For Britain’s 300,000 Jews, the past three weeks have brought an emotional storm. First they experienced horror and grief, as the Manchester synagogue attack left two worshippers dead on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Then came joy and relief, as the hostages were freed and the guns of Gaza were finally stilled. Finally, anger as West Midlands Police banned supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv from an upcoming game against Aston Villa on the grounds they posed a “high risk”.
In its own way, each of these events has served to unite the country’s disparate Jewish community. Yet they came, too, after months and years of division — focused on Israel’s conduct during its bloody war in Gaza. For some British Jews, this has triggered deep unease, even pushing some to fundamentally reconsider their relationship to the Jewish state. All the while, as the Manchester attack so vividly shows, the spectre of antisemitism is rising back home too.
For now, says Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate and the policy director of the Community Security Trust (CST), which provides physical protection for Jewish communities, the splits have started to heal. “The weather,” he says, “has definitely changed.” Even so, these divides are far from eradicated, and depending on what happens in the Middle East, they may re-emerge, with consequences not just for Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community, but for anyone interested in this country’s foreign policy.
There has always been an anti-Zionist Jewish Left. Organisations such as Na’amod consider Israel to be an apartheid state while Jewish Voice for Labour stood by Jeremy Corbyn while he was party leader. But the tensions that have emerged since October 7 were within the large Jewish majority that would call itself broadly Zionist: between those who had hitherto seen Israel as both refuge and inspiration, a light unto nations. Yet two years on from the Hamas massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, leading British rabbis were claiming that Israel’s operations conflicted with fundamental Jewish principles — a claim met by angry, vehement denials from people they’d long considered friends.
Outside the Jewish community, the rift is underreported, but I observed it close to home. Like many Jews, I absorbed a belief in Israel as part of my upbringing, and joined a Zionist youth group in my teens. I vividly remember the collective shock the last time an attack took place on Yom Kippur — in 1973, when Israel was invaded simultaneously by Egypt and Syria with support from a further 10 states, and at first seemed destined for oblivion.
A year after the Yom Kippur War, in 1974, my father co-founded the New North London Synagogue, now a thriving, progressive Orthodox institution with over 3,700 members. Last year, it was wracked by internal dispute when one of its rabbis, Lara Haft Yom Tov, wrote an essay that described Israeli politicians as “war criminals”, prompting resignations and claims that such statements “inflame antisemitic hysteria”.
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The synagogue decided not to sack Yom Tov, but another crisis emerged in July this year. Head Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg joined more than 1,000 religious leaders both in Israel and across the diaspora in signing a letter that was highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. He too faced strong criticism — though also recieved , as a man who has led his synagogue for 37 years, warm support.
Amid these verbal battles over the future of the Middle East, tensions had long been rising elsewhere. As Rich says, Jews were facing antisemitism long before Manchester, especially on university campuses and in and around schools. There were over 100 antisemitic incidents against Jewish schoolchildren in the first six months of the year, compared to fewer than 75 over the same period in 2023. Along with the apparent tolerance of extreme anti-Israel discourse, Rich tells me that this explains why an increasing number of British Jews began to wonder whether they still had a future in the UK, even if they were unsure where else they might go. Others, however, experienced a different type of insecurity, affecting their inner relationship with the Jewish state.
In the aftermath of October 7, most British Jews reacted instinctively, offering whatever support they could to its victims, and backing what they saw as a righteous military response. The attack awakened collective memories of the Holocaust, while many are connected by bonds of family and friendship to the victims. Others have relatives in Israel’s citizen army, which has been repeatedly mobilised over the last two years.
At first, the almost-immediate protests by pro-Palestinian activists against Israeli military strikes appeared to cement this unity. According to Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which carries out frequent surveys of Anglo-Jewish opinion, there was a “natural tendency to circle the wagons, to seek out solidarity”. Many Jews chose to spend far more time with others from their own community.
