LONDON/BRISTOL — A group of Jews were enjoying a late night out in London’s lively West End, chatting animatedly in Hebrew, when a group of around 20 men ambushed them. “Are you Jewish?” they asked of a woman who identified herself as Tehilla. When the woman responded that she was, they started chanting, “Free Palestine” and “F**k Jews,” she told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in January. When she and her friends tried to walk away, “they started attacking us physically,” she added.
A month earlier, an Israeli man who was wearing a kippah was accosted by a man in Finsbury Park, in northern London, as he awaited a bus. “I felt someone beating me on my shoulders and head and saying, 'I’m going to kill you. Kill the Jew,’” the man told the Jewish Chronicle.
Last week, at the University of Exeter in Southwest England, students at an Israel stall were harassed by a mob of 100 students, one of whom said they had “killed” her brother and others who pelted them with drinks.
These incidents come amid a record number of anti-Semitic attacks targeting Britain’s estimated 271,000 Jews in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on Israel, which killed 1,139 in a single day. Gaza’s Ministry of Health estimates that more than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have died in Israel’s brutal retaliatory onslaught, which has sharpened anti-Israeli feelings and provided cover for anti-Semites to harass Jews worldwide.
