In Golders Green in northwest London on December 25th, you would not notice it was Christmas Day. Recent census data says the population of the area is about 50 per cent Jewish. Wandering around you’ll find Jewish bakeries, levantine restaurants, boys in yarmulkes. It’s also home to one chapter of the Hatzola, a volunteer-run ambulance service that caters to the local community.

Early on Monday morning, two of these ambulances were burned in an arson attack. Two men aged 47 and 45 have been arrested but at the time of writing no more specifics are confirmed about the suspects, the motivation, or whether it was a terror offence. But prime minister Keir Starmer was not equivocal – this was an act of “horrific” anti-Semitism, he said. Were you to step one foot in Golders Green, you would find it hard to readily disagree with him. This neighbourhood, with Stamford Hill to the east, is the focal point of London’s Jewish life.

What you might not know about Hatzola – the non-profit ambulance service founded in New York in the late 1970s – is that its members were among first responders after the Twin Towers were struck on September 11th, 2001. You also might not know that in London, Hatzola services transported Covid patients and Covid vaccines. Not that it really matters – ambulances shouldn’t be burned in any case.

A lot of Jewish people here will say they find this all shocking, yes, but not surprising any more. Since October 7th, 2023, conspicuous anti-Semitism has risen in Britain. Recently a Jewish-owned high street chain bakery, Gail’s, has been subject to community protest in North London. Protesters make long-winded attempts to claim it’s all because Gail’s has financial backing from Bain Capital, which also has investments in Israel. But what of all the businesses in the UK with backing from Bain Capital without Jewish founders? If there have been a slew of protests outside certain branches of Pizza Express, well, no one has told me about it.

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And then you have the Yom Kippur attack from last autumn. In Manchester Jihad al-Shamie drove into pedestrians and worshippers on this holy day in the Jewish calendar, before turning on the crowd with a knife. In December, two men opened fire on a crowd of Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah in Bondi Beach, Sydney. That’s Australia, not the UK, of course – but to the British Jews I know it felt like another in this slew of anti-Semitic terrorist attacks telegrammed across the world and ending up on their phone screens and newsfeeds.

[ Anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment duel for the attention of Britain’s political classOpens in new window ]

Something is hardening in British public life. Since the war started in Gaza the political left has united around Palestine as an almost uni-cause – look at Jeremy Corbyn’s new party Your Party, and the transformation of the Green Party away from an environmentalist operation into one that has an explicit policy on Gaza. This is an understandable pivot for this wing of the left; the horrors of Gaza are hard to ignore. But there has also been a concurrent rise in anti-Semitic activity – graffiti-ing of synagogues, pro-Palestine marches that are defensible in theory but often cross the line in practice. These things are not the same but they are hardly unrelated. And what you have in its entirety – from an emergent pro-Palestine political coalition to a spate of hate crimes – is the Jewish community in Britain under a magnifying glass thanks to decisions being made in a war cabinet in Tel Aviv.

And what’s remarkable in all of this is that Jewish people here in Britain still find the drip-feed of stories coming from Ireland astonishing: from the attempted renaming of Herzog Park, to the decision of Michael D Higgins to use Holocaust memorial day to lecture a Jewish audience about Israeli activity in Gaza. Ireland has a known reputation for Palestinian solidarity. It also has one for anti-Semitism on its left.

I remember the day after October 7th, 2023, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and Downing Street in London were lit up with the blue-and-white flag of Israel – before the war in Gaza had started, in solidarity with a people who had just seen and experienced the single worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. There was no equivalent statement in Ireland. But activists in Belfast did find the time to spread a Palestinian flag on Black Mountain on October 8th – with Gerry Adams’s vocal support on Twitter, of course.

This political evolution is natural for the left – borne out of its commitment to so-called anti-imperialism. The refocusing of the left’s energy on Palestine is fine, and should never be held in equivalence to anti-Semitic crimes on the streets of British cities. But when a political energy does metastasise into something much darker, we have to be able to call it what it is.

© The Irish Times