Golders Green, 1:36 a.m.
At thirty-six minutes past one on the morning of the twenty-third of March 2026, three masked figures approached the car park of the Machzike Hadath Synagogue on Highfield Road, Golders Green. They carried petrol. Security camera footage, later shared with media outlets worldwide, shows them dousing the vehicles methodically and without hesitation. Then they ran.
What they set on fire were ambulances.
Four ambulances belonging to Hatzola Northwest — a volunteer-led, free emergency medical service run by members of the Jewish community — erupted in flames outside the synagogue. Oxygen canisters on board exploded. Windows shattered in the adjacent block of flats. Thirty-four residents were evacuated into the March night. Six fire engines and forty firefighters responded. The blaze was brought under control by 03:06. No one was killed. But four of the organisation’s six ambulances were destroyed.¹
Hatzola is not a political organisation. It is not an arm of any government. The first Hatzola chapter in the United Kingdom was established in Stamford Hill in 1979. Hatzola Northwest — the unit whose ambulances were destroyed in Golders Green — handles over five thousand calls a year, with an average response time of under five minutes. It serves everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in a 2.5-mile radius of its base in northwest London. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, funded entirely by community donations, and receives no government money whatsoever. There are seven Hatzola chapters across the United Kingdom, with units in Manchester, Gateshead, Hertfordshire, and Canvey Island.²
The Metropolitan Police declared the attack an antisemitic hate crime. Counter-terrorism police took charge of the investigation. Three suspects are being sought. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.³
The question this article exists to answer is not who did this. The police will find that out, or they will not. The question is why. Why would anyone attack a volunteer ambulance service whose sole purpose is to save lives? If this attack was connected to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East — and while the investigation is in its earliest hours, the targeting of a Jewish institution suggests it may well have been — then a question demands answering: why would anyone destroy emergency medical equipment — equipment that might save a life tonight, any life, regardless of faith — and believe they had struck a blow for justice?
The answer is a lie. A lie told so often, reinforced so relentlessly, and defended so aggressively that it has become, for millions of people from every political persuasion and background, indistinguishable from the truth.
The lie is that the Jewish people and the State of Israel are the same thing.
They are not. And until that lie is dismantled — in law, in media, in the assumptions that people carry without examining — every Jewish institution in every country on earth will remain a proxy target for anger at a foreign government’s policies. A volunteer medic in Golders Green will be treated as though he bears personal responsibility for decisions made by politicians in Jerusalem. A community ambulance will be treated as a military asset. And the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.
This is not the first time. Five months ago, on the morning of Yom Kippur — the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a man drove a car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two innocent men were killed: Melvin Cravitz, who was killed by the attacker, and Adrian Daulby, who was struck by police gunfire during the armed response. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, who was shot dead by police, was wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest.⁴
The rabbi of that synagogue, Daniel Walker, said afterwards that the attacker had shouted as he stood on the steps looking through the window at the congregation: “They are killing our kids.” Rabbi Walker’s response captures the entire problem this article addresses: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”⁵
Every Jew in the world. Collectively.
That is the conflation. That is the lie. And it is burning ambulances in Golders Green.
British Jews, British Institutions
The Jewish community in Britain is not a recent arrival. It is not a transplant from the Middle East. It is not an outpost of a foreign state. It is one of the oldest continuous minority communities in Western Europe, and its institutional life predates the State of Israel by centuries.
The London Beth Din — the rabbinical court of the United Synagogue — has functioned as the central religious authority for British Jewry since the early eighteenth century. It handles civil disputes, divorce, conversion, genealogical research, and the supervision of kashrut through the largest kosher certification organisation in Europe. The Sephardi Beth Din serves the UK’s Sephardi community with the same range of religious functions. The Manchester Beth Din and the Federation Beis Din operate independently alongside them. These are not shadow courts. They are religious arbitration bodies operating within and subject to British law, deriving their authority from the Arbitration Act 1996. Their rulings, where both parties have voluntarily agreed to be bound by them, are enforceable through the High Court — but the civil courts retain the right to intervene in any case where the award is considered unreasonable or contrary to public policy.⁶
This is what religious freedom looks like in a functioning democracy. A community maintains its own traditions of dispute resolution, its own dietary standards, its own processes for marriage and divorce — and does so within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it.
