Antisemitic incidents – 29 November update

In the 54 days inclusive between the Hamas terror attack on Israel (Saturday 7 October) and Wednesday 29 November, CST recorded at least 1747 antisemitic incidents across the UK. This is the highest ever total reported to CST across a fifty-four-day period. CST has been recording antisemitic incidents since 1984.

In just over seven weeks, CST has recorded more antisemitic incidents than the total reported throughout the entire year prior to Hamas’ attack on Israel, between 1 January and 6 October 2023, and more than the annual total recorded in 2022.

This is also a provisional total that is almost certain to increase further as we receive more delayed reports of incidents covering this period, and while we continue to verify and log all the reports that we have currently received.

For comparison, CST recorded 263 antisemitic incidents over the same 54 days in 2022. This means that we have seen an increase in anti-Jewish hate acts of 564% this year compared to the same period last year.

These are all instances of anti-Jewish racism, wherein offenders are targeting Jewish people, communities and institutions for their Jewishness. In many cases, these hateful comments, threats to life and physical attacks are laced with the rhetoric and iconography of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel politics.

Even compared to periods of previous conflicts involving Israel, these statistics are unprecedentedly high. The last time a significant spike in antisemitism related to events in the Middle East was recorded occurred in May 2021. Over the entire month of that conflict, from 8 May – 7 June, 691 instances of anti-Jewish hate were recorded. After 7 June, antisemitic incident levels in the UK returned to what CST would consider a “normal” level (which is still shamefully high, averaging over 100 incidents per month). At present, there is no sign that the volume of anti-Jewish hatred is subsiding to this “normal”.

Across the first 54 days of the conflict in July 2014, we recorded 519 antisemitic incidents. Bear in mind, when comparing these to the 1747 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded since Saturday 7 October, that the figures for 2021 and 2014 are final totals including all late-reported incidents, whereas the current total of 1747 incidents is only provisional and will almost certainly increase further.

In addition to the 1747 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded so far, CST also logged at least 1123 incidents that have not been classified as antisemitic. These include criminal acts affecting Jewish people and property, suspicious behaviour near to Jewish locations, and anti-Israel activity that is not directed at the Jewish community or does not use antisemitic language. Many of these potential incidents involve suspicious activity or possible hostile reconnaissance at Jewish locations, and they play an important role in informing CST’s provision of protection to the Jewish community.

The 1747 antisemitic incidents recorded over this fifty-four-day period fall into the following categories:

• 74 Assaults

• 112 Damage & Desecration to Jewish property

• 140 direct Threats

• 1416 Abusive Behaviour, including verbal abuse, graffiti on non-Jewish property, hate mail and online abuse

• 5 instances of mass-produced antisemitic Literature

CST has recorded 989 antisemitic incidents in Greater London; 293 in Greater Manchester; 57 in Hertfordshire; 44 in West Yorkshire; 34 in Scotland; 26 in Thames Valley; 25 in Sussex; 25 in the West Midlands; 18 in Avon & Somerset; 15 in Nottinghamshire; and the remaining 221 incidents were spread across 34 different police regions around the UK.

Of the 1747 antisemitic incidents, 1204 occurred offline and 543 were online. Many of the online incidents were ‘pile-ons’ involving multiple antisemitic posts and comments all in the same thread or conversation; CST records these as a single incident.

One hundred and twenty-three antisemitic incidents were related to universities across the UK. In the first six months of 2023, CST recorded just 17 incidents of this kind, and 56 in the whole of 2022. Meanwhile, 114 incidents were related to the school sector. Fifty-four of these affected students and teachers at non-Jewish schools; 35 involved Jewish schoolchildren abused on their way to or from school; 18 targeted Jewish schools; and seven involved offenders from non-Jewish schools abusing adult members of the public or Jewish locations. Between January and June 2023, 67 incidents in the school sector were reported to CST, and 94 in the whole of 2022.

Whenever Israel is at war, CST records an increase in anti-Jewish hate across the country, and an acute rise is usually reported specifically in and related to places of education.

Examples of antisemitic incidents recorded by CST since Saturday 7 October include:

• Posters of Jewish hostages have been removed or defaced in London, Manchester, Hertfordshire and Leeds

• In Essex, a woman woke up to banging on her front door by a gang of men shouting, “Get out bloody Jews”

• In London, a woman said to a visibly Jewish man, “Oh you are everywhere, just like the rest”

• On a bus in Brighton, a man repeatedly called a woman an “Evil Jew”.

• A woman at a pro-Palestinian protest in Glasgow was holding a sign saying, “One Holocaust does not justify another”

• A rabbi in the West Midlands received a phone call, and the caller said, “I wiped my arse on your Torah”

• A woman shouted, “You f*cking jews think you own the world” at a passer-by in London

• A Jewish boy was getting changed at school, when two other students shouted, “You’re bombing Gaza”. The offenders were excluded from the school

• In London, “KILL JEWS” was seen etched into a wall

• When visibly Jewish schoolchildren boarded a London bus, two other boys said, “There is a Jew on here, and, “F*cking Jew”

• In a London barbershop, a customer overheard another customer say, "Maybe Hitler was right, he knew what we knew", to which the barber replied, "Definitely - that’s why he left some of them, so we could see"

CST will not stand for this anti-Jewish hatred and nor should anybody else. We urge everyone who experiences or witnesses antisemitism to report it to police and to CST so that those who are trying to intimidate and threaten our community can be investigated, arrested and prosecuted.

To report an antisemitic incident to CST, please use our online form or for urgent or out-of-hours reports please call our 24-hour National Emergency Number 0800 032 3263.