There is a reason we call our little island, “Great Britain.” It is a nation saturated with thousands of years of history, innovation and culture. But above all, it is home. Home to millions of people with millions of different stories and a rich blend of faiths and cultures. As someone who is from a few different places in the world, being born in Canada to Scottish/Irish and Italian parents, I’ve only found one nation I can truly identify with: Britain. I was raised to admire it, to value its institutions, and to believe in the quiet strength of its tolerance. It was a country that, to me, stood for fairness, decency and the ability of different communities to live side by side without fear.

Today, my perspective on Britain has changed. The sense of cohesion and tolerance I once took for granted has begun to fade, replaced by hostility and tension. The Britain I grew up in, a tolerant and confident nation, feels unrecognizable.

My first memory of this change was in 2017 when eleven-year-old me was visiting my grandmother in hospital. As I was in the hospital, there was a sudden panic. Just down the road, a major terror attack was unfolding as 52-year-old Khalid Masood drove a car into innocent pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before turning on Keith Palmer, a police officer, and stabbing him to death.

Ever since, I waited for Britain to act: to do more than mourn. Instead, we were handed a quiet instruction: learn to live with it. For some communities, that instruction has carried a particular cruelty. British Jews, already navigating a steady rise in antisemitism, have faced something that goes beyond tension or hostility. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, two Jewish men were murdered outside Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. It was not an isolated incident. It was the sharpest point of a pattern that has been building for years, and which too many in power have been too slow to name.

This afternoon, I opened the news to footage of a man stabbing Jewish people in Golders Green, North London. I was not shocked. That, perhaps, is the most damning indictment of where we are: that an act of targeted violence against Jews on a London street no longer feels unthinkable. It feels like a continuation.

It follows months of arson attacks and hate crimes across the capital: Jewish homes targeted, charity ambulances set alight, businesses vandalized. And yet the word that keeps coming back to me is not anger, or grief. It is surreal. I truly cannot believe what I am seeing every single day.

I have spent my life loving Britain. I defend it instinctively, and I push for change so that we can live in a country that puts its people first and refuses to look away. But that is precisely why this moment is so painful.

As someone whose family fought against Nazi Germany in World War Two, I was raised on the belief that this country had looked evil in the eye and chosen the right side. I think about Churchill’s bravery constantly. His refusal to negotiate with Nazi Germany at the moment when doing so would have been the easier path, perhaps even the rational one. Every pressure was on him to compromise. He didn’t. He understood something that we seem to have forgotten: that evil does not negotiate in good faith, and that hesitation in the face of it is not caution: it is surrender. As a result of Churchill’s choices, hundreds of thousands of young men died, sacrificing their lives for Britain’s next generations.

That sacrifice meant something. It was supposed to mean something permanent, a line drawn in history that we would never allow ourselves to cross back over. I have attended Memorial Day services every year, standing with the same gratitude toward our fallen that I was taught as a child. They gave their today for our tomorrow. It is a phrase I have heard so many times that it has become almost ritual. And yet, this year, it landed differently. Because for the first time, tomorrow does not feel guaranteed.

To watch antisemitism rise unchallenged on British streets feels like a betrayal of that generation. Not a political betrayal. A moral one.

What pride is there left to feel when Jewish people are being targeted and hunted on the streets of modern Britain – the same streets my family once fought to keep free?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)