Rejecting the British state’s philosemitic embrace in the wake of the Manchester attack
I wanted to write something on the events in Manchester on the 2nd October, on the Yom Kippur that has just passed. Most important is to state the obvious: that this was a terrible crime, that everyone should oppose such attacks, and that we should name and mourn the victims, Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz. Their names alone typify them as British Jews – classic Anglo first names of a certain generation with a touch of Ashkenazi in their surnames. They are British Jewish everymen – it could have been any of us. At the same time, it’s important to be as specific as possible about their lives. This happened to particular much-loved individuals, at one synagogue: Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Crumpsall, in a Manchester suburb I have never visited but feel like I know well from reading Howard Jacobson novels. It’s worth noting that this is completely unprecedented; as far as I am aware there have been no cases of antisemitic killing of Jews in Britain since the Second World War, after the deportation of Jews from the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands during WW2. I am not aware of any cases since the 1656 readmission, even though I would imagine there were at least some in the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite the doom mongers, Britain has been, and remains, one of the safest and most comfortable places to be Jewish in the world
I am interested in how the news was received and processed in shuls across Britain. There’s something distinctive about a news story that you first hear together with a group of people who feel collectively affected by it, rather than experiencing it alone watching tv or listening to the radio. I wasn’t born then, but I’m sure something similar occurred in 1973 when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel, henceforth known as the Yom Kippur war. Of course, the traditional practice is to stay off electronic devices during Shabbes and Yontef and many do, but I would wager that in even the most Orthodox communities somebody checked their phone, or was told by a security person, and the news got around the congregation by the end of the day. In my synagogue, the news was mentioned early on, with a more substantial comment later in the day when a little more was known, but otherwise nothing was changed, we prayed the same prayers and heard the sermons that had been planned. This seems to have been the case in most communities – there is a (extensive) fixed liturgy to get through, lay leaders, chazzans and choirs will have been prepping their parts for months and most rabbis will have composed their sermons long in advance. Yes, a few more online rabbis probably saw the news and rewrote sermons on the hoof in response, but even then, the prayers are the prayers, Yom Kippur is Yom Kippur. I don’t know what actually transpired but I am willing to bet that members of Heaton Park shul itself managed to continue with the Yom Kippur services, even if they had to relocate them to private homes. Yom Kippur is too important to abandon, even in the face of tragedy. Despite what some outsiders think, and what some secular Jews would like, Judaism is not primarily about mourning Jewish tragedy and celebrating Jewish success. It is about life itself in all its fullness, offering wisdom, practices and poetry that seek to answer universal questions of why we are here and what we ought to do with our short time on earth. We cannot let such attacks narrow us into fear for ourselves only. We have a tradition of liberation, enquiry and joy to uphold. So Yom Kippur kept going, and so too does Sukkot, the season of our joy, marked by celebrations of the natural world and our fragility.
That ought to be it. We mourn the dead, condemn the perpetrator, allow the police to investigate what happened and get on with our (Jewish) lives. But sadly it seldom stops there. People immediately seek to spread the blame, to implicate larger groups of people. This could be reasonable; if it should turn out the perpetrator was part of an extremist organisation, then other members should be held partly responsible. Some responsibility might also be placed on the fact that we have armed police in Britain – after all police bullets were responsible for killing one victim and injuring another as they stood behind the synagogue door. Had they not used guns – or used non-lethal force to restrain the attcker – then Adrian Daulby might have survived and the perpetrator could have faced justice, and we might have learned a great deal more about his motivations for this crime. As in the US, having more guns present tends to mean more victims die, alongside perpetrators.
