of thought. If you know what they think about one topic, say transgender issues, then you know with a high degree of certainty what they think about other issues, such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is this kind of groupthink that makes increasingly large parts of the Left, the Left.

And this is where the tells may be. Consider Labour’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy. Try not to laugh, but he has said that a man, if given the right hormones, can grow a cervix. It is unconceivable that anyone who adheres to Woke dogma so strongly has views that are supportive of Israel. While such views are strictly unrelated, they tend to go hand-in-hand in the performative theater of Woke politics.

As being Woke involves adhering to unchallengeable dogma, of which being anti-Israel a central tenet, it is doubtful that Labour’s members have given up their anti-Israel views. It is fair to say that Starmer has succeeded in imposing discipline on his party’s members to shut up about Israel and Jews so that he can be more electable.

This discipline may not hold. There is considerable pressure from Labour voters for party members to tout their anti-Israel credentials. In UK council elections, there was a voter backlash against Labour’s Israel stance in areas with Muslim populations. Respected British pollster John Curtice estimates that support for Labour was down about eight points in areas where the Muslim population exceeds 10 percent.

Much of this is thought to be a protest vote over Labour’s position on Israel that may not translate to national elections. It does, however, show how strong antisemitism is among part of Labour’s support base. This makes chances high that antisemitism remains in the party, so will soon be in the British Government.

Starmer’s team is pushing the narrative that winning a huge majority will allow him to get things done legislatively, which Britain badly needs, without the need to pander to his party’s Far-Left. The problem is that while Starmer might be doing a good impersonation of a moderate, his political career shows he sits firmly on the Far Left himself.

As the party’s deputy, he offered rock-solid support to Corbyn, one of the most disagreeable people in UK politics over many decades. Starmer even took a knee, as they say, over Black Lives Matter in 2020. It is absurd that a British politician should show such support for a U.S. political movement which, despite sweeping the UK like a virus, had nothing to do with the country.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think British prime ministers should be grown-ups who do not kneel before the world in displays of performative nonsense.

Britain’s hapless Conservative Government deserves the routing it is about to get. It has been insipid. Starmer and Labour, however, do not deserve the enormous majority they are about to receive.

Starmer getting things done thanks to a huge majority might be an appealing narrative, but it is not obviously more plausible than a party deeply tainted with antisemitism winning power and continuing to be antisemitic. This is not an outlier view. Some 41 percent of Britons think Labour still has an antisemitism problem, including a third of Labour voters, according to polling firm Savanta.

The poor policing of anti-Israel protests, the media’s biased reporting of the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, and rising attacks on Jews across Britain, show that antisemitism is deep and widespread. A government including antisemitic members would, in that sense, be representative.

Britain’s Jews number only about 287,000. They do not have the political clout of the country’s 3.8 million Muslims, including an alarming number of Islamists who have their claws deeply into the soon-to-be-in-power Labour Party.

The contrast between British and European politics is concerning, too. The UK is turning Left just as Europe is turning sharply Right. Concerns about high immigration levels (especially from Muslim countries) and Jihadism are among the major reasons European Right-wing parties are resurgent.

Oddly, given European history, these Right-wing parties tend to be supportive of Israel. The battle against Islamism is their common cause, and Islamism is a serious and growing problem in places such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany. The return of the Right in Europe is a backlash against parts of society that are highly antisemitic. The very forces that Europeans are rebelling against are now coming to power in Britain.

British Jews are right to be worried. They must hope that Starmer is sincere about having zero tolerance for antisemitism and that he has the strength to implement it. Equally, British Jews must not be in denial about the scale of antisemitism’s revival or the threat radical Islam poses.

Like Jews everywhere, they should be getting Israeli passports for insurance.

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