In the early hours of Monday morning, four ambulances belonging to Hatzalah – the volunteer Jewish emergency service that provides medical care to Jews and non-Jews alike, whose name literally translates to ‘rescue’ or ‘relief’ – were set on fire outside a synagogue in Golders Green.

Nobody was killed, though.

That is a fact that will be noted often, as a form of reassurance for the Jewish community of London, to which I belong. But that argument must not be allowed to carry too much weight.

The issue is that ambulances are functional objects: they exist to close the gap between medical crisis and subsequent medical care. To target them is an act of interference – a deliberate degradation of the Jews’ capacity to respond to emergencies.

As per usual, the BBC described this attack as a ‘suspected antisemitic hate crime.’ The Metropolitan Police, meanwhile, have called it what it is, and removed the ‘suspected’ part.

What will it take for the BBC to realise that this was a Jewish organisation, Jewish ambulances – built for both the Jew and the gentile alike? Hatzalah is embedded in daily Jewish communal life and is frequently the first on scene in moments of acute need. Their impact is so great that the fundraiser dedicated to rebuilding Hatzalah hit half a million pounds over the course of the same morning.

BBC, I tell you, if this was not a targeted and precise attack, why was it not the Barnet or the Finchley NHS ambulances parked just down the road from Golders Green?

For much of the past two years, antisemitism in Britain has been treated primarily as a problem of climate: take at your leisure the rising incident numbers, ever coarser public discourse, the domestic spillover of an overseas conflict. To this ‘climate,’ official responses have followed a familiar sequence of reports, statistics and condemnations.

The implicit assumption running through all of it has been that there is a meaningful boundary between expression and action, and that whatever amount of condemnations a government throws in the way of this action will be enough to stop it.

But Britain is gradually learning that assumption is no longer reliable, as the Jews have known for decades.

Last October, two men were killed and others injured in an antisemitic attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, on Yom Kippur. This is a synagogue targeted as a synagogue. By any standard definition, this was an act of terrorism.

That is not to say that the Golders Green arson and the Manchester attacks are equivalent. But they are not unrelated either. They represent successive points on the same trajectory: first there is ambient hostility towards the Jews, then direct violence and destruction, and then murder.

Britain’s institutional response has done little to keep pace with this evolution. The language deployed remains notably cautious – ’incident,’ ‘hate crime,’ ‘isolated act?’ – even as counter-terrorism police become involved. (It is not such a stretch of the imagination to suggest that the presence of counter-terrorism police suggests that a terror attack has taken place.) There is a persistent tendency to defer judgment, to wait for patterns to become incontrovertible before drawing conclusions. And, of course, this caution is understandable – it costs a lot to make the wrong decision – but caution has costs.

The Community Security Trust recorded thousands of antisemitic incidents last year, at levels substantially higher than the pre-October 2023 baseline, with the majority of incidents non-violent in nature. There is, therefore, a temptation to treat them as mere background noise. But this misreads how thresholds work: escalation proceeds through accumulation; what is repeated becomes normalised; what is normalised expands, for a small subset of actors who nonetheless exert an influence far beyond their proportion, the range of which appears actionable.

Now, most who engage in hostile discourse online will never actually commit a violent act – but that is not the relevant measure. The relevant measure is whether the prevailing environment makes that violence even conceivable. And, on that measure, the trajectory is concerning.

For decades, areas like Golders Green and Stamford Hill have been pointed to as a sort of informal proof-of-concept for British pluralism. They are visible and rooted communities that have achieved a degree of security through their very integration. That is no longer the case, and the concept is rapidly becoming disproved.

The situation Britain faces is not one of irreversible deterioration, but the terms of the problem have changed materially. Antisemitism is no longer primarily a phenomenon of speech, nor even of sporadic violence. The appropriate response to that development is accurate description, and the policy and institutional responses that accurate description makes possible.

The most significant question we ought to ask now is not only what happened – we know what happened – but what conditions led it to happen; and what, if those conditions persist, may follow.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)