But neither of these forms of blame have received much attention. Instead, the entire focus of the political class, egged on by reckless Jewish communal leaders, has been on the pro-Palestine movement, which is alleged to have created the climate for the attack. Politicians have leaned on their pre-existing agendas, seeking to ban or limit demonstrations, suggesting that the discourse of Israeli genocide should stop and, most ludicrously, blaming the government’s recognition of Palestinian statehood. Are they really arguing that someone who was likely a confirmed Islamist was radicalised by Palestinian Solidarity Campaign demonstrations? That had the notion of genocide not been in public discourse the attacker would simply have thought, ‘Israel is just exercising its legitimate right to self-defence?’ That when Keir Starmer recognised Palestinian statehood the attacker thought, ok now I will get away with killing Jews at a synagogue? These claims insult our intelligence.
We don’t yet know what the attacker’s motivations were. But one synagogue member testified that he heard him say ‘this is what you’re going to get for killing our children’ which suggests that Gaza was a primary motivation. If so, we hardly need to look to the UK Palestinian Solidarity movement for the cause of radicalisation. The attacker would simply have needed to turn on his TV and watch any mainstream channel to see repeated footage of Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli army. They would have been radicalised not by conspiracy theories but by the reality of what the Israeli state has been doing.
The real question is: what induced him to connect that slaughter to British Jews? That needs to be our focus, for it was presumably that horrendous leap of logic that led him to carry out the attack. What made him think that Jews at prayer were responsible for the death of Palestinians in Gaza? What factors in the last two years could have led him to the conclusion that Jews and Israel were one, and that an attack on one was an attack on the other? Here we arrive at the real wider group who bear responsibility for these deaths; the conflators. The army of politicians, who have constantly spread the idea that the two are the same, that October 7th was primarily an attack on Jews rather than on Israelis, that criticisms of Israel are mostly antisemitic, that people marching are doing so because they hate Jews rather than because they care about Palestinians, and now that Manchester happened because we have been too soft on Palestine activism. These politicians say that slogans that do not mention Jews – such as ‘Free Palestine’, ‘From the River to the Sea’ and ‘Death to the IDF’, are in fact attacks on Jews, which is to (falsely) allege that all Jews oppose a Free Palestine and support genocide. Claiming that these slogans are antisemitic is in itself antisemitic. Now these politicians have argued that protests against genocide and for Palestinian rights should be postponed or cancelled, out of respect for Jewish sensibilities, both around Manchester and the October 7th anniversary. This is actually incredibly offensive, since it assumes that British Jews support genocide and oppose Palestinian rights. Starmer and others are effectively saying ‘you can’t protest against genocide as it would upset the Jews’. The leaders of this conflation have been non-Jewish politicians, whether Keir Starmer, Shabna Mahmood, David Lammy or Yvette Cooper, egged on by the odious Robert Jenrick (who has engaged in some pretty antisemitic rhetoric in the past himself towards Attorney General Richard Hermer). A verbal tic has been the tendency for ministers to speak of ‘our Jewish community’, a phrase with echoes of court Jews, as if we are a prized possession of the state. Would they speak of our Muslim community? Our Catholic community? To paraphrase David Baddiel, it’s hard to imagine them saying this about any other minority.
These politicians have of course been echoing the rhetoric of Jewish communal leaders, particularly the Chief Rabbi and Board of Deputies, both of whom have an appalling record over the past two years. The Board’s recent statement, calling for all those who were arrested for protesting against the proscription of Palestine Action to be also charged with inciting racial hatred, constituted an absolute nadir. But the conflation is being led by the British state. It is only the most recent episode in a long history of state philosemitism, in which the government follows its own self-interest but claims to be acting in defence or protection of Jews. It sets up Jews as a ‘model minority’, in contrast to whichever group the government is demonising at any one time. It’s the modern equivalent of ‘middleman theory’ – where a minority is placed between the state and the populace, designed to receive the brunt of popular anger, a human shield for the powerful to hide behind. It’s been clear for many years that if the state lauds Jews whilst treating Muslims as the enemy within, there is a chance that a few radicalised Muslims will attack Jews, seeing them as their primary oppressor. We have been so focused on ‘fighting antisemitism’ (as if it is an impersonal force that can be defeated) we have overlooked the danger of state philosemitism. Politicians are busy blaming Palestine campaigners; they would be better off looking to their own conflationist and philosemitic rhetoric.
