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How Germany’s unusual approach to fighting antisemitism is ensnaring Jews who are critical of Israel
(JTA) — The first time Iris Hefets was detained by German police, she was standing alone on a street corner in Berlin with a sign that read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza.”
That was October 2023. Hefets, a 60-year-old psychoanalyst who moved from Israel in 2002, was standing by herself because Berlin authorities had barred activist groups from holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. By carrying a sign alone, she believed she was circumventing the ban on assembly.
But the police said her sign itself was an offense. Since then, Hefets has been detained four more times while protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, all for the language on her signs. The offenses were logged in police reports as hate speech and included on the surging list of antisemitic incidents in Germany since 2023.
For Hefets, the penalties carry an obvious irony.
“It made me feel like a Jew,” she said. “This is the first time in my life that I really felt what it meant to be a Jew, and in the minority being persecuted.”
Germany has cracked down on speech and demonstrations that assert support for Palestinians and accuse Israel of atrocities, even since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October 2025. Hefets’ detainments were part of a national policy toward antisemitism, defined over decades in the shadow of the Holocaust and sharpened recently under the helm of Felix Klein, the first federal commissioner for combating antisemitism.
Klein announced last month that he will leave his post, which he has held for eight years, this summer to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. He leaves behind a proposal to criminalize chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The proposed legislation is currently being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice, and its future may rest in the hands of the next antisemitism commissioner, who has yet to be announced.
Whoever is chosen for the role will face down a fraught debate over Germany’s historic allegiance to Israel and the legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech. Many Jews say they feel safer under such bans, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which recommended Klein for his appointment as antisemitism czar. Some human rights groups and pundits have objected, however, saying the bans limit free speech and criminalize legitimate expressions of support for the Palestinian cause.
The next commissioner will also have to grapple with Jewish intellectuals, artists and activists like Hefets, who say that Germany’s antisemitism enforcers are suppressing Jewish voices that don’t fall in line.
The first swell of dissent from Jews came soon after Oct. 7. In an open letter published in the German newspaper “Die Tageszeitung” on Oct. 22, 2023, 121 Jewish writers and artists living in Germany condemned Hefets’ arrest and bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
“Virtually all of the cancellations, including those banning gatherings organized by Jewish groups, have been justified by the police in part due to the ‘imminent risk’ of ‘seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations,’” said the letter. “These claims, we believe, serve to suppress legitimate nonviolent political expression that may include criticisms of Israel.”
Emily Dische-Becker, the Germany director of the international group Diaspora Alliance and a Jewish German-American from Berlin, said Klein’s proposal to outlaw slogans like “From the river to the sea” could cement a sacrifice of free speech, ultimately harming Jews and other minorities.
“I do not think that treating antisemitism as a state of exception to our democratic laws and constitutional rights is going to help combat antisemitism,” she said.
For Klein, there is no contradiction in a German officer arresting a Jewish person for antisemitism. “It doesn’t really matter who is the person who spreads antisemitism,” he said in an interview. “Although it sounds odd at first sight, antisemitism can also be spread by Jews.”
Klein also dismissed efforts to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
“In Germany, we hardly ever talk about anti-Zionism. The political notion hardly exists,” he said. “We talk about Israel-related antisemitism. When someone says, ‘I’m only anti-Zionist, I’m not antisemitic,’ I think in most of the cases, anti-Zionism is also a form of antisemitism. They say Israel, but they mean Jews.”
Germany’s grip on speech about Israel is rooted in a decades-old effort to expunge the taint of its Nazi past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the country formalized a process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era through memorials, education and narratives about German identity. Key to this identity — and to Germany’s rehabilitation — was a special responsibility toward Israel.
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up this bond in 2008. Speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, she said Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or the reason for the existence of the state.
Now deeply ingrained in German politics, that concept has become a tool in the prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters accused of antisemitism. Last year, immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian protests. Three of the orders cited “Staatsräson,” although the protesters’ lawyer said the word had no legal standing.
Disputes over Israel recently erupted at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, as both Israel’s critics and its defenders claim the Holocaust for their terrain. The anti-Zionist group Kufiyas in Buchenwald announced a demonstration at Buchenwald on April 11, the anniversary of its liberation, in protest against a German court’s decision that the site could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh.
The court said it was “unquestionable” that wearing a keffiyeh to send a political message “would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site.” Meanwhile, the protesters argued that their campaign encompasses the “descendants of Holocaust survivors,” including Buchenwald inmates, and said the site has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.”
The group also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel, including the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, who was slated to give a commemoration speech at Buchenwald last year. Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, was disinvited after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
The planned Buchenwald protest was condemned by the European Jewish Congress, and Klein said it marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Klein’s office, titled in full the “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” was created in 2018. Germany has since produced a web of antisemitism commissioners, with 15 installed at the state level and others assigned to universities and cultural institutions. The only Jewish state czar, Stefan Hensel of Hamburg, resigned at the end of 2025. (Hensel, who cited rising antisemitic threats in his decision to step down, converted to Judaism shortly before he started the job in 2021.)
