Something Is Rotten in the State of Britain
Britain’s double standard in policing and politics now falls hardest on its Jews.
Another week, another hate march outside a British synagogue. This time St John’s Wood. You probably did not hear about it, the mainstream media decided Jews being harassed on their way to prayer is just not news.
The police, as ever, insisted they had no authority to restrict the mob from terrorizing Jews on their way to prayer. Slightly implausible considering that just last month the Met banned UKIP from holding a rally in Tower Hamlets because it might upset the local Muslim community. Two-tier policing is not a glitch; it is the system.
This is the new normal as former taboos have been naturalized and old tropes have returned. The distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been fiction, but now even the pretence is gone
The shift is unmistakable: first, the police were incapable of detouring massive demonstrations from passing in front of synagogues during service on Saturdays. Then they were helpless from stopping actual calls for violence because of protected speech. Two years of open calls for violence against Jews ended exactly as such things always do, with dead Jews, on Yom Kipur in a synagogue.
People have been detained for the crime of “open displays of Judaism.” A police ban on Israeli fans attending a soccer match in Birmingham, and now we have protests outside St. John’s Wood Synagogue. This is not a Zionist problem; this is a Jewish one.
The police and government insist they are only looking to protect free speech and freedom of assembly. At the same time, they boast the highest hate-speech arrest rate in the world. People have been arrested for misgendering, jokes, retweets, puns, quoting rap lyrics, or hurting a stranger’s feelings online.
Intimidate Jews outside a synagogue? Suddenly the police rediscover civil liberties. The same force that arrests pensioners for “offensive” placards becomes a libertarian think-tank the moment the target is Jewish. This is not inconsistency, it is a hierarchy of sensitivities, and Jews sit at the bottom of it.
Imagine what the response would have been if the Jews of Britain had gathered on October 8th outside their local mosques to protest. Obviously, the protests would not be directed to all Muslims, only radical Islamists. We don’t hate Muslims, just jihadists.
The headlines would have been apocalyptic, parliament would have an emergency debate, mass arrests would ensue, and the BBC would have had a field day. The politicians would be falling over themselves to condemn this unwarranted Islamophobia. The contrast is not accidental.
Things are very different when the Jews are the object, not the actors; suddenly it becomes “complicated.” That asymmetry explains everything about the present moment. This selective moral clarity and one-way sensitivity is also how the world treats Israel.
There is an unhealthy obsession in the digital asylum of social media and on the world stage regarding the “legitimacy” of Israel. Israel and its defenders are forced into waving bibles and maps to justify their sovereignty. No other state is forced to produce a birth certificate or baby pictures in order to validate their ancestry and authenticity.
Over the last century, over 110 countries have been created, and over half of the UN is younger than Israel. There are no demonstrations demanding the dismantling of Jordan or Pakistan. I have yet to encounter a crowd chanting “Free, Free Chad.” Only the Jewish state must earn what every other country receives by default: legitimacy.
England’s recent recognition of the non-existent state of Palestine is of a similar vein. This pseudo diplomacy is in the style of DEI theatre with a foreign flag, where the entire objective is to virtue signal at zero cost. States are not produced by ceremony; they come about by power, capacity, stability, and responsibility, in equal measure.
The Palestinians have rejected every state that was ever offered, maintained no coherent government, prioritized terror over nation-building, and developed multi-generational grievance into a national identity.
Recognition becomes a way to outsource responsibility: Europe feels moral, Palestinians feel validated, and Israel is told to foot the bill. This is geopolitical malpractice, and there is only one ally that England would have the gall to subject it to.
Britain cannot bring itself to recognize Somaliland, South Ossetia or Abkhazia, after thirty years of functioning government but has no difficulty recognizing a state that exists only on protest signs.
Israel exists because it survived every attempt to erase it, a standard no other modern nation-state has ever been asked to meet. Its recognition was written in the only language borders have ever respected: endurance, survival, agency, and reality.
The world demands a Palestinian state not because Palestinians have earned one, but because asking Israel to concede one is easier than getting the Palestinians to build one. It is easier to moralize at Israel than to expect anything of Ramallah or Gaza.
And so the circle closes. The hate-filled protests outside synagogues and the diplomatic recognition ceremonies are one and the same phenomena. This is street-level and state-level versions of the same evil banality. Jews being called upon to justify their very existence on the streets of North London and in their rightful homeland of Israel.
This fixation has nothing to do with justice, colonialism, or liberal values. It is the expression of an ancient impulse that is far older and sinister. Everything else is just pretext.
