This coming week brings another round of anti-Israel protests to our campuses and to our city centres, cynically timed to coincide with the anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October atrocities. The usual noxious mix of extremism and antisemitism will be on display. Some marchers will wave the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite that regime’s involvement in attacks on British soil. Others will show their enthusiasm for Hamas, barely hidden behind coded support for ‘resistance’ and ‘Intifada’. Some of the organisers hold a deep ideological hostility to the West as a whole.

Extremists have the right to protest, as we all do. And many of the people on these demonstrations may have more reasonable views. But overall, the anti-Israel movement in our country has proven to be a powerful incubator for the normalisation of antisemitic attitudes and violent rhetoric, and the fruits of this incitement are plain for all to see.

That antisemitism is at shockingly high levels is now beyond dispute. It is a year since Jihad al-Shamie brought his Islamist extremist hatred to Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, a terror attack that resulted in the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby. Since then, there have been arson attacks on Jewish-owned ambulances and synagogues in London and the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green.

The innate sense of safety that Jews always carried with them in Western societies has evaporated

This is also a global problem. A year after Heaton Park fell victim to violent Jew hatred, it was the turn of the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Ontario, Canada. Late last month, Sean Ward, a former soldier and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, opened fire on the building with a shotgun, seriously injuring a police officer who was guarding the congregation inside. ‘You’re going to die for the Jews,’ Ward shouted as he shot Constable Jeff Smith. In the end it was Ward who was killed, while Constable Smith is bravely recovering from his wounds.

On the very same day that Ward launched his assault in Canada, and just a few hours before the Yom Kippur fast began, two men were arrested by armed police in the centre of Manchester, and have since been charged with an alleged plot to target the Jewish community in the Manchester area.

Yom Kippur is supposed to be a time when Jews ask for forgiveness for sins in the year just passed and commit to being better people in the year to come. It is also, now, a day when Jews around the world quietly wonder whether they will get through it alive. It’s a sign of the times that Jews need an armed guard and extra policing just so they can gather in safety on the holiest day of their year.

While anti-Jewish hatred has always been around, it has usually been the preserve of cranks and extremists on the fringes of society, shunned by the masses. But in the past three years, as I show in my new book, From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism after October 7, this has changed. The innate sense of safety that Jews always carried with them in Western societies has evaporated since Hamas stormed into Israel on the morning of 7 October, 2023, and – whatever the Green party leader Zack Polanski may think – the reality of their safety has crumbled too.

As the Ontario attack shows, anti-Jewish violence can come from any quarter. Because antisemitism is not only a base prejudice but also a conspiracy theory that blames all the world’s problems on the familiar villain of Organised Jewry, it provides common ground for extremists of diverse backgrounds.

One feature of the past three years has been the ease with which antisemitic ideas now pepper the output of popular commentators and influencers on left and right, on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of Britain’s leading far-right activists have even appeared on the Islamist 5Pillars podcast, Blood Brothers, where the Islamist hosts and fascist guests share how the Jews have supposedly tricked them into hating each other.

Right now, though, the bulk of the violent threat faced by Jewish communities in Britain comes from Islamist extremists. Even before the events of the past 12 months, there was the case of Munawar Hussain, who stabbed two people at a Marks & Spencer in Burnley in 2020 because he believed that M&S funds Israel. There was Malik Faisal Akram, who flew from Blackburn to Texas in 2022 to take people hostage in a synagogue. And in 2024, Jewish-Israeli music producer Itay Kashti was the victim of a bungled kidnapping, leaving him badly beaten and handcuffed to a radiator by Muslim kidnappers ‘motivated by political and religious reasons’.

This isn’t just a problem for Jews. Before Jihad al-Shamie attacked Heaton Park synagogue last year, he and his friend, Mohammed Bashir, had planned to attack the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham. This was because they read on an anti-Israel website that Israeli soldiers were visiting there. Palestine Action claim to be disrupting arms shipments to Israel, but when they and their successors smash up factories and offices across the country, it is Britain’s own defence infrastructure they are harming.

Iran, having ‘almost certainly directed’ the arson attacks on synagogues and other Jewish premises, is now believed to have been involved in last week’s incident at RAF Fairford. What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews, as the saying goes – and as Britain is now discovering.

The government and police are making strenuous efforts to protect the Jewish community from this wave of violence. An extra £251 million has been committed to policing for the Jewish community, on top of all the existing resources that police, intelligence services and other authorities are already throwing at the problem. There is due to be a special meeting of the National Security Council on the subject, an important acknowledgement that rising antisemitism harms our national security.

But all of this will count for nothing if the flow of incitement and extremism cannot be cut off at source, or least severely reduced. It took the Heaton Park synagogue terror attack, a full two years after the 7 October atrocities, for minds in Whitehall and beyond to begin seriously grappling with the growing antisemitism in this country. Those were two lost years and we are left playing catch-up as a result, while terrorists of different hues plan their next outrage. We can’t afford to waste any more time.