According to Klein, the chief target of this antisemitism-fighting bureaucracy is clear: the pro-Palestinian movement. “The most common and most dangerous form of antisemitism in Germany, like in other countries, is Israel-related antisemitism,” he said.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office records the political origins of antisemitic crimes. In 2024, it said that antisemitism driven by left-wing extremism rose a dramatic 172%, from 40 incidents the previous year to 109. Another category titled “foreign ideology” was reported to spur 1,940 incidents, a 63% increase from 2023.
But by far, right-wing extremism drove the most antisemitic crimes, a total of 3,016. Though that figure fell slightly from 2023, the office said that right-wing extremism also constituted the majority of offenses “in every previous year.”
The publicly available statistics do not break down responsibility for different types of antisemitic incidents, from hate speech to property damage to violence, and how many were reported to have Jewish victims.
Nevertheless, Dische-Becker criticized Klein’s office for “decoupling” its focus from far-right activity. She noted that the nationalist Alternative for Germany party or AfD, which has welcomed neo-Nazis to meetings, is rapidly becoming one of the country’s most popular parties and could win in some state-level elections this year.
Klein has support from the Central Council of Jews in Germany, a representative body whose 100,000 members comprise about half of the total Jews living in Germany. The group has said that “From the river to the sea” means “the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion and destruction of the Jews living there,” adding that Germany has an “urgent duty” to clarify that definition. The Central Council did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
Israel is an “existential concern” for many German Jews, according to A. Dirk Moses, a scholar of genocide, memory studies and modern Germany at the City College of New York. The Central Council emphasizes that it views the well-being of Jews in Germany as “dependent on the robustness of the Israeli state,” Moses said.
Even when German Jews do not fully align with the Central Council’s platform, he added, they often weigh language about Israel against the risk of undoing Germany’s progress in confronting the Holocaust.
“It’s the fear that you will give ammunition to antisemites in Germany, who will say, ‘Ah, the Jews are committing genocide too, just like our grandparents did, so we don’t owe them anything,’” he said.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany represents a population of Jewish families who largely arrived as refugees from Soviet countries and rebuilt Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust. Many came in poverty and depended heavily on community structures, including the Central Council, which is state-funded. Today, Jewish retirees still depend on basic social security at 10 times the rate of the average German, said Dische-Becker.
Many of these Jews also carry the memory of Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns, which employed antisemitic propaganda, shut down Jewish life and targeted Jews as ideologically suspect.
“The communities that are part of this umbrella organization are overwhelmingly older, post-Soviet migrants,” said Dische-Becker. “They have an experience of Soviet anti-Zionism that was antisemitic, and oftentimes they lean very right-wing.”
Johanna Vollhardt, a social psychologist at Clark University affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, grew up in Germany’s Reform Jewish movement. She experienced the marginalization of Reform Judaism, which was born in Germany in the early 19th century and destroyed there by World War II, only gaining formal recognition by the Central Council and state funding in the early 2000s.
She viewed the Reform movement as part of a vast, diverse ecosystem of Jewish ideas that was stamped out, and remains stifled by policies like Klein’s proposal.
“To me, it’s important to emphasize this pluralism that was destroyed in the Holocaust and not allowed to rebuild,” said Vollhardt. “This is part of the lack of support for the expression of anti-Zionist Jewish thought, or any other non-Zionist, non-mainstream Jewish thought.”
Over recent decades, younger, richer and more politically liberal Jews have moved to Germany, particularly Berlin. Among them are up to 30,000 Israelis, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Many of the Jewish artists and intellectuals who came from outside Germany have been caught in the clampdown on alleged anti-Israel or antisemitic expression.
According to data compiled by Diaspora Alliance, Jews were involved in 25% of the performances, exhibits and artistic expressions canceled in 2023 for allegations of antisemitism — despite making up less than 1% of the country’s population. (Palestinian, Muslim and Arab communities were penalized the most.)
Candice Breitz, a Jewish South African artist who has lived in Berlin since 2002, had an exhibition canceled by the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery in November 2023. The exhibition centered on sex workers in Cape Town and was unrelated to Israel. Organizers said she had signed a letter from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and had not condemned the Oct. 7 attack.
Breitz denied both claims. She said she was not a supporter of BDS, and wrote on Instagram before the museum’s decision, “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”
Deborah Feldman, the Brooklyn-born ex-Orthodox Jew and author of the bestselling book “Unorthodox” who moved to Berlin in 2014, said she saw invitations to promote her latest book canceled in 2023. The book, titled “Judenfetisch” or “Jew Fetish,” argued that Germany’s guilt over the Holocaust had distorted its relationship to Jews and Israel.
