THE veteran political journalist Adam Boulton asked a question on Times Radio which his counterparts at the BBC had been studiously avoiding for days. Wasn’t it the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza that was the trigger for the significant rise in anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish community? He had named the elephant in the room.
This was a fallacious argument, replied the Jewish community leader Jonathan Goldstein. The knifeman running through Golders Green last week (News, 1 May) did not stop his two unfortunate victims and ask their views on the West Bank before he stabbed them.
Mr Goldstein’s logic was impeccable, and yet the realpolitik is that anti-Semitic incidents trebled in Britain after the Netanyahu government’s devastating assault on the people of Gaza following the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023. They reached a new low with the death of two Jews at the Heaton Park synagogue last Yom Kippur (News, 3 October 2025).
Politicians have been casting around for what should be done. Baroness Falkner, a Muslim, criticised her co-religionists for their “deafening silence” on anti-Semitism — though the Muslim Council of Britain swiftly condemned the Golders Green attack, as did the prominent Muslim peer Baroness Warsi. The Prime Minister, after his Downing Street forum on the heightened threat to Jewish communities, told us all that it was the job of “every part of society” to confront “the crisis”.
The most significant intervention of the week did not grab the headlines. A group of 40 British rabbis and Jewish scholars published a collection of essays: Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel. The essays together warned that the behaviour of the current government in Israel is increasingly “incompatible with Jewish values”. Indeed, the Netanyahu coalition now poses an “existential threat” to Judaism itself. Knowing that many in the Jewish community will be horrified by their public critique, they also declare that criticism is not an act of disloyalty but “a Jewish obligation”.
With chapter titles such as “The Battle for the Soul of Judaism” and “The Collapse of Nuance”, these Jewish scholars are searching for a “language that can hold multiple truths at once”: grief for Israeli lives lost on 7 October 2023, anguish for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, fear at a rising anti-Semitism, and deep concern for “the moral and political direction of Israel itself”.
They highlight weaknesses in Israeli democracy, corruption, inequality, threats to the independence of the judiciary, abuses of Palestinians, and violence by Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank. All this undermines the “millennia-old moral and spiritual underpinning of Jewish existence”, which ought to make it “a light to the nations” and “a blessing to all humankind”.
After 9/11, they write, “we learned to make the necessary distinction between the religion of Islam and the political ideology of Islamism”. Now, they say, they must do the same for their own faith. “Israelism, a nationalistic political ideology” has “ridden roughshod over Judaism’s moral orientation towards compassion, justice and peace”.
If prominent Jewish leaders such the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, were also to condemn publicly the disproportionate military excesses of Benjamin Netanyahu, it might go some way to lessen the erroneous culpability many people attribute to innocent Jews for the behaviour of the government of Israel.