It is impossible not to look at what is happening in Britain today – the relentless synagogue firebombings and attacks against the Jewish community in London – and not think about Australia. It specifically brings to mind the path that led to the horror at Bondi Beach, where fifteen people were murdered last December during a Chanukah festival.
In the span of just a month, at least five attacks across London have been carried out against synagogues and Jewish institutions. The Jewish community has warned that police are not protecting them, accusing officers of letting hate crimes go ‘largely unchecked’ after the latest synagogue firebombing in northwest London on Saturday night.
These incidents do not exist in isolation. Only last October, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, a synagogue in Manchester was targeted in a terror attack on Yom Kippur. This was a chilling reminder that Jewish houses of worship in Britain have increasingly become targets for terror.
Britain still has time to change course. The warning signs are already there
That alone should set off alarm bells at the highest levels of government. I say this as someone who has watched a similar warning go unheeded before.
In Australia, the Jewish community spent more than two years sounding the alarm. Again and again, we pleaded with authorities to recognise the rising tide of anti-Semitism and the increasingly extremist rhetoric accompanying it. We warned that when hatred and calls to ‘globalise the Intifada’ are allowed to fester – when they are excused, normalised or mainstreamed – it will inevitably lead to violence.
At moments like this, what communities need is decisive leadership. What they often receive instead are familiar statements condemning anti-Semitism and assuring the public that such behaviour ‘will not be tolerated’. Those statements matter, but when they are repeated while attacks continue unabated, they begin to ring hollow. Because the reality is that this is being tolerated.
The massacre in Bondi did not happen in a vacuum. It was the catastrophic manifestation of a climate allowed to deteriorate unchecked – a wholesale failure of leadership to confront hatred before it metastasised into the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil. Now Britain stands at a similar crossroads.
The pattern emerging in London should alarm every decent person in the country. A single anti-Semitic attack is abhorrent; five in a single month against Jewish institutions suggests something far more sinister. It signals perpetrators feel emboldened; that the risks are low and the climate permissive. That sense of impunity must be shattered.
There is another dimension that cannot be ignored. Elements linked to the Iranian regime have openly taken credit for the recent spate of attacks, while even Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer conceded in February that ‘over the last year alone, [the Iranian regime] have backed more than 20 potentially lethal attacks on UK soil.’
Britain, much like Australia, has long prided itself on being a nation where minorities can live openly and safely, contributing to public life without fear. For centuries, British Jews have done exactly that, woven into the fabric of the country’s society. Yet today many British Jews are asking a question that should trouble every citizen: are we still safe here?
This is not hysteria, but the inevitable result of watching synagogue after synagogue targeted while anti-Semitic rhetoric increasingly spills from the fringes into the mainstream.
British Jews, like Australian Jews, are not asking for special treatment. We do not wish to live behind closed walls. We simply want something more fundamental: equality. The same right as every other citizen to walk the streets safely, to send our children to school without fear and pray in our synagogues without wondering whether we might become the next target.
The lesson from Australia is stark: waiting until violence erupts is already too late. As the Chief Rabbi, Sir Efraim Mirvis warned after the most recent synagogue attack in Harrow on Saturday night:
Thank God, no lives have been lost, but we cannot, and must not, wait for that to change before we understand just how dangerous this moment is for all of our society.
Leadership means confronting the problem before tragedy strikes. It means drawing clear red lines against anti-Semitism in all its forms, whether from radical Islamist extremists, populist agitators or those who cloak it in the language of political activism under the veneer of ‘anti-Zionism’. It means more than statements after the fact. It means enforcing the law decisively against those who attack Jewish institutions and ensuring swift consequences.
Most importantly, it means recognising that anti-Semitism is rarely isolated. It is a warning sign of a broader breakdown in the values that hold our democratic society together.
Britain still has time to change course. The warning signs are already there. The question is whether Britain’s leaders will act with the urgency this moment demands – or wait until tragedy forces their hand.
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