Michael Gove has warned that Britain risks “descending into darkness” if it fails to tackle growing antisemitism in the UK.
In a special address on Tuesday at Jewish community hub JW3, requested by the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the communities secretary said the safety of the Jewish community in the UK is the “canary in the coalmine” for the health of the whole political system.
The Community Security Trust recorded the highest number of anti-Jewish hate incidents nationwide in 2023, a 147 per cent increase from the previous year. The CST recorded 2,699 incidents in the period on or after 7 October, constituting 66 per cent of the annual total, and this figure alone exceeds all previous annual totals.
Gove’s speech was delivered on the same day that Lord Walney is expected to publish a landmark report on political violence and disruption, ahead of the publication of the Government’s Counter Extremism Action Plan in the coming weeks.
He said that since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, “we have seen a shadow come over the Jewish community here and around the world,”
Quoting a number of antisemitic incidents to have taken place in the UK in recent months he said displays of antisemitism during the weekly pro-Palestinian marches were becoming “increasingly strident, visible, and lurid”.
Gove condemned march organisers for not doing more to prevent symbols of anti-Jewish hate.
“Swastikas, Hamas banners, depictions of Jews as exploiters, devils, child-killers, it’s incessant,” he said. “We saw it again only this weekend, the imagery of Der Stürmer paraded past the gates of Downing Street.
He added, “Organisers of these marches could do everything in their power to stop that. They don’t.”
He noted that “many of those on these marches are thoughtful, gentle, compassionate people, driven by a desire for peace and an end to suffering, but they are side by side with those who are promoting hate.”
He said it was an “iron-clad law of history that those countries which are descending into darkness are those that are becoming more unsafe for Jewish individuals and the Jewish community. The Spain of the Inquisition, the Vienna of the 1900s, Germany in the Thirties, Russia in the last decade.
“It is a parallel law that those countries in which the Jewish community has felt most safe at any time are the countries where freedom is most secure at any time. The Netherlands of the 17th century, Britain in the first decades of the last century, America in the second half of that century.”
He continued, “When Jewish people are under threat, all of our freedoms are threatened. The safety of the Jewish community is the canary in the mine. Growing antisemitism is a fever which weakens the whole body politic. It is a mark of a society turning to darkness and in on itself.”
Quoting the late Lord Rabbi Sacks, Gove said antisemitism has evolved to currently focus on the “delegitimization and demonisation” of the State of Israel, as “a prelude to its dismantlement and its destruction.
“That is what the ‘from the river to the sea’ chant envisages: the erasure of the Jewish people’s home.”
He contended the protests “may ostensibly be presented as against Israel’s actions in Gaza, but in reality, they’re directed against Israel’s continued existence.”
Israel, he said, is treated “uniquely among nations in the way it is so consistently treated differently from others,”
“There are no BDS campaigns against Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, the regime guilty of killing more Muslims in living memory than any other,” he said. “There are no student encampments urging university administrations to cut all ties with China, given what is happening in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or what happened in Tibet. I know of no efforts to organise marches in their thousands to demand immediate action to stop the persecution of the Rohingya or Karen people by Myanmar’s government.
“I have may have missed it, but agitation to end the war in Sudan or the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo, or Mali, or Ethiopia, does not seem to energise our campuses.”
He said there “were no suggestions other than with Israel that errors or even crimes of a country’s leaders should necessitate the end of that country’s independent existence.”
He concluded that it was for this reason that the argument “that the cry ‘from the river to the sea’ or calls for the globalisation of the intifada or demands for victory of the resistance, is not antisemitic, is so disingenuous.”
Gove said antisemitism is “the common currency of hate” and the thread that connects extremist ideologies, be it from “Islamism, the far-right, and the hard-left”.
Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove, speaks at JW3, May 21, 2024
He said that is why the government is taking action in “legislating to prevent universities from enabling antisemitism by endorsing the antisemitic BDS campaign” through its Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill. He appealed to members of the House of Lords to “listen to the Jewish community, send a message to the antisemites on our campus, and back the bill now.”
The bill would stop businesses and organisations – including those affiliated with Israel - being targeted through ongoing boycotts by public bodies, leading to community tensions and a rise in Antisemitism.
Gove stressed that the safety of Jewish people is a moral duty for all people to uphold.
He said: “We must say to every Jewish citizen in this country - your safety is the best guarantee of our security, your freedom to live as you choose the only way we can be certain we remain a land of liberty, your future is our future. We said Never Again. And that is a promise we will never, ever, disavow.”
