How synagogues became fair game for the Israelophobic mob

It is remarkable how swiftly the unthinkable returns. How easily the guardrails of morality crumble to dust. That was my thought upon watching a seething mob besiege Edgware United Synagogue yesterday. They screamed abuse at Jews. They hollered for the destruction of the Jewish nation. Some were adorned in the inverted red triangle that signals support for the Jew killers of Hamas. And there you have it: Jews, once more, are being terrorised at their places of worship. What comes next?

The pretext for the vile swarming of a synagogue in a heavily Jewish part of north-west London was that it was holding a Great Israeli Real Estate Event. It was an event for ‘those thinking of moving to Israel’, as the Guardian described it. These ‘thieves’ are selling off land that isn’t theirs to sell, wailed the wild-eyed Israelophobes. In their warped worldview, no Jew should be permitted to buy property in ‘Israhell’. ‘From the river to the sea!’, they chanted, giving voice to that fever dream of all bourgeois bigots: that the world would be a better place if the Jewish nation were annihilated.

Yet however much the hordes at the synagogue doors try to dress up their agitation in the finery of radical politics, there’s no escaping the truth: it is 2026 and Jews’ holy places are once more surrounded by snarling crowds. The mob accused the event organisers of hawking properties in the ‘occupied territories’ of the West Bank. But the organisers firmly deny this. In the words of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to fume outside a synagogue on ‘false pretences’ looks like a desperate scrabble for any old ‘excuse’ to ‘harass and intimidate’ Jews.

It’s hard to disagree. I find it remarkable that not one member of this bristling pack of Israel-haters stopped to think: ‘Should we be doing this?’ They are so intoxicated by blind animus for the Jewish nation that even optics are no longer a factor in their thinking. It doesn’t even cross their Gaza-fried minds that they might come off like those gangs of Hitler Youth who gathered outside synagogues in 1930s Germany with placards saying ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ – ‘The Jews are our misfortune’. Do the keffiyeh invaders of Edgware think their antics are better because they were only saying Zionists are our misfortune? You would think at some point in the ugly mayhem, one might have said to another, in the vein of that meme, ‘Are we the baddies?’.

Even as they were finally compelled to leave the area of the synagogue, they chanted: ‘Zionists, Zionists, watch your back / We will be coming back.’ I invite you to imagine the media storm that would rage if any other minority group were told to ‘watch their backs’. Imagine if an army of racists besieged a mosque and chanted: ‘Muslims, Muslims, watch your back…’ There would be outrage over such menacing, slippery threats, rightly so. Yet the Jews of Edgware can be taunted with seeming impunity. No condemnation from the PM. No expressions of concern from London’s chattering class.

In fact, the political class helped to whip up the anti-Zionist mob. The day before the Edgware event, London mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted: ‘I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements in the West Bank, be that in London or anywhere else in the world.’ Again, the organisers firmly deny that West Bank property was on sale. The mayor’s comment came off like incitement of the mob. He was making it clear that he, too, was morally repulsed by what was due to unfold in Edgware, effectively giving a green light to every wanker who wanted to rage about it. Let’s see if he now tweets: ‘I condemn anyone who tells London’s Jews to “watch their backs”.’ I won’t hold my breath.

There’s one thing the synagogue mob didn’t reckon with – the determination of Edgware’s Jews to defend their place of worship. Huge numbers of Jews and their friends gathered to tell the keffiyeh bigots that ‘They shall not pass’. It was like a mini-Cable Street, only this time ‘the left’ was firmly on the other side – not the side of Jews who only want to live free of harassment, but the side of that twisted Islamo-left nexus that has made a bloodsport of taunting ‘Zionists’. The Jews danced and sang and waved the Israeli flag and the Union flag: a display of genuine anti-fascism against the fake anti-fascists of the Jew-state haters.

The magnitude of these events cannot be overstated. The unthinkable is not just thinkable now – it is doable. In vile mimicry of those 1930s mobs that swarmed synagogues and boycotted Jewish goods, now ‘the righteous’ scream about Zionism at the doors of synagogues and boycott Jewish State goods. In Manhattan, keffiyeh gangs raged outside the Park East Synagogue, also on the pretext that it was hosting an Israeli real estate event. A Jewish girl had her hair violently yanked by a masked bigot. Placards featuring Jeffrey Epstein said: ‘Free America from Isra-hell.’ The synagogue mobs of the 1930s likewise looked upon the Jews as a paedophilic race from which Germany should be ‘freed’. There have also been synagogue protests in New Jersey, LA, Canada and France.

At the New Jersey protest, Jews were called ‘Zionist pigs’ and ‘baby killers’. At the Paris protest, hundreds of Jews were trapped inside their synagogue as stones rained down on the building. And now in Edgware, Jews are told by a frothing mob to ‘watch their backs’. Can we be real? These are not protests – they’re practice pogroms. We are witnessing the sinister resuscitation of the medieval belief that Jews are pigs who kill children and thus their ‘Synagogues of Satan’ are fair game for mob fury. Not content with making life harder for Jews in the West, now the keffiyeh army tells them they are forbidden from escaping to Israel. So where can they go? Don’t answer that.

It is a testament to the battering our civilisational values have taken since 7 October that 1930s-style mobbings have returned and no one in power seems to give a damn. Good on the Jews who stood up to the keffiyeh bigots in Edgware – next time I want to see many more non-Jews standing with them.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.