The number of anti-Semitic incidents has increased significantly in Great Britain. Tens of thousands take to the streets to demonstrate for the Palestinian territories. Many Jews in the country are shocked.
“The Vienna Holocaust Library” in London is the oldest library and study facility for research into the Holocaust. In the past few days, unknown people defaced a poster that was hung on the fence in front of the institute and wrote “Gaza” on it.
This incident is particularly disturbing given the history of the facility. The founder, Alfred Wiener, had lived in Germany before fleeing the Nazis to the USA and came to London after the war to found the institute here. He documented anti-Semitism and racism in Germany and Europe. Alfred Wiener wrote his doctoral thesis in Islamic studies.
Hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents
It is just one of many anti-Semitic incidents that the London police are currently dealing with. The number of registered crimes with an anti-Semitic background has increased significantly in London in recent weeks. The Metropolitan Police said there were 408 incidents between October 7 and October 27, compared to just 28 in the same period last year.
Jewish students reported being slapped on the way home from school, the ITV television station showed a cell phone video showing a car driving past a Jewish institution, a person in the car shouting “free Palestine” out of the rolled down window .
Over the past weekend there have been repeated demonstrations in London where Palestinian flags were displayed. Participants chanted “free, free Palestine.” Most recently, around 100,000 people came together to protest in London.
Still safe in London?
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Tzipi Hotovely commented on the anti-Semitic incidents in Great Britain. She receives messages from Israel in which friends ask whether she can still feel safe in London, whether Jews can still feel safe in the British capital.
Friends saw the same jihadist ideology on the streets of London as in the Gaza Strip and wondered what was going on here. The article is headlined with the line: “Jewish people feel London is now less safe than Israel.”
280,000 Jews live in Great Britain, around 0.5 percent of the total population. Half of them live in London. Police forces and private security services are increasingly deployed in front of schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions in the north.
There are police officers in front of many Jewish institutions in Great Britain these days, such as this school in London.
A double trauma
The editor of the English newspaper Jewish Cronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, said Jews were experiencing a double trauma. On the one hand, there is the shock after the Hamas attacks in Israel. The second trauma was caused by the reaction in Great Britain to these events.
“We could not have imagined that Palestinian flags would be waved before the blood was dry in southern Israel. There is nothing wrong with waving a Palestinian flag in principle, but it depends on the context,” sSaid Jake Wallis Simons in the “Media Confidential” podcast with a view to the demonstrations, where many only wanted to point out the catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip, but where supporters of the terrorist organization Hamas also appeared.
He suspected that there would be many Hamas sympathizers. However, the fact that so many would take to the streets made many Jews feel like they were alone.