Beyond Breaking Point: The Day Antisemitism Broke Britain

It was supposed to be a morning of celebration on their most holy of days. Instead, it became the epicentre of the day that antisemitism broke Britain. 

At 9:31am on the morning of Yom Kippur, a black Kia Picante smashes into crowds outside the reinforced gates of Heaton Park Congregation Synagogue. From the vehicle emerged Jihad Al-Shamie, a Syrian-born British citizen on bail for rape charges, armed with a knife and an imitation explosive vest. For the next six minutes, he unleashed a rampage of terror which would take the lives of two of the congregation and leave Jews around the world shaken to their cores, halted only by heroic members of the public and several rounds of Manchester Police bullets.

I was at my desk in Westminster when I first heard of the news, and was watching rolling coverage of the aftermath as I continued to work into the early evening. When I caught a glimpse through the glass exit doors of what had begun to unfold whilst I’d been in the sanctuary of my office, I paused in disbelief at the sight of sizeable anti-Israel protests for several moments before gripping the handle. It had been mere hours since terror had struck the Jewish community. 

It took all of ten seconds from taking my first step onto the pavement outside for the feeling to kick in that something felt off. 

I’ve experienced countless protests in Whitehall and Parliament Square before - it’s one of the protest capitals of the world, and I’ve also witnessed first-hand the recent civil uprisings in Ecuador and Peru, as well as protest crackdowns in Hong Kong and China, but no demonstration I’ve seen has ever had an atmosphere as unsettling as Thursday night’s. From every direction for miles around, people of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds adorned with keffiyehs walk towards Parliament, emerging from buses, underground stations, buildings and passages and beginning to congregate in large groups. Dozens of male youths mounted on bicycles occupy all the roadways around Parliament Square, cheering and hollering and waving 10-foot Palestinian flags raised on similarly long flagpoles as they slice past and circle any vehicle or pedestrian daring to advance onto their tarmac. Police stand idly by, visibly nervous at the prospect of what’s to come. 

Then the realisation dawned on me. 

There wasn’t a scent of solidarity in the air, or anguish, or anger, or any emotion expressed on behalf of innocent Gazan civilians - or, frankly, any sense of linkage between the activity across Westminster and the people in whose names they claimed to be acting in. There was far more jubilance than cries for justice, far more celebration than condemnation.

It must be said that there is, of course, a world in which a protest for the rights and protections of Palestinians could operate perfectly outside any reference to the religion or ethnicity of the people of Israel. Unfortunately, with instances of rife virulent antisemitism at almost all similar protests in UK cities in the last two years, this is a world we no longer live in. 

As tragic as the atrocity in Heaton Park was, we should be anything but shocked by it. Inevitably, the main question within the public narrative will be how did we get here, but the sheer volume of latent anti-Jewish hate amongst so many in the U.K. has been building up so nakedly for all to see. Such is the magnitude of the siege that Jewish communities have been under that the only real shock is that a spillover of hate into deadly violence hadn’t already happened sooner.

In the immediate aftermath of the despicable October 7th attacks against Israel, reported incidents of antisemitism in the UK increased by 581%. Last month, YouGov found that over one in five Britons now hold entrenched anti-Semitic views, up from 16% using the same survey the year previous and 11% in 2021. That same study found that 34% of the UK now do not consider Jewish people to be as ‘loyal’ to the UK as other British people, 34% also wouldn’t disagree with the notion that Jewish people talk about the holocaust of 6 million of their own ancestors to further their own political agendas, and only 43% of the country disagree with the idea that Jewish people have too much influence over the media.

This exponential increase of hate in the UK extends to other religions, too. Police statistics show Muslims faced 13% more instances of hate in 2024 than 2023 - 63% of these were for abusive behaviours and 27% for threatening behaviours. A 15% increase in hate towards Christians occurred in the same period, with 18% of Christians reporting feeling discriminated against in the workplace and 56% having experienced hostility or ridicule for discussing their beliefs.

The extreme leftist narratives peddled after the October 7th atrocities have done much to rapidly accelerate the extremification of political debate within the UK and across much of the west. People of all religions have paid the price, Judaism now with blood.

What has made the situation so much worse, however, is that, in our moment of crisis, everyone in government has been asleep at the wheel.

A year and a half ago, reacting to the election of the extreme left wing and long-alleged antisemite George Galloway in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election, outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned of the rising threat of hate-based extremism in an unprecedented televised address. Since then, virtually nothing has been done to combat it. 

Thursday’s attack could easily have been much more devastating had it not been for the heroic actions of the synagogue’s security staff, who denied the terrorist access to the building where almost all of the local Jewish community were sheltering having gathered to celebrate for what will have been the six longest minutes of their lives before teams of armed police arrived.

Manchester Police should absolutely be applauded for such a quick, robust and life-savingly effective response, but the fact that they had to travel to respond in the first place begs the question: why are synagogues being protected by their own security staff and not the police to begin with. What’s more galling is the fact that people describe these security staff as staff at all. For years now, every synagogue in Britain has had to have a volunteer rota of members of its own security, who need to seek and receive professional training so that, on the weeks they are called upon to forego being able to pray alongside family and friends, they are able to keep everyone remaining inside safe. With a climate of such astronomical Jew-hatred, questions must be raised about why on earth such gathering places hadn’t been afforded such police protection for even just their largest, most significant events sooner. Only now have police been deployed to synagogues around the UK. The idea that synagogues, or any place of worship, should ever be in a position to need protection in the first place should shake everyone to their core.

So we return to Thursday night. If, by chance, demonstrations had been already planned for the evening before the horrific news broke, then the choice of protesting the world’s only Jewish state on Judaism’s holiest day is an act in of itself difficult to argue the whiff of antisemitism away from. If not, then organisers, and dare I say many attendees, were acting in a way so overtly intentionally provocative as to be painfully beyond circumstantial. Before you come to your own conclusion as to which is true, consider the answer one protestor volunteered to a reporter when posed with much the same question: “I don’t give a f*** about the Jewish community”. Meanwhile, two families were still coming to terms with spending their first nights without their murdered loved ones. 

It’s a horrific reality that the in UK, one of the most proudly tolerant and free countries in the world, you can now be killed for your religion.

Image: Flickr/Indigo Nolan

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