British Jews have been anxious about rising antisemitism and the war with Hamas, but the United Kingdom is still a good place for Jews to live, Board of Deputies of British Jews President-elect Phil Rosenberg told The Jerusalem Post in an interview, explaining how his priorities coming into office were to tackle antisemitism, extremism, and foster unity to ensure that the isles would remain a haven for Jews.
“We are on an inflection point,” said Rosenberg, who was elected on May 12 to lead the Jewish community organization, succeeding Marie van der Zyl in June. “The UK is a very good place to be Jewish, and all things being well, it should be, but we’re going to have to just be that much more activist to make sure it remains that way.
Is the UK a good place to be Jewish?
“We can’t take it completely for granted,” he said, “but if we do the right things, the UK will continue to be this brilliant and inclusive place where our communities continue to flourish and thrive. The challenges that face us are challenges that face wider society.”
Britain’s Jews have a unique advantage in helping their country with the increasing polarization, extremism, and lack of cohesion in UK society, according to Rosenberg, and in conversations he has had with the government and opposition, there was interest in hearing about ideas from the community.
Jews have long experienced minority status in various societies and therefore can offer a rare perspective. Rosenberg, possibly the youngest president in the organization’s 264-year history, is coming into office with a manifesto of 43 different proposals that would help the problems ailing British Jews and UK society.
“It’s an ambitious proposal that says not only do we have to do some of the hard stuff, we have to fight antisemitism, [and] we have to stand up for Israel’s peace and security, but we also have to celebrate our culture and be proud as Jews, proud of our identity, and project that outward: be outward-reaching and proud of who we are as well,” said Rosenberg.
Antisemitism on the rise
The issue of antisemitism is the most pressing one for the board’s president elect and his communities. The Community Security Trust 2023 annual summary recorded a 147% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to 2022. With 4,104 CST documented incidents, 2023 was a record-breaking year for Jew-hatred.
Rosenberg said that the Jewish community had understandably been reacting to the antisemitism situation as it has been developing, but that he wanted to take a step back and to look at it from a fresh vantage point – not to try to treat the symptoms of individual incidents, but to fight the root causes as they manifest in different spheres.
He has proposed a commission on the key variants of antisemitic ideologies and has developed proposals and advocacy programs. Rosenberg wants to explore whether the law has been strong enough on certain matters, if there is enough police and law enforcement training, and if the issue is prosecutorial.
“We need to make sure that there are stiff penalties, legal penalties, but also maybe social penalties for people who are antisemitic,” he said. “We also need to look at institutions – and I think this is not unique to the UK – but a lot of Jewish communities around the world have just looked at civil society and it’s failed us.”
One institution in which Rosenberg has seen a lot of positive change regarding antisemitism is the Labour Party. He noted that the Board of Deputies was involved in the fight against antisemitism in former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s party. With Labour set to make major gains in the upcoming elections, the incoming president said he didn’t think there was “anything like what we saw in 2019.”
“We had a situation where a lot of Jewish people saw the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn as a nearly existential challenge,” Rosenberg recalled. “Kier Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, has, to his credit, done a lot to tackle the problem of antisemitism in Labour. There are still occasionally cases that need to be dealt with. It’s not fully ‘mission accomplished.’
“But I think in the next election between the Conservatives and Labour, people are going to be much more able to vote on their social views and values and their economic interests in a way that in the last election, those things almost went out the window.”
Both parties still sometimes had their issues. Rosenberg noted that many of the troublesome politicians who had left or been removed from Labour had joined parties like the Green Party and MP George Galloway’s new Workers’ Party of Britain. The Greens weren’t doing due diligence in filtering out extremists, and Galloway had fostered friendships with anti-Western regimes over the years, such as those of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The problem of antisemitism overlapped with the general problem of extremism, with the UK grappling with Islamist, far-right and far-left extremism, said Rosenberg.
“We need to grapple with this problem and deal with it,” said the president-elect. “Not just because it’s a problem for Jews,” but because “it’s a problem for wider society.”