Beyond the courts, British Jewish communal life is an ecosystem of institutions that exist for one purpose: the welfare of the community and its neighbours. Hatzola, whose ambulances were torched in Golders Green, is one example. Shomrim, the neighbourhood watch organisation that was among the first to condemn the arson attack, is another — a volunteer-run community safety group that works alongside and in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police. Jewish schools educate thousands of children across the country. Jewish welfare organisations, burial societies, and charitable foundations serve needs that have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with the daily life of a religious community rooted in Britain.⁷
These institutions are not Israeli. They are not funded by Israel. They do not answer to Israel. Many of them predate the Zionist movement entirely, let alone the state it produced.
And yet they are targets.
The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitic incidents and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the United Kingdom in 2025 — the second-highest annual total in its history, and more than double the 1,662 incidents recorded in 2022, before the current conflict in the Middle East began. Of those incidents, fifty-one per cent referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. There were 1,766 incidents showing explicitly anti-Zionist motivation — instances where the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist” were used as euphemisms for “Jew” and “Jewish,” or in conjunction with other antisemitic abuse. For the first time in the CST’s history, over two hundred incidents of anti-Jewish hate were recorded in every single calendar month.⁸
The pattern is unmistakable. When the Israeli government acts, British Jews pay the price. When Israeli forces conduct military operations in Gaza, antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom spike. When the conflict dominates the news cycle, Jewish children in British schools face harassment. When politicians in Jerusalem make inflammatory statements, synagogues in Manchester and London are vandalised, threatened, and now burned.
The Yom Kippur attack in Manchester — in which Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on 2 October 2025 — was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since the CST began monitoring incidents in 1984. Greater Manchester Police reported that antisemitic hate crime tripled in the three weeks that followed.⁹
And now Golders Green. Ambulances. Volunteer ambulances that save lives regardless of faith, burned to shells outside a synagogue, because someone could not — or would not — distinguish between a Jewish community and a Jewish state.
What Is a Jew?
To understand how the conflation works, it helps to understand why it works so well. And that requires engaging — carefully, respectfully, and honestly — with a question that has no clean answer: what, exactly, is a Jew?
This is not an idle question, and it is not asked here to provoke. It is asked because the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people depends entirely on the ambiguity of Jewish identity, and anyone who wants to dismantle the conflation must first understand the ambiguity it exploits.
Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, in his widely respected introduction to Judaism, What Is a Jew?, opens with a disarmingly honest admission: “It is difficult to find a single definition of a Jew.” He then proceeds to offer not one definition but five. A Jew is one who accepts the faith of Judaism — the religious definition. A Jew is one who seeks a spiritual base in study, prayer, and daily routine dedicated to Jewish wisdom — the spiritual definition. A Jew is one who, without formal religious affiliation, regards the ethics, folkways, and literature of Judaism as his or her own — the cultural definition. A Jew may also be understood through an ethnic definition — though Kertzer notes that this definition is, in his words, “going the way of the dinosaur,” as the Jewish community increasingly includes converts and those raised with no ethnic identity in particular. And Judaism has been called a civilisation — a people linked by a common history, a common language of prayer, a vast literature, and above all a sense of common destiny. In this sense, Jews are a people, not in the national or racial sense, but in a feeling of oneness.¹⁰
Five definitions. None of them complete on its own. All of them true simultaneously. And — this is the point that matters for this article — none of them mention a state.
