LONDON — Grim statistics about a record-breaking wave of antisemitic incidents since the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught have regularly hit the UK headlines.

But for one of Britain’s leading experts on antisemitism, they may be shocking but they are hardly surprising.

Instead, Prof. David Hirsh detects a pattern stretching back at least two decades to the United Nations’ notorious antisemitic 2001 Durban conference and the subsequent onset of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in the UK.

“I think there’s an assumption that October 7 is a watershed event, and I’m a little bit skeptical about that,” Hirsh, the chief executive of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, tells The Times of Israel in an interview.

The level of antisemitic incidents experienced by Jews may have risen substantially, but the threat has been “boiling up since the beginning of the century,” Hirsh says.

Nonetheless, Hirsh recognizes that many British Jews have experienced what he terms a “cultural shift” in the wake of October 7 — a feeling that “social spaces” in which they’d previously felt at home are no longer welcoming. It is a feeling, he adds, that was already familiar to those who had previously experienced the sharper edges of anti-Israel activism firsthand. He cites Jewish academics in the university lecturers’ union, the UCU, when the academic boycott campaign began in earnest in the late 2000s, and Jewish members of the Labour Party after the election of its hard-left former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in 2015.

The lasting impact of Corbyn’s spell at the helm of the Labour Party has been detected by some campaigners against antisemitism in the fierce hostility to Israel in many quarters since the October 7 attacks.

“I always thought the key danger of Corbyn’s politics was that it normalized antisemitism,” shattering the postwar consensus in British politics that “any kind of antisemitism was recognized as being outside of the boundaries of democratic discourse,” says Hirsh.

After October 7, that fear turned out to be true.

“Antisemitic ideas [have]........

© The Times of Israel