In any such attack, people understandably clutch for solutions, actions that will supposedly prevent this from ever happening again. The first will be security: bigger walls, stronger fences, more guards, perhaps armed, more police protection. The trouble is that British Jews have had an incredibly high level of security for around 45 years (inspired by terrorist attacks in Europe in the early 1980s). The Manchester attack should be understood as a failure of our communal security system. The synagogue had a large fence as most do; the attacker broke through by driving a car at the gate. To respond to this attack by increasing security (how?) would be the definition of madness; doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The second common suggestion is to change laws, arrest more people, stop more marchers; what some campaigners have called ‘carceral anti-antisemitism’. This suggestion is clearly targeted primarily at Muslims, so will increase the danger outlined above; Muslims would be targeted by the police and Prevent even further than at present, and the government would tell them that it is doing so on behalf of Jews. Is this really supposed to make us safer? Have we forgotten that over the longue durée authoritarian states were bad for Jews, and liberal ones that protected basic freedoms far better?
I would like to see British Jewish bodies pushing back hard against conflation and vocally rejecting the state’s philosemitic embrace. But, contrary to the claims of conspiracists, we Jews are not that powerful, so this may not be enough. The British state engages in philosemitic conflation not because Jews demand it, but because it suits its own geopolitical interests. We need to reject the state’s approach in a very tangible way. Instead of only contextualising this attack alongside other antisemitic attacks around the world, we could view it as connected with terrorist and violent attacks in Britain in recent decades, not only against Jews. The most obvious is the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017 which killed 22 people. But there are many more: the 2016 murder of Jo Cox, the 2017 London Bridge Attack, the Finsbury Park Mosque attack of the same year, the 2021 murder of David Amess MP, the Southport stabbings of July 2024 and subsequent anti-migrant riots and the recent arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven to name but a few. The thread linking these is violence arising from conspiracy theories; whether Islamist or far-right/fascist; we should treat all the victims of these, from all backgrounds, as victims of contemporary violent extremism in Britain.
This understanding could lead to a new approach to security. The idea that security at Jewish buildings must be done by Jews for Jews is ideological; based on the Zionist notion that Jews should be strong and defend themselves. But it has some obvious disadvantages; it makes those Jews doing the external security an easy Jewish target – one of the victims was killed when the attacker drove his van at the synagogue gate. The same is true for attacks on mosques – if security is provided by Muslims, they may well become the primary victims of a far-right attacker. And this bifurcation adds to intercommunal fears, Jews see Muslims as a threat, and Muslims see, through state philosemitism, Jews as a group in whose name the government surveils and mistrusts them.
What if Jews and Muslims instead did security together, for each other? This would have immediate advantages. If an Islamist extremist was considering attacking a synagogue, they would know that in the process of trying to break in they would likely kill and injure fellow Muslims as well as Jews, a significant deterrent. And when far-right extremists consider attacking a mosque or a hostel hosting asylum seekers, they would know that in the process they might kill or injure Jews, a group they see themselves as protecting. Such co-operation could also help with intelligence; Muslims might know more about individuals in their communities who had been radicalised and were at risk of attacking Jews; Jews might well know of other Jews who were supportive of the EDL and Reform (it seems there are a growing number) and thus inclined to join far-right protests and riots. It needn’t be just Jews and Muslims – anyone who cares about the safety of their neighbours could be part, and ideally pro-Palestine campaigners would also get involved in protecting both synagogues and mosques. Such a community initiative would also move security away from the police and make clear that we do not want to rely on the state and its agencies to protect us. We – a coalition of minorities – will do it ourselves, for each other. A community security model has the capacity to overcome statist tokenisation and repression and make all of us a great deal safer. As the Jewish singer-songwriter Aly Halpert wrote in her song Beautiful People, written in the wake of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting:
They have taken a universe
They have taken a mountain
Our voices echo in the hills
They will not divide us
We will not abide this
We know that together we’ll be free
Mourning tragedy
Our safety is with each other