Kertzer is equally clear about what a Jew is not. Jews are not a race. Their history reveals, as he puts it, countless additions through marriage and conversion. There are Jews of every physical appearance, from every continent. There are black African Jews from Ethiopia, Chinese Jews from Kaifeng, Jewish communities across the Indian subcontinent. Nor are Jews a nation in the modern sense. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian citizens of Israel do constitute a nation, Kertzer acknowledges — but there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews, he writes, are part and parcel of every community in which they live.¹¹
And no one speaks for all of them. Kertzer devotes an entire chapter to this point. There is no Jewish pope. No single authoritative body to which all Jews owe allegiance. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Jews all maintain their own synagogues and rabbinic organisations. Each congregation does what it thinks best. There is wide diversity within all synagogue groups, and no element of compulsion. The old expression captures it: “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions.”¹²
I have a personal encounter with this complexity. Years ago, before my conversion to Islam, I attended Jewish conversion classes. I did not complete them — I needed to resolve the question of Jesus as Messiah first, and that journey led me elsewhere. But during those classes, the rabbi explained something that has stayed with me. He told me that if I completed the conversion, I would have rights as a Jew. But without a Jewish mother, I would not be considered Jewish in the fullest halakhic sense — though my children would be.¹³
I later discovered, through maternal DNA testing, that I am three per cent Ashkenazi Jewish by ancestry. That means somewhere on my mother’s side, a third to fifth great-grandparent was Jewish. By the ethnic definition, I carry Jewish heritage. By the religious definition, I am not Jewish and never was. The two frameworks do not agree, and they were never designed to. Jewish identity was not constructed to be legible to outsiders. It was constructed to maintain a covenant community across millennia of displacement, and it did so with extraordinary success — precisely because it could not be reduced to a single category.
This complexity is not a weakness. It is the defining feature of one of the most resilient identity structures in human history. But it is also the crack through which the conflation enters.
If Jewishness were purely religious, then criticism of the State of Israel would obviously be a political matter — no more connected to Jewish identity than criticism of Saudi Arabia is connected to Islam. If Jewishness were purely ethnic, then Israel’s religious claims to the land would be irrelevant, and the state would be judged as any other state is judged: by its actions. It is the fact that Jewish identity is both — and neither cleanly — that allows the conflation to operate. The ambiguity creates a space in which political criticism can be reframed as ethnic hatred, and ethnic hatred can disguise itself as political criticism. Both the defenders of Israel and its most vicious opponents exploit the same confusion. The Israeli government says: to criticise us is to attack the Jewish people. The antisemite says: the Jewish people are responsible for what Israel does. Both claims rest on the same false premise — that Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.¹⁴
They are not. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to be made are Jewish people themselves — the ones who are being attacked in Manchester and Golders Green for a conflation they never asked for and many actively reject.
A hostile reader might object at this point: but most Jews do support Israel. Doesn’t that make the conflation natural, even if imprecise?
It does not. And the evidence comes from within the Jewish community itself.
Kertzer addresses this directly. “Almost all Jews in North America are Zionists,” he writes, “in the sense that we all support the right of Jews to have a Jewish state, even though we continue to consider ourselves an integral part of the lands in which we live.” That last clause is the one that matters. Supporting the right of a state to exist is not the same as being represented by its government. Kertzer himself acknowledges that official Israeli government policy sometimes falls short of Jewish ethical expectations, “at which time Jews may object to the Israeli government, much as Americans protested during the Vietnam War.” The analogy is precise: an American who protested the Vietnam War was not anti-American. A Jew who objects to Israeli government policy is not anti-Jewish. And neither is represented by the government they are criticising.¹⁵
Contemporary polling confirms what Kertzer observed. A 2024 J Street survey of American Jewish voters found that ninety per cent believe someone can criticise Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel. Sixty-eight per cent disapprove of Prime Minister Netanyahu. A 2025 Washington Post poll found that sixty-one per cent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza — and yet seventy-six per cent still say Israel’s existence is vital to the long-term future of the Jewish people. These are not people who have abandoned Israel. Whether Israel deserves that loyalty given its conduct — a question I have addressed at length elsewhere — is not the point here. The point is that even among those who extend it, the conflation is rejected. They are people who refuse to let a government speak for them — who insist, as Kertzer insisted, that supporting a state and being represented by its leaders are entirely different things.¹⁶
The conflation does not survive contact with what Jewish people actually think. It survives only in the minds of those who have never asked them.
The Machinery of Conflation
The conflation of Israel with the Jewish people did not arise organically. It was built. It is maintained by specific mechanisms, operated by identifiable actors, and it serves identifiable interests. Understanding those mechanisms is essential to dismantling them.
