An attempted firebombing of the Finchley Reform Synagogue is not an isolated incident. It is a warning.
It comes only weeks after ambulances operated by a Jewish community emergency service, one that serves the wider public, were deliberately set alight in Golders Green. The trajectory is no longer arguable. The threat to Britain’s Jewish community is not hypothetical. It is here. It is active. It is escalating.
While synagogues are being targeted and lifesaving services attacked, the threat is already embedded within our borders. The Prime Minister pointed, in a Jewish Chronicle opinion piece this week, to the banning of Kanye West as proof of his government’s seriousness at combatting antisemitism. Whatever the merits of that decision, elevating it at a moment of real and escalating threat is not seriousness. It is a profound misreading of the danger.
The reality is clear. The drivers of this hatred are already embedded within our borders. Others continue to be imported into them. That is the issue that must be confronted.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community is told to remain vigilant. Vigilance is not a policy. It is an admission that the state is failing to provide the security it owes its citizens.
If an attempted arson attack on a synagogue is still not enough to force meaningful action, the question is no longer what the threat is. The question is whether there is the will to face it.
When even a country at war such as Ukraine has moved to formally criminalise antisemitism, the United Kingdom’s continued failure to act with comparable clarity is not oversight. It is a repeated political choice, and one that leaves British Jews to live with the consequences.
