Groucho Marxism

Antisemitism sadly appears to be on the rise again, and there has been no shortage of coverage of this in the mainstream media. For example, writing in The Spectator last week, Brendan O’Neill stated that ‘Britain is experiencing one of the worst eruptions of anti-Jewish hatred in decades’; and this is just one of dozens of recent articles that make similar claims. The statistics seem to bear this out: the Community Security Trust (CST), a British charity set up to protect British Jews from terrorism and antisemitism, recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2024, the second-highest total ever reported in a single calendar year. The highest ever was in 2023, with 4,296 incidents recorded. These figures are far in excess of the equivalent figures for 2022 (1,662), 2021 (2,261), and 2020 (1,684).

As the CST itself states, the trigger for this sudden increase was the Hamas attack on Israel on 7^th October 2023. However, it is not clear whether was the attack itself that was the trigger, or whether it was Israel’s response to the attack. According to the CST’s 2023 Antisemitic Incidents Report, there was a rise in anti-Jewish hate following the attack and before Israel had set in motion any extensive military response in Gaza; but this doesn’t make much sense as Israel declared war on Gaza and began bombing it on 7^th October, just hours after the initial breach of the Gaza perimeter by Palestinian militants. Either way, it is clear that targeting British Jews because of a war going on thousands of miles away, which most of them have nothing to do with, is both stupid and totally unacceptable.

So why would people do this? The explanation put forward by the CST is that Hamas’s attack emboldened those with an underlying hatred towards Jews and legitimized antisemitism in these people’s minds. The main problem with this as an explanation is that it doesn’t really explain anything (why do these people hate Jews so much?). An alternative explanation is that there has been a deliberate conflation of Judaism with Zionism the mainstream media over recent years and this may have led some to blame the actions of the Zionist Israeli state on Jews in general. Of course, this does not in any way excuse these antisemitic attacks, but it does offer a more nuanced explanation as to why they have increased so significantly.

The latter explanation also has the advantage of being more consistent with the data. If the rise in antisemitism was caused by those with an underlying hatred towards Jews being emboldened following Hamas’s attack, then why it still at a higher level now, almost two years later? The CST would probably point to a spike in cases immediately following the attack; but this spike could also be explained by the higher salience of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in people’s minds around that time. Furthermore, the explanation put forward by the CST does not explain a similar (albeit smaller) spike in antisemitism during the Israel-Palestine crisis in May 2021, which was sparked by Israeli forces storming a mosque compound in the West Bank.

This once again highlights the importance of maintaining a clear separation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And they are definitely separable: Judaism is a religion which has been around for thousands of years, whereas Zionism is a political ideology which has been around for just 150 years. Furthermore, not all Zionists are Jews; the Christian United for Israel is an evangelical organization which is also the US’s largest pro-Israel lobby. Critics may counter that the majority of Jews consider themselves Zionists, or are at least sympathetic to Zionism. That may be so, but there is still a significant number of Jews who are anti-Zionist. In fact, I would argue that Zionism is itself antisemitic as it puts Jews around the world at greater risk.

Finally, I think we should make sure that we keep the recent rise in antisemitism, disturbing as it is, in perspective. Of the 3,528 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2024, the vast majority – over 80% – involved ‘abusive behaviour’. This is a quite a broad term that apparently (according to the CST’s own case study) includes schoolkids making antisemitic remarks to their fellow classmates. At the other end of the spectrum, just one of the 3,538 reported cases involved extreme violence (specifically, alleged arson). Obviously that is one too many, but it pales in comparison to what the Palestinian people are currently going through. For these people, the most extreme violence is the norm day in, day out, with no end in sight. They are the ones who most need our support right now.