Jonathan Sacerdoti

The Archbishop of Canterbury has given the country a perfect lesson in interfaith engagement – in what it is, rather than what its practitioners imagine it to be – and, like most perfect lessons, she taught it by accident. Those of us who have sat through a lifetime of clunky ‘interfaith’ initiatives – and I have done so from the Jewish side of the table for at least 20 years – learn to recognise the tell. The harder an event works to demonstrate that two communities get along, the more clearly it announces that somebody doubts it. I have said for decades, usually to sneers, that these choreographed encounters are not coexistence but a performance of it; that the performance tends to prove the opposite of what it intends; and that a stage, once built, attracts performers.

On Sunday afternoon, five young people in hoodies walked up to Lauderdale Road Synagogue in Maida Vale. One kept lookout. Two fired rocket fireworks at the building, and in the smoke and the bangs all five ran off. It was the second day of Rosh Hashanah. The building was empty as the service had finished. Nobody was hurt. No damage, as the community's message put it, 'beyond the incident itself’. That is my synagogue. I had my bar mitzvah there. I sang in its choir as a boy. I go there to pray, and I go there to be with my community. I go there to celebrate a friend’s new baby, an acquaintance’s wedding, or to mark the passing of a year since a familiar stranger’s mother’s death. But this year, for the first time, I was not there for Rosh Hashanah.

I do a fair number of interviews these days – television, radio, podcasts, panels, my own interview series – across several countries and formats, mostly on subjects I also write about here or elsewhere. Back when old-fashioned media was king, more of that work was traditional broadcast, and the BBC was the king of kings. They used to call on me semi-regularly, usually to talk about Israel or about Jews. Then, almost exactly on 7 October 2023, it stopped. The very topics they had liked me for became the biggest international story in a generation, and the phone went quiet. No explanation was offered and none is owed. It is entirely their prerogative.

Waiting in the ITN greenroom before a television appearance recently, I spotted a sign in the corridor for the multi-faith prayer room, and asked a runner if I could pay a visit. He looked at me blankly. He had no idea such a room existed, and had to go and find a colleague who did – a young man who led me straight there. Inside, the room was arranged almost entirely around a wudu station, the low basin at which Muslims wash their feet before prayer. On the shelf: Qurans and prayer mats. Nothing else. The room always tells the truth, even when the sign on the door does not “Do you use this room?” I asked him as we left. He did – that was how he knew the way. “Do you mind me asking what religion you are?” He was Muslim. “It’s not really a multi-faith room, is it?

Sitting in the GB News greenroom on Sunday evening, I watched the two guests on air before me – one from Reform, one from the Greens – debate whether Nigel Farage should have reported Zack Polanski to the police for potentially inciting violence against him. Was it a challenge to free speech? The timing was almost too neat. Only last week, I learned the outcome of the Green Party's own attempt to silence me, after police were sent to my home and I was threatened with arrest for opposing the party’s antisemitism. As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive Everything was set for my first interview of the day – lights on, cameras ready, my guest a professor of architecture – when the doorbell rang.

As Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, in his first speech as head of the terrorist group’s political bureau, promised to ‘continue on the same path and footsteps as before, carrying the banner high, until it flies over Al-Aqsa (Jerusalem) and the lands of a free and proud Palestine,’ Britain’s new Defence Secretary was also making his own promises to diminish Israel.  Labour’s strange fixation on Israel appears increasingly driven by the need to satisfy a political constituency that treats each concession as the starting point for another demand Just two days into his new job, Wesley Streeting declared that he ‘fear[s] Israel has fallen short’ of British military standards in Gaza.

The last time the girls and boys of the Oxford Union had invited me to speak, it was about Israel, so naturally I was screamed at and abused. They threw out one of my fellow speakers, and threatened to remove another (both Arabs who like Israel). It seems we had found the limit of free speech they had all denied existed. That limit was Islam This time, they invited me to debate a much calmer topic: Islam. I spoke alongside Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, and opposite a little-and-large double act of converts to Islam who have made a career sharing their Islamic experience on the internet. Oh, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who I thought was a Conservative and a Catholic. What could possibly go wrong?

Has Jacob Rees-Mogg converted to Islam? Obviously not. Why would I even ask such a question? Later this week, Rees-Mogg will be arguing alongside Abdullah Al Andalusi and Michael Doward at the Oxford Union, to defend Islam from the suspicions of Western society. Sir Jacob is famous, among other things, for being an observant Catholic. He has stated that he does not believe Mohammed was a prophet, nor that the Quran is the word of God. Rather than smear, slur, or ban those invited to speak, we would all do better to listen to them, engaging with their thoughts honestly and respectfully “Indeed, I think if it were the word of God, God says some pretty peculiar things and encourages some pretty odd forms of behaviour,” he has said.

I was invited back on to Piers Morgan’s show next week to debate Cenk Uygur, in studio, while he was due in the UK to speak at SXSW festival in London. I politely declined. Uygur is, to put it mildly, not a man whose public manner suggests calm forensic exchange. Morgan himself proudly features a compilation video on his YouTube channel entitled: “Cenk Uygur’s Biggest Piers Morgan Uncensored MELTDOWNS!”, complete with a thumbnail showing no fewer than three images of Uygur snarling and yelling in fury. The hypocrisy might also embarrass the Labour government, if they are still capable of that emotion It is therefore with some amusement that I now learn that he has been barred from entering the United Kingdom by the Home Secretary.

To the untrained eye, ceasefires in the Middle East can look a bit like war at a lower intensity. US Central Command spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins has confirmed that American forces conducted what were described as self-defence strikes in southern Iran in order to protect US personnel from Iranian threats during the ongoing ceasefire. Two Iranian vessels were also caught laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and were subsequently destroyed. A surface-to-air missile site in Bandar Abbas that was reportedly targeting American aircraft was struck. But American officials have stressed that they do not signify the end of the ceasefire.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Unite the Kingdom rally was just how unremarkable it felt. There were no mass chants calling for the death of particular groups, no calls for the eradication of foreign countries, and no flags of terrorist groups or tyrannical theocracies waved in the crowd. Nobody cited scripture to urge the slaughter of another people, nobody waved terrorist symbols, and nobody I saw during the entire day covered their face.

If anyone needs proof that jihadism is for losers, they need only look at the case of Abdullah Albadri. He was found guilty yesterday at the Old Bailey of preparation of terrorist acts and two offences of possession of a bladed article in a public place. On 28 April last year, he travelled across London to the Israeli embassy in Kensington, wrapped his head and face in a red-and-white shemagh, put on sunglasses, armed himself with two knives, and tried to climb the perimeter fence. Armed diplomatic protection officers stopped him within seconds. That was the whole grand operation. An hour of theatrical pilgrimage through London, a martyrdom note, two knives, a costume, a fence, and then the ground.

Another day, another attack on Jews. Two men were stabbed in Golders Green: one in his 70s, one in his 30s. This is not even the first time. In January 2024, a man was given a suspended sentence for an attempted stabbing at a Jewish shop in the same neighbourhood. We have been warning for years that this was coming. Now it is here. Keir Starmer finds it 'deeply concerning' and 'utterly appalling'. Like many Jewish Britons, I find him deeply concerning. I find Zack Polanski utterly appalling. I find the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reprehensible for its part in the climate of hate engulfing us all.