A recent paper by the American trauma therapists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman suggested this process was intensified by the long-recognised condition known as “traumatic invalidation”. Psychologically wounded by the Hamas attacks, British Jews discovered that instead of expressing care and compassion, their non-Jewish friends and colleagues were exhibiting “a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding and even outright denying the atrocities of October 7”. Struggling to cope with shock and bereavement, they were told their feelings were invalid or inappropriate, “often by influential figures or groups” on whom they thought they could rely.
Yet as the war dragged on, Boyd says, these same feelings began erupting within the Jewish community itself. “The divisions exist within families and friendship groups,” he explains to me, “and they raise difficult questions.”
Rich believes the breakdown in British Jewry’s pro-Israel consensus can be dated to the end of the last ceasefire in March, and Israel’s decisions to cut off aid from international bodies such as the UN. This corresponded with the fraying of unity in Israel itself. With no clear end to the killing in sight, Rich adds, it seemed the country was “no longer unified” behind the war, as demonstrators demanded an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages at all costs.
Polling data from the JPR supports Rich’s analysis. In a survey timed for the first anniversary of October 7 last year, only a minority of British Jews thought Israel’s prosecution of the war might conflict with Jewish values. This year, the figure was above 50%. Since 2022, meanwhile, the proportion of Jews who identify as anti-Zionists has increased from 8% to 12%. The biggest shift has taken place among the Jewish youth who, of course, weren’t alive for the 1973 war which posed an existential threat to Israel, instead witnessing Israel through numerous rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas, which have seen high Palestinian casualties.
At the same time, says Rich, British Jews know that the IDF is “made up of their cousins and their friends’ kids, and they know they’re not baby killers”. Yet by late spring 2025, it was also “quite obvious that terrible things were happening in Gaza”. This imposed an unbearable dilemma: “How do you express this in Britain when there are so many people out there who think Israel is the new Nazi Germany, and that if you even care remotely about Israel, you’re some kind of fascist?”
Faced with such questions, in the months before the ceasefire, some Jews found they could no longer agree to differ, let alone compromise, even if disagreement and debate have defined Jewish culture for many centuries. First came the rabbis’ letter signed by Wittenberg and more than 40 of his British colleagues. It condemned the “nihilistic” brutality exhibited by Hamas and supported Israel’s need to battle these “evil forces”. But the rabbis also said they could not condone the scale of civilian casualties, or, most controversially of all, what they claimed was “the use of starvation as a weapon of war”. They said the limits Israel had placed on humanitarian relief “contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it”, especially the sanctity of human life and the requirement to exercise “mercy and compassion”.
To Israel’s defenders, both there and in Britain, this statement was based on lies. According to Netanyahu’s government, the UN’s claim that it had caused a famine in Gaza was fabricated. Israel’s supporters said it amounted to a “blood libel” — a modern version of the ancient calumny that Jews use Christian children’s blood to make unleavened bread at Passover. I asked one rabbi who signed the letter what he made of this. He said he felt he had had no choice but to speak out, and that if he hadn’t, his silence might make gentiles imagine that Judaism is a “terrible religion”.
On 10 August, these bubbling frustrations spilled out in public, at the end of what was supposed to be a “national march” in support of the hostages. Outside the gates of Downing Street, in front of hundreds of people, two senior rabbis were booed offstage. Charley Baginsky and Josh Levy, the joint leaders of Britain’s Progressive Judaism movement, had spoken of their horror at the October 7 atrocities. Their hecklers were fellow Jews, in whose eyes the pair’s sin was to call for an immediate end to the war, the resumption of unlimited aid into Gaza, and the creation of a Palestinian state. After the rabbis were hustled away, another speaker was loudly cheered when she praised the crowd for ejecting them. According to Baginsky, “there were moments when I thought we were literally going to get lynched”.
