Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, has just been published by Wicked Son. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Over the past few days, antisemitism has exploded as an issue in Britain.
It was a reaction to two things. Last week, two Jews were stabbed in separate attacks in the streets of London’s largely Jewish area of Golders Green. This week, the insurgent Green Party very publicly sank into a sewer of Jew-hatred during the run-up to Britain’s local government elections.
Dozens of Green Party candidates, whose supposed environmental concerns have given way to a hard-left, anti-Israel agenda, were revealed over the past few days as having a record of blood-curdling Jew-hatred.
Their party leader, Zack Polanski-who is himself a Jew-had asked whether British Jews were really unsafe or merely had “a perception of unsafety." After the Golders Green attacks, he provoked outrage by criticizing the police for kicking the attacker to disarm him.
British Jews are under increasingly aggressive siege from abuse, intimidation, discrimination, arson attacks on their institutions, street violence and terrorism that left two Jews dead in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.
The Golders Green stabbings last week provoked a huge outpouring of revulsion and concern. There was a fusillade of bromides about “no place for antisemitism in Britain" from the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and other Labour Party politicians.
The media suddenly started publishing accounts by deeply distressed British Jews about the state of fear in which they were being forced to live. Commentators produced outraged and horrified diatribes against a society that was forcing its Jews to consider emigrating.
Yet some of those voices had previously produced outraged and horrified diatribes against the State of Israel, recycling defamatory falsehoods about the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.
This discrepancy alone should have sounded a warning that, for all the public breast-beating, the real point was still being lost.
This is because attacks on Jews are still deemed to be in a separate category from attacks on Israel or Zionism. The assumption is that attacks on Jews are very bad indeed because they are against people, but attacks on Israel or Zionism are absolutely fine because they are merely against a country or an ideology.
The distinction is false, and itself helps fuel the hatred of both Israel and Jews.
The point was illustrated this week in Manhattan. At Park East Synagogue on New York City’s Upper East Side, where an event marketing Israeli real estate was taking place, hundreds of masked Islamists and their supporters chanted from behind a police barricade: “We don’t want two states. We want ’48!"
The mob, which flew a Hezbollah flag, was spearheaded by a branch of Al-Awda, which is linked to Samidoun, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
The police thankfully prevented a repeat of what happened last November at Park East, when anti-Israel demonstrators blocked people from entering and exiting the synagogue. That intimidation helped motivate city legislators to tell the police to establish a protest-free “buffer zone" around houses of worship.
The city’s Islamist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is ruthlessly exploiting the false distinction between attacking Israel and attacking Jews.
“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers," he said about the Park East demonstration. Yet at the same time, he registered his opposition to the synagogue event that was promoting the sale of land “in occupied 'West Bank' in settlements that are a violation of international law."
Condemning Jew-hatred while simultaneously inciting it through incendiary distortions is the mind-twisting stock in trade of the anti-Israel left.
In Britain, Starmer’s government is now talking about banning the “hate marches" that have taken place almost every week since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The belated realization is beginning to dawn that the chanting on these marches for the murder of Jews may help cause actual attacks on Jews.
Despite this, Starmer and many others are still failing to join the necessary dots. The rampant Jew-hatred that has so shocked them is the result of something that they won’t acknowledge.
It’s anti-Zionism that is poisoning Western society, spreading a mind virus that’s targeting both the Jewish world and Western civilization itself. This contagion is being spread principally by Islamists, who are gleefully tapping into the anti-Zionism that has captured the non-Muslim progressive classes, including vast swathes of the young.
The question that’s constantly asked-if anti-Zionism really is antisemitism or is something different-fails to encompass the sickening enormity of what’s happened.
Anti-Zionism is an evil in itself because it launders antisemitism. It singles out the Jewish state for a verbal pogrom of wild blood libels straight out of medieval Christian, Soviet and Nazi demonology.
Accusations against Israel of “genocide," starving innocent Gazans to death or wanton “baby-killing" aren’t just defamatory lies. They present the Israelis as positively evil and a uniquely demonic force in the world which therefore needs to be removed.
This murderous hatred doesn’t just fuel the aim of eliminating Israel. It’s also awakened that lightest of sleepers in the West, the secret wish of millions to remove the Jews from their world altogether.
The “hate marches" have been joined by people who may think they’re supporting the poor, oppressed Palestinian Arabs against the cruel and oppressive Israelis who have occupied their land. Nevertheless, these marches are in themselves an attack on Jews because they are an attack on Zionism, a denial of the right of the Jewish people alone to have their own nation-state in their own ancestral homeland.
Led, organized and funded by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, these marches aren’t organized principally to protest against Israel or in support of “Palestine." They are instead an expression of near-delirious Islamist triumphalism and a statement that the Muslims now control the streets.
For the Islamists, the Oct. 7 atrocities signaled the beginning of the end of the Zionist entity, itself a stepping stone to the conquest of the West.
The Islamists believe that they’re on course to victory because there’s been no pushback against them, only against Israel. Hamas actually thanked Starmer for rewarding them on Oct. 7 by recognizing a “State of Palestine." And they gloat that U.S. President Donald Trump is being outwitted by the regime in Tehran.
In America, the Democratic Party is hurtling down the anti-Zionist rabbit hole. This has given permission to the Tucker Carlson faction of MAGA Republicans to parade their vicious conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel.
Meanwhile, Britain and Europe are rapidly losing their historic cultural identity to Islamization. And that’s not all.
It’s now clear that the threat to the West from communism didn’t collapse along with the Soviet Union in 1989. Communism merely shifted its strategy to wage a culture war that has colonized the Western intelligentsia by anti-West hatred, and to use the Palestinian Arab cause as a Trojan Horse to destroy the West’s moral compass altogether.
In the 1960s, the Palestinian Arab terrorist leader Yasser Arafat cooked up a fictitious Palestinian identity with the Soviet Union.
In 1975, the KGB orchestrated the U.N. declaration that Zionism was racism.
In the 1980s, as the scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has documented, the Soviet Union promoted the “genocide" libel against Israel.
Fighting the menace of Islamist and communist-backed anti-Zionism is hardly being assisted by Diaspora Jews protesting that attacking them is unjustified because they have nothing to do with Israel. This merely reinforces the impression that Israel is too awful to be identified with.
Diaspora Jews should be loudly declaring instead that Palestinian Arab identity is a fabrication created to destroy Israel and steal the Jews’ own history in their ancestral homeland. They should be saying that Israel always acts in accordance with international law. They should be calling out Muslim antisemitism as a scourge going way beyond Islamist extremists.
They don’t do so, either through fear or because too many themselves believe the lies or support the poisonous ideologies that underwrite them.
Anti-Zionism is a weapon of mass destruction-not just against Israel and the Jews but against the West. It’s high time that Diaspora Jewish leaders acknowledged this and started fighting it robustly in public. They would gain many allies if they got up off their knees and did so.