The first mechanism is Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.
In February 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” On 1 March 2015, preparing to address the United States Congress, he repeated the claim: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people.”¹⁷
The response from Jewish leaders was immediate and sharp. Senator Dianne Feinstein, herself Jewish, called the claim “arrogant” and said flatly: “He doesn’t speak for me.” The editors of The Forward, one of America’s oldest Jewish publications, wrote: “We’ve learned to find vitality and sustenance in a dynamic pluralism that resists centralisation… We wouldn’t presume to speak for all Jews. Neither should anyone else.” J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, publicly contested the claim. Jewish members of the United States Congress boycotted the speech.¹⁸
What makes this claim extraordinary is that it contradicts Israel’s own founding commitment. In 1950, in the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement between Israel’s first Prime Minister and the president of the American Jewish Committee, David Ben-Gurion stated “without any reservation, that the State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country.”¹⁹
That agreement was not a casual remark. It was a formal diplomatic understanding, negotiated precisely because American Jewish leaders were alarmed at the suggestion that a new foreign state might claim authority over their identity. Ben-Gurion understood the danger and disavowed it explicitly. Netanyahu reversed that disavowal. In doing so, he did not merely make a political claim. He asserted ownership over an identity that — as Rabbi Kertzer’s own analysis makes clear — has no single owner, no pope, no central authority. And he made every Jew on earth a potential proxy for his government’s actions.
The second mechanism is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
The IHRA definition, adopted in 2016 and since endorsed by dozens of governments and hundreds of institutions, defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” So far, unremarkable. But the definition is accompanied by eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate to Israel. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” And: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”²⁰
Read that last example again. The IHRA definition lists, as an example of antisemitism, the act of holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. On this point, the definition is correct — it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. But the definition simultaneously creates the conceptual framework in which that collective responsibility becomes almost inevitable, because it treats the state and the people as so deeply intertwined that criticism of one is presumptively an attack on the other.
The definition includes a caveat: “Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” But in practice, as over a hundred human rights and civil liberties organisations — including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union — warned in a letter urging the United Nations not to adopt the definition, “the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.” Even Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee lawyer who was the principal drafter of the original text, has publicly objected to its institutional adoption, saying it was designed as a data-collection tool, not a speech code.²¹
The effect is circular. The definition says it is antisemitic to hold Jews responsible for Israel’s actions — but the broader framework of the definition treats Israel and the Jewish people as so deeply connected that separating them becomes an act requiring justification. The conflation is embedded in the very instrument designed to combat the hatred that the conflation produces.
The third mechanism is Christian Zionism — a force that reinforces the conflation from outside the Jewish community entirely.
This article is not the place to rehearse in full the history of the evangelical movement’s embrace of the State of Israel; I have documented it at length in “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy.”²² But the essential point bears repeating here. Evangelical theology — the theology that drives Christians United for Israel (with over ten million members), that shapes Republican foreign policy, that told American troops God anointed their president to trigger Armageddon in Iran — cannot distinguish between Jews and Israel. In its eschatological framework, they are literally the same thing. The Jewish people are prophetic instruments. The State of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. To criticise Israel is to oppose God’s plan. To support Israel is to hasten the Second Coming — after which, in the theology’s own terms, Jews will convert or be destroyed.
Christian Zionists do not conflate Israel with the Jewish people out of ignorance. They do it because their theology requires it. And they are the most powerful external force maintaining the conflation in the Western world.
These three mechanisms — Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews, the IHRA definition’s embedding of the conflation into the language of anti-hatred policy, and Christian Zionism’s theological inability to separate a people from a state — operate together. They create a world in which a volunteer medic in Golders Green and a politician in Jerusalem are, in the minds of millions, the same thing. And when anger at the politician’s decisions reaches a certain temperature, it is the medic’s ambulance that burns.
The Consequences
Numbers tell part of the story. The Community Security Trust’s 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025 are not an abstraction. They are 3,700 moments in which a Jewish person in Britain was harassed, threatened, assaulted, or had their property damaged because they were Jewish. They are 3,700 instances in which the conflation crossed the threshold from bad theory into lived experience.²³
But the numbers do not capture the texture of what this means for a community.
