Britain’s antisemitism crisis could trigger legal reckoning at home and abroad
That morning in Golders Green, one of London’s most visibly Jewish neighborhoods, a man ran through the streets with a knife looking for Jews to stab. He found them. A 70-year-old man. Another in his 30s. Both were attacked outside a synagogue.
By then, the response had become predictable. "Deeply concerning." A line so worn it had lost all meaning. The next day, the U.K. government raised the national threat level "from substantial, meaning an attack is likely, to severe, meaning an attack is highly likely in the next 6 months," the last time it was at that level was in November 2021.
In the weeks leading up to it, a Jewish charity's ambulances had been firebombed in the same neighborhood. A memorial to the victims of the Oct. 7 attacks was burned. Across the country, antisemitic violence has been rising in plain sight. This was not random. It was not isolated. It was a pattern.
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And the response from the British government — statements, candles, patrols — had ceased to be serious. It had become theater.
Two weeks earlier, Shurat HaDin had filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for enabling terror through material support to Iran. The principle was simple: responsibility did not end with the attacker. It extended to those who made the attack possible.
That principle did not stop in Spain.
Britain may not have exported detonators. But it had allowed something else: a climate where calls to "globalize the intifada" echoed through its streets, where incitement was tolerated and where Jewish life was increasingly treated as expendable.
When a government repeatedly failed to protect a minority from foreseeable, escalating violence, the question was no longer political. It was legal.
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British Jews have already begun rendering their own answer. A growing number of families are quietly making plans to leave for Israel — not in panic, but with clarity. The absolute numbers remain small relative to the size of the community, and most British Jews are determined to stay and fight for the country they love. But the direction matters. Families that two years ago would never have considered emigrating are now weighing it seriously. They have seen this before. They know how it ends.
After Oct. 7, we had been told not to overreact. Marches were just marches. Words were just words.
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The marches had become arson. The rhetoric had become violence. And that morning, it had become a man with a knife hunting Jews outside a synagogue in Golders Green.
The attacker has since been arrested and faces charges. Prime Minister Starmer, after years of treating antisemitism as a public-relations problem, is at last confronting it as the security emergency it has become. He has raised the national threat level. He has promised concrete measures to combat antisemitism. He himself has acknowledged that the era of indifference must end.
That recognition is overdue — and welcome. But recognition is not enforcement.
The test now is not what the British government says, but what it does. Statements without arrests are theater. Threat-level upgrades without prosecutions are paperwork. Promises of action without deportations of the foreign agitators leading these marches are promises broken in advance. If the rhetoric is not matched by results — quickly, visibly, and at scale — the fanatics will have learned the only lesson that matters to them: that Britain will flinch, and that Jewish safety can be traded away to keep the peace with those who threaten it.
Shurat HaDin did not file the Sánchez complaint as a gesture. We filed it because we have spent two decades building a body of law — in American courts, in European courts and now at The Hague — that holds governments, banks and enablers financially and criminally accountable when they grease the machinery of terror against Jews. We have frozen the assets of terror financiers. We have won judgments against state sponsors. We have made the cost of looking away real.
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The principle behind the Sánchez complaint is straightforward: governments that knowingly create the conditions for attacks on Jews bear legal responsibility for the violence that follows. Spain enabled Iran. The United Kingdom has enabled something different but no less dangerous — a domestic climate in which "globalize the intifada" is chanted in the streets, in which ambulances are firebombed, in which Oct. 7 memorials are torched and in which the official response, until this week, was a candle and a press release.
We are already mapping the chain — from the permits issued for the marches, to the speech that crossed the line into incitement, to the warnings ignored, to the attacks that followed. The same legal architecture that put Pedro Sánchez on notice can be turned on Westminster. Sovereignty is not a shield when a government is repeatedly warned of foreseeable, escalating violence against an identifiable minority and chooses, again and again, to do nothing.
The era of indifference is ending — one way or another. Either the British government ends it through enforcement, or we will end it through the courts.
To the Jews of Britain: your instincts were right. Your fears were not paranoia. And you are not alone. You have a government that, however belatedly, is beginning to move. You have legal allies prepared to act in every courtroom that will hear us if it does not. And — unlike every Jewish generation before the modern era — you have a Jewish state with an open door. Whether you choose to stay and fight for the Britain you love, or to come home to Israel, you will be defended either way.
This is what "Never Again" looks like when it is not a slogan. It looks like prosecutors. It looks like filings. It looks like the people who tried to make Jewish life unlivable in London discovering that the law has a longer memory than they do.
We are not finished finding antisemitism and Jew-hatred wherever they hide — in governments, in institutions, in the streets — and we will not stop prosecuting those who enable them. Not in Madrid. Not in London. Not anywhere. We will keep building the cases. We will keep filing the complaints. We will keep dragging the enablers into court until the cost of looking away becomes greater than the cost of standing up.
That is the promise. And we intend to keep it.