Antisemitism has surged across the West since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th 2023. The mindset draws on the age-old myth of a sinister Jewish cabal bent on power and subjugation. Sir Mark Rowley, Britain's top policeman, calls it a "ghastly Venn diagram of hate": much of the left frames Jews as colonisers who can never be victims, much of the nativist right thinks Jewish "globalists" are plotting the West's downfall, and hostile states use proxies to strike abroad.
There were just 287,000 people who described themselves as Jewish in either a religious or ethnic sense in the 2021 census of England and Wales. Antisemitic incidents rose by 4% in 2025, according to the Community Security Trust. The monthly average of 308 incidents was double the average in the year before October 7th 2023. In a YouGov survey commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, 26% of Britons agreed that "Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media", up from 18% a year earlier.
On April 29th 2026 two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, a hub of Britain's Jewish community. Police charged Essa Suleiman, a 45-year-old of Somali heritage, with attempted murder and declared the assault a terrorist incident. The stabbings followed a series of firebombings at Jewish sites in London since March. A new group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has claimed responsibility for attacks against Jewish institutions in Britain and on the continent; experts say its social-media presence has the marks of militias Iran's regime sponsors elsewhere. After an attack on a Manchester synagogue in October 2025 killed two congregants, the government commissioned a review of public-order legislation.
Keir Starmer pledged a "visible" police presence around Jewish communities and an extra £25m for security. He said in a BBC interview on May 2nd 2026 that Britain should protect freedom of speech but people chanting "Globalise the intifada" should be prosecuted, and in some cases protests should be banned. In July 2025 the government proscribed Palestine Action, a protest group that had spray-painted military planes, as a terrorist organisation; thousands have been arrested for holding pro-PA placards.
In March 2026 synagogues were targeted in Michigan and the Netherlands. In December 2025 fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach in Australia. In the 2010s some 38,000 French Jews moved to Israel amid rising antisemitism, peaking in 2015 after a deadly shooting at a kosher supermarket.
Conspiracism is the common denominator, linking modern antisemitism to the hatreds of Nazi Germany or tsarist Russia. Conspiracist thinking flourishes amid upheavals—rise and fall of empires, ideological ruptures, populism and war—and often defaults to the hoariest conspiracy theory with its atavistic associations of Jews with greed and divided loyalties. The trope features in depictions of Binyamin Netanyahu and George Soros as puppetmasters, and in the idea that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is the wellspring of the world's ills.
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.