The first thing you notice is the choreography. A march gathers, the crowd sets its jaw, and a chant starts in one corner of the city and echoes down the avenues like a relay of certainty. Police officers – high-vis coats, neutral faces – arrange themselves in polite lines. Jewish families shut their doors and draw their curtains earlier than planned.
The law, too, is present: pages crammed with noble intention, centuries behind each clause. Yet between statute book and street a vacuum opens, like the air pocket trailing a lorry. Into that space rush menace, bravado, and the thrill of impunity.
We tell ourselves Britain is a land of precedent and prudence. We cite the Public Sector Equality Duty with pride – as if “have due regard” were a spell against demons.
On paper, the architecture gleams: The Equality Act obliges public bodies to eliminate harassment and foster harmony; the Crime and Disorder Act treats bias as an aggravator; the Human Rights Act stitches Strasbourg’s philosophy – religion, expression, private life – into daily life; and the ICC Act 2001 domesticates the worst of atrocity law. This cat’s cradle of duties glows in classrooms and dazzles on Home Office slides.
But on a Saturday, the glow fades. You see a constable advising a Jewish man to fold his flag lest it offend; a patrol diverting a Jewish charity’s van from a route that might “inflame”; phones filming a hundred petty trespasses that later become nobody’s problem. The preference is to relocate the victim rather than arrest the aggressor. The caption reads: If you are frightened, make yourself smaller.
The misinterpretation of tolerance
When did we grow timid about our laws? Tolerance, rightly cherished, has been mistranslated as passivity, yielding paralysis with liberalism’s manners but none of its spine. You hear it in the throat-clearing of police statements: “We must balance rights…” Balance is not indifference. It does not equate speech that chills a minority out of public space with a rude opinion shouted into the air. The law knows the difference. So do we.
Consider the figures: more than 1,500 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2025 – almost certainly an undercount, as many people no longer report. Consider the testimonies: attacks and mockery; families removing mezuzot; students weighing each word like a bomb technician choosing a wire. Consider October in Manchester: a radicalized assailant targeting worshipers on Yom Kippur, pledging to ISIS, and murdering two. It happened not only in a city but in a climate of surging threats. Weather forms, then breaks. Without umbrellas, you are soaked.
The law appears in the wrong tense. After the fact, it turns lyrical: careful files, disputes over intent, solemn reviews. Before the fact – chants rising, banners lifted, streets closing like fists – it falls mute. There is an aversion to immediacy: Arrests, conditions, and dispersal orders exist, yet they feel somehow embarrassing to use. Bashful about authority, Britain prefers to ask the threatened to step aside.
Tell people to shrink, and they will: disappearing from certain streets, days, and conversations. They will not be at the rally point; they will fall silent in the seminar; and their shops will close early. The measure of a society is ordinary life, not the brilliance of drafting but the courage of enforcement. In the gap between paper and pavement, civic life thins to a ghost.
THERE IS a deeper danger. International law calls “persecution” the severe deprivation of fundamental rights amid a widespread or systematic attack. We are not at that terminal point, but the symptoms are being rehearsed: the targeting of Jewish visibility, anti-Zionism declaring Jewish nationhood illegitimate and applying that judgement to Jews everywhere, and mobilizations that surge after each outrage abroad and seek the nearest synagogue. The test is whether a pattern hardens into a program. Britain used to be good at noticing patterns. Why so coy now?
The answer is fear – of overreach, of headlines, of “taking sides.” That fear is the gravest error, handing initiative to the boldest. Radicals set the tempo; moderates apologize. The lesson absorbed is clear: If you are many and loud, rules bend. A careful country becomes reckless.
There is another way – neither draconian nor faint-hearted. Take the statutes seriously. Treat anti-Zionist campaigns that target Jews and Jewish life as anti-Jewish discrimination, and let that recognition flow through the Equality Act and the hate-crime framework. Intervene in real time when intimidation presents itself; do not save courage for the press release. Reroute protests that menace synagogues. Stop harassing chants with powers you already possess. Pursue organizers using incitement and conspiracy laws, not merely the most careless of their followers.
Then say what you have done. Publish arrests, charges, and sentence uplifts locally and regularly. Deterrence’s best ally is predictability. Nothing deters like counting and acting. Nothing restores confidence like an honest ledger.
The grander tools – the ICC Act – exist to remind us how persecution works, by a sequence of small permissions. Use them in egregious cases to communicate a boundary. Laws do not only punish; they teach. At present, Britain teaches two contradictory lessons: Jews are promised protection, and Jews must hide. Only one can be true in a liberal state.
We are judged by the ordinary week. Can a family attend shul without scanning the sky? Can a child wear a Star of David without rehearsing a speech? Can a citizen walk their own city without negotiation? If the answer is “sometimes,” our legal house is fragile. Close the vacuum with courage, routine, and candor, and the statutes will become shields held, not prayers whispered.
Britain keeps its promises. Here is one for daylight: No minority should fold itself away to flatter our timidity. To insist on that is not to take a side in a distant conflict; it is to take responsibility for our own streets. The law knows how. It is time we did too.
The writer is executive director of We Believe In Israel.