It means Jewish children walking to school past security guards. It means synagogues that cannot operate without bollards, CCTV, and community volunteers trained in threat assessment. It means a Jewish student on a university campus being asked to explain — or apologise for — the actions of a government she may never have voted for, in a country she may never have visited, on the basis of nothing more than her identity. It means a Jewish family in Golders Green waking to the sound of oxygen canisters exploding and the smell of burning ambulances drifting through their windows.
It means, in the words of one Golders Green resident who could smell the smoke from his living room: “It’s a terrible, terrible act what happened… Why is it happening to us? We’re living in scary times.”²⁴
The CST’s data reveals a direct and measurable correlation. Fifty-one per cent of the antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. The worst month was October 2025, with 463 incidents — sixty-three per cent higher than September’s figure — driven in part by the aftermath of the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester. When Jewish communities are perceived to be vulnerable, antisemites exploit that perception. When the conflict in the Middle East intensifies, the violence follows British Jews home.²⁵
The Yom Kippur attack deserves particular attention, because it illustrates the conflation in its most lethal form. On the morning of 2 October 2025, a man drove his car into worshippers arriving at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two men — Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby — were killed. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, a thirty-five-year-old British citizen born in Syria, was shot dead by police. He had been wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest, later determined to be fake.²⁶
As the attacker stood on the synagogue steps, looking through the window at the congregation inside, he shouted: “They are killing our kids.”
They. Not the Israeli government. Not the IDF. Not a named politician or a specific policy. They. The people inside a synagogue in north Manchester, gathered to observe the holiest day of their calendar — a day devoted to atonement, fasting, and prayer. In the attacker’s mind, those worshippers were not Melvin Cravitz, a man whose bravery saved lives, or Adrian Daulby, a man described by those who knew him in terms of profound affection. They were they. The Jews. The ones who are killing kids. Collectively responsible. Interchangeable with a state.²⁷
That is what the conflation produces. Not just statistics. Not just policy debates. Dead people. In Manchester. In Golders Green. In the communities where Jewish families have lived for generations, practised their faith, raised their children, and served their neighbours — and are now being made to pay for the actions of a government that does not represent them, in a conflict they did not start, on the basis of an identity they share with a state only in the minds of those who cannot or will not see the difference.
The Double Standard
There is another community in Britain that knows what it looks like when religious institutions are reframed as outposts of a foreign threat. I know this because I am part of it.
British Muslim communities operate religious institutions within the British legal framework in ways that closely parallel the structures just described. Sharia councils handle marriage, divorce, and inheritance matters in an advisory capacity, subject to British law — just as the Beth Din does. Muslim welfare organisations, schools, community centres, and charitable foundations serve the daily needs of a religious community rooted in Britain — just as their Jewish counterparts do. Muslim volunteer networks provide services to their neighbours regardless of faith — just as Hatzola does.
And these institutions are routinely treated — not as expressions of a religious community’s life in the country where it lives, but as evidence of divided loyalty, foreign infiltration, or civilisational subversion. Sharia councils are presented in tabloid headlines as parallel legal systems threatening British sovereignty. Muslim schools are subjected to suspicion that would never attach to a Jewish or Christian school operating under identical legal frameworks. The word “mosque” carries, for a significant portion of the British public, connotations of extremism that the word “synagogue” does not — though both are simply houses of worship where communities gather to pray.²⁸
The mechanism is identical. A religious community’s institutions are reframed as arms of a foreign enemy. For Jews, the foreign enemy is Israel — and the reframing turns synagogues into targets. For Muslims, the foreign enemy is variously ISIS, Iran, al-Qaida, or an imagined global caliphate — and the reframing turns mosques into suspects. In both cases, the people who suffer are British citizens practising their faith in their own country, being held responsible for the actions of actors and governments they have no connection to and no control over.
