BEN FREEMAN: I’m Leaving the UK.
For years I clung to the belief that, despite the rise in hostility to the Jewish community, we could still build lives here. I had watched from abroad during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when Jew-hate poisoned the party and seeped into wider politics. Yet, despite my deep disappointment, I still believed in this country enough to move back from Hong Kong in 2022. I wanted to believe the Jewish story here still had a future, and I was determined to be a part of it.
October 7, 2023, changed everything. Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and instead of residents recoiling in horror, Britain’s streets filled with marches that celebrated it. Even after two Jews were massacred in Manchester yesterday, on Yom Kippur, the marches continued.
Jew-hatred has become mainstream here. It has been excused by leaders. It has been embedded in a culture where terrorism is justified and Jewish suffering denied.
You see it in the tearing down of hostage posters across Britain’s cities, a painful message that Jewish lives do not matter. You can see it in the way Jew-hatred and violence are always paired with condemnations of “Islamophobia.” You can see it in a justice system that treats public displays of Judaism as a threat to public safety, rather than the Islamists who cause the danger. You can see it in placards calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and for the genocide of Jews, and in crowds carrying the flags of proscribed terror organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. These are not, and have never been, pro-Palestinian marches. They are, at their very core, anti-Jewish. They are about stigmatizing Jews as perpetrators of mass murder—and therefore creating the permission structure for violence against us.
https://www.thefp.com/p/im-leaving-the-uk-antisemitism-manchester