IF, AS is being claimed in several quarters, the war with Iran has now come to Britain’s shores, then it has brought the fog of war with it. That is clear from the various reactions to the firebombing of four Jewish ambulances outside a synagogue in Golders Green, in north London.
The response of the Netanyahu government to the Hamas terrorist massacres in October 2024 has triggered a rise in anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Anecdotes abound to show this. One woman changed her name on her Uber account for fear of being identified as Jewish. Another took down the traditional Jewish prayer scroll from her door frame. Others transferred their children to Jewish schools for fear of bullying in state schools. A student espousing Zionist views was called a “child killer” by peers outraged by Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza.
British political and religious leaders this week issued vehement condemnations of rising anti-Semitism after the torching of the ambulances. Interestingly, the Israeli embassy in London pointed the finger in a more specific direction. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, a new Islamist militant group linked to Iran. The embassy pointed out similarities between the Golders Green attack and others in Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands.
According to Laurence Taylor, head of the Met Police’s counter-terrorism squad, more than 20 Iranian-backed plots have been foiled in Britain since 2024. If the ambulance firebombing was the work of Iranian agents, it is more directly part of President Trump’s “war of choice” than it is a misguided response by opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched earth in Gaza, free rein for marauding settlers in the West Bank, or driving another million people permanently from their homes in Lebanon. It is more about international politics than what the Chief Rabbi has called “vile Jew hate”.
What adds to the complication and confusion is that it is not just military power that is out of balance in this asymmetric war. Sir Keir Starmer noticeably failed to employ the vehemence with which he condemned anti-Semitism to criticise the Israeli soldiers who fired directly through the windscreen of a family returning from an end-of-Ramadan shopping trip, slaying a father and mother with a blind and disabled child on her lap. “We killed dogs,” cried the soldiers after firing on the car.
The fog of war disguises imbalances in logic and empathy as well as firepower. Once, it was possible to abhor the merciless anti-Semitism of Hamas while also detesting the indiscriminate killing of thousands of Palestinian children by the Netanyahu government. But hardliners now insist that all criticism of the Israeli state is, by definition, anti-Semitic. At the “Rally against Jew Hate” in Golders Green on Monday, Israeli flags were waved, compounding the confusion among those who seek to maintain that religious, racial, and political identities can be distinct.
The Jewish leader Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust, pointed out powerfully this week that the firebombing in Golders Green was not just an assault on Jews, but on every British person and on the values of freedom that we all share and cherish. Part of expressing those is the insistence that the fog of war needs to be dispersed and not nurtured.