Political violence in Britain is intensifying. That has long been true, but the situation is now acute. It is manifesting in attacks on synagogues and, most recently, the horrific assault on two Jewish men in Golders Green this week.

The UK’s tiny Jewish community, comprising less than 0.5% of the total population, has every reason to feel afraid. Britons are, after all, living in a culture in which journalists appear to be rationalising attacks on Jewish businesses as a response to deaths in Gaza. This plays into the hands of terrorist organisations.

The implication is that British Jews should expect violent assaults because of a conflict thousands of miles away, over which they have no influence. It even suggests there is a cold logic to this position, as though marches through British cities week after week, by people wearing Hamas headbands and calling for the death of Israeli soldiers, are entirely unconnected.

No matter how angry people are about events in the Middle East, making excuses for violence against Jews is unforgivable. Two men were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester in October last year, and further fatalities were avoided on Wednesday only by the swift intervention of Jewish volunteers and the police. Speaking on Thursday about the Golders Green attack, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that Jews are “scared to show who they are in their community, scared to go to synagogue and practise their religion”, adding: “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”

But tolerance for violent antisemitism — and there has been plenty of that on social media in the last two days — disconnects it from a wider phenomenon. When I was writing my book Home Grown, about the link between domestic violence and terrorism, it became clear that violent men actively seek out ideologies as a channel and a “justification” for their extremist impulses.

They usually have a history of violence in their own families, terrorising wives and children long before they discover a “cause”. They have often been exposed to violence themselves, witnessing fathers beating mothers. It normalises violence, and they think it’s part of being a man. It’s something Isis understood and played upon, using teams of volunteers to radicalise angry young men — and women in some cases — via the internet. According to Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may be running a similar operation in the UK to encourage attacks on British Jews.

This is a crisis that should be at the top of the Government’s security agenda, namely the existence of a pool of men in Britain who are obsessed with murder, weapons and violent death. Some may also be mentally ill but they are easily susceptible to propaganda, and it’s not hard to see how the pro-Palestinian marches have created a permissive atmosphere for verbal antisemitism and worse.

But it’s part of a much wider problem of violence in this country. Two summers ago, Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls and injured many others at a dance class in Southport. A year earlier, Valdo Calocane stabbed two students to death and ran over a school caretaker in Nottingham. In 2020, Danyal Hussein savagely attacked and killed two sisters at a park in north London. Essa Suleiman, the man arrested for Wednesday’s attack, was previously jailed for stabbing a policeman and his dog.

Hussein and Rudakubana were referred to the Government’s anti-terrorism programme, Prevent, but were discharged because they were not obviously attached to an ideology. Suleiman was himself referred to Prevent in 2020, before his case was closed later that year.

All this has exposed a gap in the state’s ability to protect its citizens in cases where an individual’s known obsession with violence isn’t linked to Islamism or Right-wing extremism. It has also left a series of institutions struggling to contain the threat posed by young men obsessed with knives, torture and murder.

The underlying problem is the number of men in this country with a propensity for extreme violence. A blinkered willingness to frame it as “ideological” is putting lives at risk. At the moment, ministers must recognise that British Jews are on the front line.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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