The greatest victims of Islamist extremism have been Muslims, “whether that’s ISIS, whether it’s who the Iranians kill most days when they’re not fighting others,” or who “Hamas kills when they’re not fighting Israel.”
Rosenberg continued, noting that “in Western societies, it’s Muslim kids who are being groomed and radicalized and perverted by these extremists. I think that story is about reaching out – working with moderate Muslims to fight extremism.”
Rosenberg considered the potential for all 300 of the organization’s deputies and their communities, from across the entire political spectrum, working together to “get messages to their local politicians, their local faith leaders, their local media, their local universities.”
“I do interfaith outreach for my own synagogue,” said Rosenberg, who shared a story about having joined an interfaith Iftar dinner where Muslims break their daily fast during the month of Ramadan. An Islamist extremist group called for a demonstration against the mosque where it was being held and attacked the house of worship’s leadership. Rosenberg said that they needed to address such extremism.
Rosenberg said that while the marches had become a focal point for extremism and antisemitism, he thought that it was because they were visible and large, but that many people who attended had good intentions.
“I find it depressing because as much as I think I want to believe that a lot of these people are of good heart, I just ask the question: ‘what would have happened [if] instead of demonstrating against Israel, they had said to Hamas, “Release the hostages”’? If they’d said, ‘we want Hamas to surrender and disarm,’” said Rosenberg.
“If Hamas had looked around the world and seen no support in some ways, but actually the call was all on them to release the hostages and to disarm, I think this war would have been very short – and I think we’d have lost a lot less lives on both sides.”
While Rosenberg gave protesters the benefit of the doubt, he said that it was essential to tackle the extremists.
“One of the sharpest rises in antisemitism that we saw was not after Israel went into Gaza and responded: It was actually in those first few days after October 7, when Israel was still collecting the bodies and fighting back against terrorist infiltrators who were still running amok in some of Israel’s Southern communities,” he said.
“That’s a very sobering thought, because these people were not fighting us because they thought Israel was being too strong: They were being antisemitic because they thought Israel was too weak,” said Rosenberg. “We had – not many, but some – incidents of people celebrating in a few parts of London. That’s extremely alarming.
“Some Muslim friends [of mine] have said it doesn’t excuse it, but maybe they didn’t know exactly what was happening. They thought they’d principally ‘broken out of a prison,’ as they see it,” he said. “I don’t know what the truth is, but certainly seeing people celebrating when you know that there’s these gruesome atrocities being perpetrated, that is concerning.”
The British government and opposition got a mixed grade in their response to antisemitism and extremism, but Rosenberg said that they had been supportive of the Jewish community. What they needed was the will to act stronger and faster against major problems to which there were no simple solutions. For example, he called for the government to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
The government has woken up to the threat of political coercion with threats to MPs and vandalism of their offices, said Rosenberg, and new counter-extremism efforts were promising, but the Board of Deputies needed to make sure that they had teeth.
Part of the reason he wanted a commission was to push past finger-pointing, where politicians blame police for lack of law enforcement, and police blame politicians back for lack of legislation.
“Do we need to toughen the law? If we need to toughen the law, let’s toughen the law. If police don’t have sufficient resources, let’s give them more resources. If they’re not sufficiently trained, let’s let them get trained,” the board’s president-elect said, noting incidents of police not understanding symbols like swastikas or the problem of Islamists calling for jihad.
“Given the rise in antisemitism and concerns about friends and family in Israel, there is anxiety,” said Rosenberg. “But at the same time, the UK Jewish community is a well-organized community with many brilliant institutions, strong infrastructure, and a fantastic cultural scene.”
While British Jews have a great diversity of opinion, he said that it was essential that they model the Jewish principle of veahavta l’reyekha kamokha – loving one another as you love yourself – a sentiment that he hopes Jews can spread through wider society.
“There’s lots going on,” he concluded, “that gives us a lot of reason for pride and optimism.”