The attack and murder at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester on Thursday 2 October (Yom Kippur) have brought antisemitism back to the fore in public discussion.
We know very little of Jihad Al-Shamie’s motivation for the attack, but it has occurred against a backdrop of rising antisemitic attacks and a growth of antisemitic beliefs in one form or another across British society. The stark truth is that the issue has not been paid the due attention for several years, and socialists and consistent anti-racists should see it as their duty to be aware of the issues, which will allow us to consistently oppose racism and bigotry in all its forms.
A new survey of British Jews arranged by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, surveying 4,800 people, found that 35% of them feel unsafe in Britain, compared to just 9% before the 7 October 2023 attack. 47% (up from 11% in 2012) see antisemitism as a “very big” problem, and 32% report experiencing at least one antisemitic incident in 2024.
The Community Security Trust (CST) has carried out regular surveys of antisemitic incidents for decades. The first half of 2025 saw a drop in the total number of incidents year-on-year from 2024 – but both years are significantly higher than any other year on record, with 1,521 cases recorded from January-June this year. Of those, 51% were said to be “linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas terror attack or the subsequent conflict.”
Israel’s invasion of Gaza looms large in discussions around antisemitism in Britain. Many of the reported antisemitic incidents involve the use of the terms “Zionist” or “Zio’” or Jews being seen as in some way representatives of, or responsible for the actions of, the Israeli state. A forthcoming report from John Mann, commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, will explore this phenomenon in more detail. In an interview with the BBC, Mann said that “ordinary Jewish men and women are going about their everyday life particularly at work and suddenly being held to account for what’s happening in the Middle East in their workplace”. Whatever else we think of Mann, he’s right about that.
The invasion of Gaza is horrific, and Workers’ Liberty has been campaigning for an end to the assault, and supporting Israeli and Palestinian anti-war groups on the ground, since the war’s beginning in October 2023. We want as many people around the world as possible to agree with us on these politics. But it would set a dangerous precedent to require people, or groups of people, to hold a particular political position in order to live a life free from discrimination.
75% of British Jews see themselves as “emotionally attached” to the state of Israel, and 49% “very attached”. These figures are up from 72% and 40% respectively before the October 7 attack. Many of those “Israel-attached” Jews will also oppose Netanyahu’s war, as great numbers of American Jews (and now Israeli Jews) do. The same survey also found that the number of Jews who considered themselves “anti-Zionist” had grown in the same period, from 8% to 12%.
In this context, it is easy to see the issue with boycotting “Zionist businesses”, or using chants like “Zionists off campus”. If your definition of “Zionist” is broad enough to include the vast majority of British Jews, it is not hard to see how forms of “anti-Zionism”, if not carefully framed, can take on an antisemitic character.
Holding British Jews responsible for the crimes of another state, no matter their personal views on that state, cannot be used as a justification for antisemitism, and responses to the war in Gaza have sometimes involved normalising a low-level, generalised antisemitism in public discourse.
The oft-repeated mantra on the left that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” is true in the sense that denouncing actions by Israel, or criticising various historic Zionist ideologies (Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, whoever), is not antisemitic. Solidarity has carried criticism of the Israeli state and its far-right government in virtually every issue since the beginning of the current war. But there are ways of criticising the Israeli state that do cross the line into antisemitic rhetoric, and refusing to distinguish between the two is a dangerous path to go down. Using “Israel” and “Zionism” as sort-of-synonyms (and then equating “Zionism” with the worst variants of Israeli chauvinism), as if the Israeli Jews were not a nation but an ideological selection, is also dangerous.
Attention
Those who have responded to cases of antisemitism by stating that not enough attention has been paid to anti-Muslim rhetoric and racist attacks against Muslims do that important issue a disservice. Hatred for Muslim people in Britain is also on the rise and poses a real threat to Muslim communities. This summer’s far right protests have brought that threat into sharp focus.
That fact is no reason to demote or wave away a genuine rise in antisemitism across the country. Anti-racists oppose bigotry and systemic oppression in all their forms, no matter who is on the receiving end, and no matter the politics or worldview of the victimised person or group. Pitting Jewish and Muslim communities against each other helps neither and harms both.
Workers’ Liberty has long argued that the revolutionary left has a duty to address a “left” antisemitism that has worked its way into the thinking of socialists and other leftists over many decades. Political arguments that rely on attacking a nefarious conspiracy that “secretly runs society” are not just dangerous because they are an incorrect class analysis of modern society; they also feed into centuries-old ideas of Jews as somehow all-powerful and malevolent, and into the broader stigmatisation of real Jewish people.
In response to Manchester, Socialist Worker denounced antisemitism, but claimed it was something unique to fascists and the far-right. “The torrent of racism — pushed by the fascists and far right and legitimised by Labour — is to blame”. We do not know the politics of Jihad Al-Shamie. He was almost certainly not inspired by an otherwise socialist-minded “left-antisemite” to carry out his attack. But it’s unlikely he was inspired by Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage, either; and quite likely that some variant or another of low-grade antisemitism, which is much more widespread, helped him along his way.
Many surveys have shown that low-grade antisemitism (“Jews have too much power”, etc.) remains present across society, not just on the far right, but in the political centre and even, shamefully, on the left. To box off antisemitism as only a problem of the Robinson-Farage far right, as if going on protests against those far-right figures is all we need to do to combat it, is evasion.
The left must be clear in its own ideas if it wishes to properly combat antisemitism more broadly. A socialist who is susceptible to left antisemitism will draw the wrong conclusions from this attack, and be useless in fighting the resulting ideological battle required of all of us, against both crimes like Manchester and the lower-grade prejudice they feed on.
This article originally appeared on the website of the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
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