The incident triggered shockwaves. The Board of Deputies, British Jews’ main representative body, called the rabbis’ treatment “disgraceful”, and a statement by more than two dozen Jewish organisations warned it would “give strength to our enemies”. And if that implies there is a link between commenting on Israel and the safety of Jews here in Britain — without, for a moment, denying the agency of antisemitic attackers themselves — Baginsky says she has been warned that by criticising Israel, she encourages hatred of Jews, as if “the only response to antisemitism is to support Israel unequivocally”.
If the rabbis’ letter represents one end of Jewish opinion, Jake Wallis Simons represents the other. The former editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of a new book on Western antisemitism is one of Britain’s more strident pro-Israelis, saying that even measured criticism of the Jewish state is liable to “become ammo for the other side”. (Full disclosure: I worked for Wallis Simons at the Jewish Chronicle.)
Wallis Simons is unsusprisingly forthright in denying that Israel did cause a famine in Gaza. “So far as I’m aware,” he tells me, “all the pictures of people starving have turned out to be of those with congenital issues or health problems like cancer. Before the war, there was death or starvation in Gaza because it’s run by jihadis and there was no proper welfare programme for poor people.”
In his view, the Trump-brokered ceasefire underlines something most of the West has forgotten — “the virtues of strength”. Now, he says, democracies “need to embark upon a soul-searching of their own. How can it be that almost every single leader allowed himself or herself to be brainwashed and gaslit by Hamas and its international sympathisers so that all the pressure and condemnation was directed at Israel?”
Nevertheless, Wallis Simons is willing to criticise broader Israeli policy, arguing that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s two far-Right cabinet ministers, have done “huge damage” — because they have “given Israel’s haters exactly the words and so-called evidence that they need” to accuse it of genocide.
If all this is now, what of the future?
As far as UK antisemitism is concerned, Rich is optimistic that the universal condemnation by British political leaders not only of the Manchester atrocity but also the banning of Maccabi fans is a “pivotal moment”. The Government, he thinks, is very serious about combatting antisemitic violence. To be sure, some Maccabi fans have expressed racist views and clashed with rivals, as seen in Amsterdam when their team played Ajax last year. But as he points out, most of the Israeli fans were victims, not instigators of violence. Moreover, there have been English clubs with aggressive supporters too. Somehow or other, the police have usually managed to deal with them.
“The ban is an absolute disgrace, but at least it’s being seen for what it is.”
In Rich’s view, then, “the ban is an absolute disgrace, but at least it’s being seen for what it is: extremists getting to say who can watch football. The police are either saying they can’t police the streets because they have lost control, or that they don’t want to for fear of upsetting them.”
That leaves the question of British Jews’ future relationship with Israel. If, under the terms of Trump’s peace plan, Hamas really does disarm and abandons its hopes of power, the dilemmas and divisions of recent months will likely vanish. But if, as many fear, the war restarts and Israel renews its onslaught, they are far more likely to sharpen.
In such circumstances, Israel’s progress towards international pariah status would probably continue, affecting everything from the country’s participation in the Eurovision song contest to the close cooperation in intelligence and security between Israel and allies such as Britain. Historically, the UK’s Jewish community has played a significant role in influencing British government policy, not only over the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but on issues such as Iran. Arguably, this influence has already weakened, as shown by Keir Starmer’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state, although, for now, no such thing exists — a move Starmer himself long resisted, and one condemned by many Jews as a “reward” for Hamas. If the community becomes seriously divided again, this influence would further diminish — even as the Government looks anxiously at the challenge of organised political Islam in Labour strongholds.
For many British Jews, the past two years have triggered a psychological readjustment, which has made something that once seemed unproblematic more challenging: balancing their British and Jewish identities. Then again, as Rich points out, “few Jews alive today know what it is to live in a world without Israel, and the Manchester attack is a reminder for everyone, whatever they think about the war in Gaza, of why Israel exists”.
Two years after the October 7 massacre, Britain’s Jews feel more vulnerable than they have for many decades, yet are united in wanting to give peace a chance. Their misfortune is that, over the short term, its prospects largely rest with others.
