Oct. 7 is not a ‘watershed’ event for UK antisemitism, but did bring it to a boil, says expert
David Hirsh, head of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, warns of the dangers of ‘normalized’ antisemitism and a rising populist threat

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] become normalized,” Hirsh says, by people on the far-left who strenuously claim to be fierce opponents of antisemitism. The result, he posits, is that “what you have today, above all else, is the claim that Israel — one of the very key projects of the post-Holocaust Jewish world — is deliberately murdering thousands of women and children and is committing genocide like the Nazis did.”

That claim evokes the centuries-old blood libel that Jews murder children and then conspire to cover up their crimes, he says.

Hirsh labels the conflict in Gaza “an absolute tragedy,” recognizes that many children have died in it, and says it is legitimate to question Israel’s strategy in the wake of October 7. But, he insists, there is a “huge difference” between the tragic deaths of children in war and “children who are murdered deliberately in a campaign to eradicate a particular kind of people defined by their killers.”

Hirsh, who has played a prominent part in the campaign against an academic boycott of Israel and has written widely on left-wing antisemitism, is keen to debunk the notion that the left has a monopoly on antisemitism. He is critical of the tendency on both the left and right to deny the presence of the problem within their own political home while pointing it out among their opponents. This evasion, he suggests, is simply a “way of not having to deal with the antisemitism around you.”

“I come from the left. It always seemed to me completely natural that antisemitism on the left was the most serious [problem] to me because it was in my own political family,” Hirsh said. “It was around me, and I understood it much better.”

His belief is simple and principled: people should fix their own flaws first.

“If somebody is involved in right-wing politics, then rather than focusing on the threat that comes from [the left], they should focus on the potential for antisemitism in their own political house,” Hirsh says. The same goes for those on the left, he says.

Populism as a platform for antisemitism

Hirsh believes that the growing appeal of populist politics poses a particular danger.

Populism — which is founded in the notion of a self-interested, invisible elite exploiting “the people” — isn’t inherently antisemitic, believes Hirsh. But, he says, it provides an opening for Jew-haters to propagate their ideas. He cites research published last year that he carried out with fellow academics Daniel Allington and Louise Katz. It concluded that antisemitism is much more likely to be found among people who believe in conspiracy theories — the idea of a hidden global elite “that sits behind the visible structures of society and which directs it” — and are hence willing to consider draconian action against their political opponents.

“Anyone who knows anything about antisemitism will immediately see how that idea of a ‘globalist cosmopolitan elite’ connected to capital can create a market for antisemitism,” Hirsh says.

As Hirsh notes, populism has both left- and right-wing variants. “I think there’s a very serious situation in France,” he says, with the populist left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Marine Le Pen’s populist right vying for power. “Both of them are quite concerning.”

Hirsh believes the situation for Jews in Britain is complex. “I think in a way, Jews don’t know how to describe the position they’re in, and they don’t know how to think about the position they’re in,” he says. The country remains, he says, “one of the best places to live if you are Jewish.”

At the same time, he believes there’s a rising intolerance towards those who vocalize Zionist ideas in a growing number of professions.

“It will get you completely marginalized if you argue what are considered to be Zionist things in many, many walks of life, and the walks of life in which that’s the case are increasing, and have increased since October 7,” Hirsh says.

This had already been the case in academia, especially the social sciences, for some time.

“It is now pretty widely the case across the arts and across the caring professions, such as social work teaching, even medicine and the law,” Hirsh says.

We are not living in 1933

In short, says Hirsh, those who argue that “it’s 1933” all over again are wrong. But so, too, are those who suggest there is no problem.

He recognizes there are no easy answers or quick solutions to the problem of antisemitism. “There’s a culture of antisemitism and antisemitic ways of speaking, which [is] fairly well entrenched,” Hirsh says, adding that there’s no broad public consensus as to what constitutes antisemitism to guide those in positions of authority.

“I think there’s a similar problem [facing] people in authority, whether they be university authorities, broadcasting authorities or the Metropolitan Police, which is that many, many people think that things that we might think are antisemitic are not at all antisemitic and would protest very, very strongly if they were curtailed,” he says.

“It’s difficult to ask people in administrative power to do things for which there is not broad support,” Hirsh continues, while also suggesting that many of them could still “do much better.”

Hirsh is critical of some of the stances adopted by Britain’s Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer since it came to power last July. He disagrees with its decision to restore funding to UNRWA, restrict some arms sales to the Jewish state, and say it would abide by the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nonetheless, Hirsh commends Sarmer’s staunch opposition to populism. Given Hirsh’s fears about the danger posed to Jews by this rising political tide, that opposition constitutes a real feather in Starmer’s cap.

He also lauds Starmer’s record since becoming Labour leader in 2020.

“Keir Starmer was a factional opponent of Jeremy Corbyn, and his faction defeated Corbyn’s. He effectively expelled Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party,” Hirsh says. “He apologized to British Jews and to the country about antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn. I didn’t really think any of that was possible, and certainly not so quickly, so he begins with a lot of credit.”