Britain’s antisemitism crisis could trigger legal reckoning at home and abroad

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Investigation underway after stabbing targets London Jewish neighborhood

Police remain on scene in London as authorities investigate a suspected antisemitic stabbing that injured two people. A suspect is in custody. (Credit: APTN)

That morning in Golders Green, one of London’s most visibly Jewish neighborhoods, a man ran through the streets with a knife looking for Jews to stab. He found them. A 70-year-old man. Another in his 30s. Both were attacked outside a synagogue.

By then, the response had become predictable. "Deeply concerning." A line so worn it had lost all meaning. The next day, the U.K. government raised the national threat level "from substantial, meaning an attack is likely, to severe, meaning an attack is highly likely in the next 6 months," the last time it was at that level was in November 2021.

In the weeks leading up to it, a Jewish charity's ambulances had been firebombed in the same neighborhood. A memorial to the victims of the Oct. 7 attacks was burned. Across the country, antisemitic violence has been rising in plain sight. This was not random. It was not isolated. It was a pattern.

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Police officers work by cordon at the junction of Golders Green Road and the North Circular Road, in the Golders Green neighborhood of north London, on April 29, 2026. (Justin Tallis / AFP via Getty Images)

And the response from the British government — statements, candles, patrols — had ceased to be serious. It had become theater.

Two weeks earlier, Shurat HaDin had filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for enabling terror through material support to Iran. The principle was simple: responsibility did not end with the attacker. It extended to those who made the attack possible.

That principle did not stop in Spain.

Britain may not have exported detonators. But it had allowed something else: a climate where calls to "globalize the intifada" echoed through its streets, where incitement was tolerated, and where Jewish life was increasingly treated as expendable.

When a government repeatedly failed to protect a minority from foreseeable, escalating violence, the question was no longer political. It was legal.

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Antisemitic hate was displayed at an anti-Israel protest in London amid record levels of antisemitism in the U.K. following the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7. (Campaign Against Antisemitism)

British Jews have already begun rendering their own answer. A growing number of families are quietly making plans to leave for Israel — not in panic, but with clarity. The absolute numbers remain small relative to the size of the community, and most British Jews are determined to stay and fight for the country they love. But the direction matters. Families that two years ago would never have considered emigrating are now weighing it seriously. They have seen this before. They know how it ends.

After Oct. 7, we had been told not to overreact. Marches were just marches. Words were just words.

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Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove, Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis lead a march against antisemitism in central London on Sept. 7, 2025. (Carlos Jasso/AFP via Getty Images)

When a government repeatedly failed to protect a minority from foreseeable, escalating violence, the question was no longer political. It was legal.

The marches had become arson. The rhetoric had become violence. And that morning, it had become a man with a knife hunting Jews outside a synagogue in Golders Green.

The attacker has since been arrested and faces charges. Prime Minister Starmer, after years of treating antisemitism as a public-relations problem, is at last confronting it as the security emergency it has become. He has raised the national threat level. He has promised concrete measures to combat antisemitism. He himself has acknowledged that the era of indifference must end.

London, UK, Dec 9 2023, Pro-Palestinian protesters hold a banner and chant at at anti-Israel protest (Photo by: Andy Soloman/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (Getty Images)

That recognition is overdue — and welcome. But recognition is not enforcement.

The test now is not what the British government says, but what it does. Statements without arrests are theater. Threat-level upgrades without prosecutions are paperwork. Promises of action without deportations of the foreign agitators leading these marches are promises broken in advance. If the rhetoric is not matched by results — quickly, visibly, and at scale — the fanatics will have learned the only lesson that matters to them: that Britain will flinch, and that Jewish safety can be traded away to keep the peace with those who threaten it.

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits the Hatzola Northwest independent ambulance base after yesterday's terrorist incident, on April 30, 2026 in Golders Green, England. A 45-year-old British-Somali man was arrested yesterday, after stabbing two Jewish men, Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine, in a terrorist attack in Golders Green. Both victims are in stable condition, and the suspect was caught by police after being tasered. The government has since pledged £25 million to improve security for the Jewish community following the incident. (James Smith/Sam Snap/Getty Images)

Shurat HaDin did not file the Sánchez complaint as a gesture. We filed it because we have spent two decades building a body of law — in American courts, in European courts and now at The Hague — that holds governments, banks and enablers financially and criminally accountable when they grease the machinery of terror against Jews. We have frozen the assets of terror financiers. We have won judgments against state sponsors. We have made the cost of looking away real.

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The principle behind the Sánchez complaint is straightforward: governments that knowingly create the conditions for attacks on Jews bear legal responsibility for the violence that follows. Spain enabled Iran. The United Kingdom has enabled something different but no less dangerous — a domestic climate in which "globalize the intifada" is chanted in the streets, in which ambulances are firebombed in which Oct. 7 memorials are torched, and in which the official response, until this week, was a candle and a press release.

Protesters hold up flags and placards during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London, Saturday, Jan. 13, 2024.  (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

We are already mapping the chain — from the permits issued for the marches, to the speech that crossed the line into incitement, to the warnings ignored, to the attacks that followed. The same legal architecture that put Pedro Sánchez on notice can be turned on Westminster. Sovereignty is not a shield when a government is repeatedly warned of foreseeable, escalating violence against an identifiable minority and chooses, again and again, to do nothing.

The era of indifference is ending — one way or another. Either the British government ends it through enforcement, or we will end it through the courts.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez arrives to attend a press conference at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid on March 20, 2026.  (Pierre-Philippe Marcou / AFP via Getty Images)

To the Jews of Britain: your instincts were right. Your fears were not paranoia. And you are not alone. You have a government that, however belatedly, is beginning to move. You have legal allies prepared to act in every courtroom that will hear us if it does not. And — unlike every Jewish generation before the modern era — you have a Jewish state with an open door. Whether you choose to stay and fight for the Britain you love, or to come home to Israel, you will be defended either way.

This is what "Never Again" looks like when it is not a slogan. It looks like prosecutors. It looks like filings. It looks like the people who tried to make Jewish life unlivable in London discovering that the law has a longer memory than they do.

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We are not finished finding antisemitism and Jew-hatred wherever they hide — in governments, in institutions, in the streets — and we will not stop prosecuting those who enable them. Not in Madrid. Not in London. Not anywhere. We will keep building the cases. We will keep filing the complaints. We will keep dragging the enablers into court until the cost of looking away becomes greater than the cost of standing up.

That is the promise. And we intend to keep it.