The Peacehaven mosque arson — which occurred just two days after the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 — illustrates the symmetry with grim precision. When Jewish communities are attacked, Muslim communities are attacked in retaliation, and vice versa. The conflation operates in both directions, and both communities bleed.²⁹
This is not a competition between communities. It is not an attempt to centre Muslim experience in an article about Jewish suffering. It is a statement of structural fact: the conflation of a religious community with a foreign state or political movement is the same error, producing the same consequences, regardless of which community it targets. And the people who maintain these conflations — whether they are antisemites who cannot distinguish a Jew from the Israeli government, or counter-Islam activists who cannot distinguish a Muslim from a terrorist — are often drawing from the same intellectual well. The counter-Islam network documented in my forthcoming article, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” overlaps significantly with the machinery that maintains the Israel-equals-Jews equation, because both conflations serve the same political interests.³⁰
The principle at stake is simple, even if its application is contested: a religious community has the right to maintain its own institutions, its own traditions of worship, its own processes for resolving internal disputes according to its own laws — within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it. The Beth Din operates this way. Sharia councils operate this way. Neither is a threat to British sovereignty. Both are expressions of the same principle: that religious freedom means the freedom to live as a community, not merely to believe as an individual.
When that principle is violated — when a community’s institutions are treated as evidence of disloyalty rather than expressions of belonging — the result is what we see in the CST’s statistics, in the charred ambulances of Golders Green, in the blood on the steps of a Manchester synagogue, and in the suspicious glances directed at every mosque in the country after an attack carried out by someone who happened to share a faith with a billion other people.
The conflation is the common enemy. And it will not be defeated by either community alone.
Back to Golders Green
Hatzola Northwest’s ambulances will be replaced. The community has already said so. Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said it plainly: “The UK Jewish community will meet the moment with strength, pride and resolve. We will replace the ambulances and continue our service to this nation that we love. We shall not be moved.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the arson “a particularly sickening assault — not only on the Jewish community, but on the values we share as a society.”³¹
The ambulances will be replaced. The volunteers will go back to work. The next time someone in Golders Green has a heart attack, or a child breaks a bone, or an elderly person falls — Hatzola will respond, as it has for nearly half a century, regardless of the patient’s faith, regardless of whatever political fury is burning through the news cycle that week. That is what they do. It is who they are.
But resilience is not a solution. Replacing burnt ambulances does not address the lie that made them a target. And the lie will keep producing the same results — in Golders Green, in Manchester, in Paris, in Brooklyn, in Melbourne — until it is confronted directly and dismantled systematically.
The lie is that Israel speaks for all Jews. It does not. Israel’s own founding prime minister said so.
The lie is that Jewish identity is inseparable from the State of Israel. It is not. Jewish identity — religious, spiritual, cultural, ethnic, civilisational — predates the state by millennia and will outlast it, whatever its future holds. Rabbi Kertzer’s five definitions do not include “citizen of Israel.” The old expression — “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions” — does not add “unless the topic is Israeli foreign policy, in which case they all agree.” The diversity is the tradition. The tradition is not a state.
The lie is that criticising Israel is the same as hating Jews. It is not. The IHRA definition itself says so, even as its structure makes the distinction almost impossible to maintain in practice. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to hold are not the critics of Israel. They are the Jewish families in Golders Green and Manchester and every other community in this country who are being made to pay for a conflation they never endorsed.
I write this as a Muslim, as a British citizen, as someone who attended Jewish conversion classes before his own faith journey led him elsewhere, as someone who carries Ashkenazi ancestry in his DNA and one hundred per cent certainty that the people who burned those ambulances are the enemies of everything both our traditions hold sacred. I write it because the same mechanism that turns a Jew into a proxy for Israel turns a Muslim into a proxy for ISIS, and both conflations are sustained by people who profit from the confusion and have no intention of clearing it up.
The untangling is not anti-Jewish. It is the most pro-Jewish thing anyone can do. It is the insistence that a Jewish volunteer medic in Golders Green is not responsible for the actions of a government in Jerusalem. That a Beth Din in London is not an outpost of the Knesset. That Hatzola is not the IDF. That a community’s ambulances are sacred — not because of whose Star of David is painted on the side, but because they save lives, and saving lives is what both our traditions call us to do.
They are not the same. And until we stop pretending they are, the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.
² Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Hatzola (Stamford Hill), hatzola.org; Hatzola Manchester, hatzolamanchester.org; Gateshead Hatzola, hatzola.org.uk.
³ Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, Metropolitan Police oral statement, 23 March 2026.
⁴ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, updates on Manchester attack investigation.
⁵ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025.
⁶ London Beth Din, bethdin.org.uk; “London Beth Din,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Sephardi Beth Din, sephardi.org.uk; Manchester Beth Din, mbd.org.uk; Federation Beis Din, federation.org.uk; Arbitration Act 1996; “Use of the Beth Din as a Forum for Determining Civil Disputes,” Barrister Magazine, 20 June 2023.
⁷ Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Shomrim, statement on X, 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.
⁸ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.
⁹ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates; Greater Manchester Police statements, October 2025.
¹⁰ Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, revised edition (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), Chapter 1: “What Is a Jew?”, pp. 7–8.
¹¹ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, pp. 8–9. On Jews not being a race or a nation: “The Jews are not a race. Our history reveals countless additions to our numbers through marriage and conversion.” And: “It would be equally misleading to speak of the Jews as a nation, though in antiquity they were… But there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews are part and parcel of every community in which we live.”
¹² Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 12: “Who Speaks with Authority for the Jews?”, p. 28.
¹³ Personal account of the author. For the broader context of this period, see Will Prentiss, God and Country (memoir).
¹⁴ For a comprehensive treatment of how the conflation operates theologically and politically, see James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism: How Zionism Betrays Judaism, Endangers Jews, and Dehumanises Semitic Peoples,” Fireline Press, 2026.
¹⁵ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 11: “What Are Zionists?”, pp. 26–27.
¹⁶ J Street, “Jewish Voters Reject Trump and Republicans, Support Diplomacy, Oppose Netanyahu Government Policies,” election survey conducted by GBAO Strategies, 30 October – 5 November 2024; Washington Post, survey of 815 American Jewish respondents, 2–9 September 2025, published 4 October 2025.
¹⁷ Netanyahu’s February 2015 statement: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Post, 12 February 2015. His 1 March 2015 statement: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Times, 2 March 2015.
¹⁸ Senator Dianne Feinstein, CNN’s State of the Union, 1 March 2015; The Forward, “Who Speaks for the Jews?”, 11 February 2015; J Street public statement, February 2015. See also: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Claim to Speak for All Jews Is Disputed, Characterized As ‘Arrogant,’” The American Council for Judaism; Times of Israel, “Sen. Feinstein pans Netanyahu over claim to speak for all Jews,” 1 March 2015.
¹⁹ The Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement, 1950. Cited in Shmuel Rosner, “Does Netanyahu represent ‘the entire Jewish people’?”, Jewish Journal, 2015.
²⁰ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, holocaustremembrance.com; also available at the United States Department of State, “Defining Antisemitism,” state.gov.
²¹ Human Rights Watch et al., letter to the United Nations, 4 April 2023, signed by 104 human rights and civil society organisations including the ACLU. On Kenneth Stern’s objections to institutional adoption of the definition he drafted: see “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026), with multiple sourced references to Stern’s public statements.
²² James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 2026.
²³ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.
²⁴ Gedale Weinberg, quoted in CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026.
²⁵ CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025: “The worst month was October, with 463 antisemitic incidents reported, the fifth highest monthly total ever logged by CST and 63% higher than September’s figure.”
²⁶ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates.
²⁷ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025. Walker reflected: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”
²⁸ For a detailed examination of how Jewish courts work within UK law, and the parallels with other religious arbitration bodies, see “The Beth Din: Jewish Law in the UK,” Centre for Social Cohesion / Henry Jackson Society. The Arbitration Act 1996 provides the legal framework under which both the Beth Din and Sharia councils operate.
²⁹ “Peacehaven mosque arson,” referenced in the Wikipedia article on the Manchester synagogue attack (accessed 23 March 2026). The arson attack on the Peacehaven mosque occurred on 4 October 2025, two days after the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester.
³⁰ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, forthcoming April 2026.
³¹ Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, statement to CNN, 23 March 2026; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, statement on X, 23 March 2026.