Once one of Israel’s staunchest allies, the United Kingdom has witnessed a downfall of spectacular proportions over the past decade, both within the country’s domestic political scene (see the rise of Jeremy Corbyn) but also in the modern iteration of its relationship with the Jewish state and British Jewry.
Today, as the weekend’s scenes from the Glastonbury Festival show, Britain is a place where open hostility to Jews masquerades as progressive virtue.
At this year’s Glastonbury Festival, one of the largest annual music and culture gatherings in the world, what was supposed to be a celebration of music transformed into a stage for glorified hate.
As hundreds of Palestinian flags were waved, thousands chanted “Death to the IDF,” led by a rapper of the group
Bob Vylan
, as well as “Free, Free Palestine.”
UK police are now investigating the matter, and the
BBC
, which broadcasts the festival each year, has come under heavy criticism both within and outside the UK for allowing the broadcast to continue, unfiltered, into millions of people’s homes.
And it was the same story we have seen across the West for the past two years.
Among the crowd at Glastonbury, the smiling faces of well-fed, well-educated British youth who profess a martyred cause in neo-Marxism, while paying hundreds of pounds for the opportunity to attend.
Those same people who strut around British university campuses, professing a belief in the purity of Hamas and the wickedness of Israel.
Bob Vylan’s performance came before the even more notorious performance of Belfast group Kneecap, who told the crowd, “
There’s no f***ing hiding it, Israel are war criminals
.”
If festival-goers chanted for the death of Ukrainians, American soldiers, or NHS nurses, would the BBC beam those chants into homes across the country?
Would Sir Michael Eavis, Glastonbury’s founder, say those offended should “go somewhere else”? Of course not. But when it comes to Jews, even calling for their death has become not only permissible but fashionable. Glastonbury’s organizers did eventually come out on Sunday, calling the chants “appalling.”
The sickness is embedded in modern British institutions
This sickness is not confined to festival fields. It is embedded in modern Britain’s public institutions.
Last week, Channel 4 announced it would air
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack
, a documentary originally commissioned by the BBC but shelved due to concerns over bias.
That Channel 4 is picking it up in the middle of an unprecedented global wave of antisemitism, at a time when Hamas still holds Israeli hostages, says everything about the state of British media.
The BBC’s decision to delay the film was correct. That Channel 4 is now rushing to broadcast it should give pause for thought.
It is pure propaganda, ignoring Hamas’s use of hospitals as command centers, overlooking the booby-trapped clinics and human shields, and offering viewers a narrative in which Israeli restraint is erased and Palestinian victimhood is contextualized.
A Community Security Trust report revealed what every British Jew already knows: antisemitic incidents in the UK have skyrocketed since October 7, 2023.
Britain saw more antisemitic attacks in 2024 than in any previous year on record. Synagogues have been vandalized, children harassed in schools, Jewish MPs targeted, and Jewish students driven from campuses for being “Zionists.”
The distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has collapsed. In today’s Britain, hatred for the Jewish state has become the acceptable cover for hatred of Jews. And politicians, particularly those in the current Labor government, media executives, and university administrators, have been too afraid or too complicit to draw a line, allowing it to thrive.
A country that once fought fascism now allows its symbols to be repurposed by radicals demanding “intifada revolution” on the streets of London. A nation that stood firm against tyranny now shrinks from condemning Hamas while indulging fantasies of Israeli war crimes.
It was only a brief respite that the crowds mostly stopped protesting while Israel took on Iran, a country that threatens the UK itself. But this is a Britain adrift, where Jews are vilified, terrorists romanticized, and moral clarity has drowned in a sea of hatred and willing blindness.
Many Jews in Britain have professed their fear of the future. Many have decided that enough is enough and that the time has now come to move to Israel, or other, safer pastures for Jews.
History repeats itself once again.
