Whodunit?

Antisemitic violence is like a trip to the ice cream parlour — the only question is: what flavour?

I don’t take it personally. In December, I was relaxing a couple of miles away from Bondi Beach as the Hanukkah massacre, in which 14 people were murdered, was unfolding. Last night, I was a similar distance from only the latest violent attack on Jewish life, this time arson on four ambulances belonging to Hatzalah, a non-profit, volunteer organisation which provides transport to everyone — not just Jews — in the North London community.

The reality is, this is happening wherever Jewish life exists — and even some places where it has long been extinguished. There are many elements to being Jewish in 2026, some of which are shared with everyone else. For instance, we are tired. It has been 30 months since October 7, an event which took place in Israel but sparked immediate — and given they occurred before the Israeli response, one can only conclude — celebratory antisemitic attacks all over the world.

There is also a profound sense of marginalisation. Of alienation. Of being abandoned to our fate as Jews — the ever unpopular, pathetically small and frustratingly enduring minority. Of having to choose between the anxious ignorance of blocking out the news, or the bottomless pit of mild terror that accompanies any reflexive glance at a phone or, for a certain generation, television news.

An ebbing resistance to the self-evident truth that antisemitism, whether genocidally violent or merely schoolyard cruel, carries little cultural stigma. Indeed, getting one over the Jews — or Zionists-but-obviously-only-the-Jewish-ones — is part of the fun. With attacks on Jews reported as mere ‘blowback’. But I’m not interested in publishing an itemised list of my complaints this morning. Rather, a brief observation.

The Usual Suspects

This morning’s arson attack on some ambulances — simply because they are a bit Jewish in that they transport both Jews and non-Jews to hospital for free — could have been perpetrated by anyone. Antisemitic violence is a bit like a trip to the ice cream parlour — the only question is, for any given incident: what flavour?

Some prefer theirs ideological. Others religious. Others still insist it’s political, perhaps even moral. But it is all recognisably the same thing:

• It could be Islamist antisemitism, such as the Bondi massacre or the Heaton Park Synagogue attack in Manchester during Yom Kippur last year, in which two Jews were murdered.

• It could be far-right antisemitism, such as the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh in 2018, in which 11 Jews were murdered — in part — because the community had participated in a National Refugee Shabbat the previous week.

• It could be far-left/anti-Zionist antisemitism, such as the Boulder, Colorado attack in 2025 in which a man shouting “Free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish group, killing one, or the Washington, D.C. shooting, which left two dead.

• It could be Iranian state-sponsored antisemitism, such as the arson attack in December 2024 at Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and a similar one on a kosher cafe in Sydney. More recently, British counter-terrorism police have arrested two Iranians following an investigation into alleged spying of Jewish targets on behalf of Iran, including synagogues and schools.

• It could be someone with no particular ideological cause or an interest in a seemingly random mixture of the above, simply obsessed with mass violence without necessarily targeting a specific group.

We all have our reasons to hate Jews. You’d be amazed, if you spoke with these people, at how they remain quite convinced their motivations are in fact fair, decent, moral and above all necessary. I mean. They’re not one of those antisemites with their silly, backward views.

In fact, they may even be accurately able to criticise the antisemitism of their ideological opponents. The far-left calls out neo-Nazi violence, the far-right condemns Islamist terrorism. But this is partisanship, not anti-racism. There is a reason why Jews, despite comprising a mere 0.5% of the UK population, are subject to 29% of religious hate crimes, according to Home Office data.

I could, of course, write about this sort of thing every day. I certainly think about it at least as often. But I don’t want to be Lines To Take’s antisemitism correspondent. I find other things interesting too. No disrespect to those who do it — in fact, quite the reverse. Fearless reporting is vital for any democratic society. But for the individuals doing it, it seems like a fairly miserable existence unless you possess weapons-grade levels of compartmentalisation, which I don’t.

I just can’t bring myself to comment every time a Jewish bakery in Sydney is forced to close due to antisemitic violence, or the Green Party wants to define Zionism as racism, or my heart sinks at the sight of a police car stationed outside a synagogue every Saturday morning. And how the condemnation of anti-Jewish racism always oddly muted from the self-appointed anti-racism tsars.

Life — particularly Jewish life — is too short.

So I’ll leave you with a quote that has hung over me for the last two and a bit years. It’s from an essay by Liel Leibovitz for Commentary magazine, published in the apparently prelapsarian world of 2021. Nothing in the last two years has required an update:

The creative genius of Jew-hatred has always been its ability to imagine the Jew as the embodiment of whatever it is that polite society finds repulsive. That’s why Jews were condemned as both nefarious bankers controlling all the world’s money and shifty revolutionaries imperiling all capital; as both sexless creeps and oversexed lechers coming for the women and the girls; as both pathetically powerless and occultly powerful. Like something out of Harry Potter, the Jew takes the shape of whatever the Jew-hater fears and loathes most.