Ban the Jews, Save the Peace?

Why Britain's institutions “manage” antisemitism rather than confront it.

Photo by Dylan4photography on Unsplash

What has happened to Britain?

Not content to watch impassively as hate marches defile our streets week after week, our ruling class and self-styled progressives have now achieved what the country’s antisemites down the centuries could only dream of. A nation that once defeated fascism and stood proudly with its Jewish citizens has become a country where Jews are quietly told to stay out of sight – for their own good.

“It’s only a football match,” say the bureaucrats. It’s a matter of “public safety”, say the police. Merely a small procedural ban to prevent “potential unrest.”

Please. Only the wilfully myopic or ideologically motivated could fail to see what’s going on here. When British authorities prohibited Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their Europa League fixture in Birmingham, they did far more than cancel a few plane tickets. They admitted, in effect, that Britain can no longer guarantee Jewish safety – except through Jewish absence.

This is the kind of twisted moral reasoning that characterises our age. Better to hide the Jews than confront those who hate them and mean them harm. Wiser to placate the bigot than risk offending him. It’s disgraceful, of course, but made worse by the cowardly pretence that all this is somehow noble and enlightened. Far from it. This is capitulation and appeasement – justified, as ever, in the soothing language of “empathy”.

None of this is without precedent. Jewish students at several universities say they modify their behaviour and even avoid certain areas during campus protests – not because they pose a threat, but because someone else might. Jewish schools have gates and guards. Synagogues are protected with the high-level security of major embassies. A Jewish comedian had her gigs cancelled in Edinburgh after threats that weren’t even subtle.

The same instinct was on display again this summer. In London, a Jewish lawyer wearing a small Star of David necklace was arrested after police claimed the symbol had “antagonised” pro-Palestine protesters. Ten hours in custody, a formal interview, and a bail order later, the message was unmistakable: the presence of a Jewish symbol, not the behaviour of the mob, was treated as the threat. When the display of a Star of David becomes a public-order risk, we can be sure something in Britain’s moral compass has gone badly wrong.

Right on cue, professional activists issue warnings to the unenlightened. “British parents are skipping meals to feed their kids”, scorns Owen Jones, “but the government is funding Israeli hooligans”. In one sentence, this paragon of moral confusion manages to fuse every modern vice on the left: class resentment, sanctimony, and that faint but unmistakable whiff of the world’s oldest prejudice. Jones is a practised agitator and grievance-monger who understands that emotion, not reason, is his most effective tool. Flatten unrelated grievances into a hot take of moral inversion. Turn the persecuted into the privileged, and the threatened into the threat. Job done.

This is the all-too-familiar workings of modern activism, perfected by the keffiyeh clowns and now common to all performative outrage. It speaks of justice but yearns above all for catharsis – even vengeance. It trades complexity for purity and turns politics into show business for the perpetually aggrieved. Once you divide the world into oppressors and the oppressed, evidence becomes irrelevant. If Jews require protection, that only proves their power.

What makes all of this so poisonous is not just the stupidity of the activists but the cowardice of the political class and cultural establishment. Institutions that once defended pluralism now manage antisemitism the way they manage health-and-safety checks or planning permission – with risk assessments, comms briefings and a fog of equivocation. The police talk of “community tensions”, universities mumble about “context”, and politicians hide behind “cohesion”. These are language games dressed up as sensitivity and compassion. We’ve heard it all before.

The Community Security Trust logged over 3,000 antisemitic incidents in 2024 – a record. The response? Committees, awareness weeks, “dialogue”. Meanwhile, Jewish groups pay for private security because the state has subcontracted their safety. We’ll talk about antisemitism, they say. We just won’t stop it.

For decades, our betters have lectured us on our latent xenophobia, racism and – increasingly – “Islamophobia”, as the NGO lexicon of “microaggressions”, “white privilidge” and “unconscious bias”, seeped into every layer of officialdom.

Yet when one particular minority faces a genuine existential threat, those sermons evaporate. When the mob turns on Jews, the same voices that shout “racism!” fall curiously silent. Or worse, they find a way to blame Jews for their own misfortune – as if the real problem is not the hatred of their abusers but the inconvenience of their presence.

Protecting Jewish fans means confronting the people who would attack them. That means admitting which community they come from. And that means conversations our institutions would rather die than have. Far easier to ban the Jews. No hard questions. No headlines. No risk to the fiction that diversity is always and everywhere a triumph. The political class would rather armour synagogues than ask why they need armour; tell Jewish students which streets to avoid than face why those streets aren’t safe.

What the hate marches exposed, the Maccabi decision confirms beyond doubt: Britain has lost its moral centre. The country that once prided itself on courage and fairness now flatters the mob to preserve the peace.

The people who made that decision will sleep well tonight, congratulating themselves for preventing violence. They didn’t. They just stopped Jews from attending a football match. The violence they deferred will reappear elsewhere, against someone else, on another day. Because the problem was never Jewish visibility. The problem is British cowardice.

Appeasement, of course, always begins politely. It ends, as history keeps reminding us, in shame.

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