It is a reflection of the truly perverse state of the modern world that one of the more alarming consequences of the October 7 attacks carried out against Israel in 2023 should be a steep rise in anti-Semitism. One might expect that the cold-blooded massacre of at least 1,200 people, many of whose bodies suffered vile mutilation, and the taking of a further 250 or so hostages by Hamas terrorists that day might persuade most right-thinking people that their condemnation should be focused on the group responsible for carrying out the atrocity.
Instead, rather than making sure that the Islamist death cult faced the same level of international retribution as that which al-Qaeda encountered following the September 11 attacks in 2001, it is Israel and the wider Jewish community that has become the principal focus of bien pensant opprobrium.
This irrational desire to blame Jews for the war that has erupted in Gaza can take many forms. It can result in Israeli academics attending a Holocaust memorial event finding themselves the target of harassment, as happened recently at such an event in Dublin. Or there is the “vanishing-Jew” approach favoured by the likes of Angela Rayner, the disgraced former deputy leader of Labour, who appeared to ignore the fact that Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust when she was pictured, on social media, lighting a candle for “all those who were murdered”.
Jake Wallis Simons’s new book, Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, provides an absorbing and detailed examination of how this disturbing new form of anti-Semitism has arisen. Wallis Simons, former editor of The Jewish Chronicle and regular contributor to this paper, draws on a stimulating range of Western and Oriental philosophical thought to provide a provocative account of how complacency among Western elites in recent decades has given rise to a revival of the world’s oldest hatred. He also draws on an extensive series of interviews he has undertaken for his podcast The Brink, which he co-hosts with Andrew Fox.
Surprisingly, Wallis Simons contends that, until October 7 2023, the world was generally experiencing a “golden age” during which anti-Semitism was regarded as taboo, certainly within polite society. But on looking closer, he identifies a number of worrying trends that were already in play, and would ultimately lead to today’s shameful situation, where Jews throughout the world find themselves targeted for events taking place thousands of miles away in the Middle East.
Among the more recent factors that Wallis Simons considers to have contributed to the problem is the fact that many migrants to the UK and other Western countries are followers of Islam. He quotes the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who argued during her successful 2024 leadership campaign that “not all cultures are equally valid”. She went on, writing in this paper: “Those we chose to welcome, we expect to share our values… We cannot be naive and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border. I am struck, for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel.”
Ultimately, though, Wallis Simons believes that it was Tony Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997, and the dramatic culture-shift that subsequently took place throughout British society, that provided fertile ground in which toxic anti-Semitic attitudes could slowly take root. Suddenly, minority cults, once consigned to the margins of British society, took centre-stage in the nation’s culture wars. He quotes a telling observation made by the writer Douglas Murray in an interview for The Brink: “People have treated themselves to completely absurd ideologies, which are all reliant on a set of presuppositions which are not supported by the ideology they’ve fallen into. Things like human rights, things like tolerance, things like freedom.”
Wallis Simons is particularly critical of what he calls the cult of “centrist fundamentalism”, by which he means the well-meaning but ill-informed liberal elites who appear more interested in promoting minority groups and their views than upholding the long-standing traditions that have forged the nation’s character over many centuries. He argues, for example, that even though Muslims account for just 6 to 7 per cent of the UK’s population, too many national institutions are more likely to respect Islamic holy events such as Ramadan than they are Christmas and Easter. In such a climate, it’s unsurprising that anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments have replaced, as the norm, traditional British values such as tolerance and freedom from persecution. The result has been a staggering increase in anti-Semitic activity, with 121 incidents of assault reported in Britain in 2024, together with a 246 per cent rise in vandalism and an astonishing 465 per cent spike in anti-Semitism at universities.
One of the most compelling passages in Wallis Simons’s book is when he interviews young Israeli conscripts charged with the daunting task of doing battle with Hamas fanatics hiding in the complex network of tunnels the terror group had constructed beneath Gaza. Rather than complaining about their lot, the phrase these Israelis often used to justify their commitment to defending their country was “this is our shift”: they had no alternative but to tackle the jihadists who threatened their country’s very existence. Indeed, their commitment to defending their homeland echoes the sentiments of Golda Meir, the redoubtable Israeli wartime leader who once remarked: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”
Yet, instead of making any serious effort to understand why the atrocities committed on October 7 are regarded by many Jews as an existential event, there appears to be more interest in the West in absorbing Hamas propaganda. This is particularly the case on social-media platforms such as TikTok, where recent research has found that, since the 2023 attack, there have been 52 videos that are pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine for every one that’s supportive of the Israeli cause.
While Wallis Simons ranges widely to show how the modern cult of self-loathing has taken root in Western democracies, he can sometimes stray too far from his central theme: how this relates to the re-emergence of anti-Semitism as a threat to 21st-century Jews. No problem could be more urgent. At the end of the Second World War, when the true horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the outside world, the cry “never again” became a familiar refrain for those determined to ensure history was never allowed to repeat itself. By deliberately choosing the same phrase as the title for his new book, Wallis Simons is making a direct appeal to both political leaders and ordinary men and women: they need to respond “to this great emergency” by “jumping to their feet” and confronting, once again, anti-Semitism’s curse.