Other Jewish intellectuals who don’t live in Germany say they have been shunned from coming. The Russian-American writer M. Gessen had a prestigious award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation pulled in December 2023, following an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto (and criticizing Germany’s constraints on pro-Palestinian views). Gessen ultimately received the award after the original ceremony was canceled.
In 2024, Nancy Fraser, a philosophy professor at the New School in New York, was disinvited from a visiting position at the University of Cologne over her signature on a letter titled “Philosophy for Palestine.” The university said that Fraser’s job offer was rescinded because the letter called into question “Israel’s right to exist as an ‘ethno-supremacist state’ since its foundation in 1948.”
Iris Hefets is a founding member of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), a pro-Palestinian organization roughly comparable to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States. It is much smaller, with membership in the hundreds, and counts only Jews as members, unlike the U.S. group. But membership surged after Oct. 7, 2023, said Hefets.
In 2024, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared Jüdische Stimme an extremist organization. (The same agency designated the AfD as an extremist group in 2025.)
As a result, newer Jewish immigrants have peeled off from Jüdische Stimme. They don’t want to risk being questioned about their role in an extremist organization while applying for citizenship, said Hefets.
She called it “perverse” to see “Jews being accused of antisemitism by Germans who have Nazi grandparents.” Through her detainments, she believes, German officers were signaling that their “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” was complete; they had finished reckoning with the past.
“What Germany is saying now is actually that Germany worked through its past, and now Germany can go back to business as usual,” said Hefets. “‘We were punished by the Allies, but now it’s over, we are good again, because the Jews forgave us.’ And the Jews, for them, that’s Israel.”
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Romania’s secret police trailed a Jewish photographer. Decades later, their files have become a film.
(JTA) — BERLIN — He had wild hair and wore jeans. He was American — and Jewish. He had a camera.
That was enough to trigger surveillance by the notorious secret police of communist Romania, the Securitate.
Now, 41 years after photojournalist Edward Serotta boldly stepped behind the Iron Curtain, we can see just how obsessed the Romanians were with him, thanks to a short documentary by renowned Romanian director Radu Jude and historian Adrian Cioflâncă.
“Plan contraplan/Shot Reverse Shot,” which had its world premiere at the Berlinale international film festival last month, gives equal time to Serotta’s reminiscences about Romania in the 1980s, and to the Securitate’s observations of him.
And of course, to the photos: After his Romania adventure, Serotta put down new roots in Europe, and has spent decades documenting the Jewish life that was nearly obliterated in the Holocaust. He has published several books of photographs documenting Jewish communities. He also documented the fall of the communist regimes in which he’d set foot as a young man.
Twenty-two minutes long, the film was one of several shown at the festival with themes related to Jewish life and history, or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The obsessive spying of the communist regime, as documented here, appears absurd today. But it was fully serious at the time.
In his narration, Serotta — born in 1949 in Atlanta — recalls how communist authorities in 1985 “had given me the permission to come to Romania under the idea that they would have glowing and fine articles and positive articles about Romania.” His stated intention was to document World War II memorials, of which at the time there were only a handful. Today, there are many more.
“He will be put under surveillance,” declares the spy, narrated in the film’s second half by Romanian political scientist Diana Mărgărit, “in order to prevent contact with parasitic protest elements.”
While Serotta was aiming his lens, the informants were sneaking around, snapping quick shots and jotting down observations. They also slipped into his hotel room one day, and exposed a roll of film.
The things they frantically recorded are “funny right now,” a reminder of a bygone regime that at the time was deadly serious, said Cioflâncă in an interview. Cioflâncă is on the advisory college of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, a state institution that deals with the history of communism. “I lived for 15 years when I was a child under communism. And it was not fun.”
For 41 years, until the regime’s fall and the execution of president Nikolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, in 1989, the Securitate spied on and terrorized citizens of Romania, suppressing dissent. According to the virtual Cryptomuseum, based in the Netherlands, the Securitate had up to 11,000 agents and 500,000 informants monitoring a population of 22 million.
In 2006, a governmental commission reported that more than 600,000 Romanians — and potentially around 2 million — were incarcerated for political crimes, and more than 100,000 died.
Western journalists, though suspect and surveilled, were to some extent wooed — at least in the 1980s. When Serotta requested to visit in 1985, Ceaușescu had been president for some 11 years (after heading the communist party from 1965). Ceaușescu was seen as more friendly to the west: He had refused to contribute troops to invade former Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he kept up relations with Israel when other communist countries severed their ties.
At the time, the regime wanted to gain “most favored nation” economic status from the United States, which depended on their allowing some freedom of movement to its population.
“There were 855 western journalists coming to Romania during the Ceaușescu period, and 80 of them were American,” said Cioflâncă, who also directs the Bucharest-based Center for the Study of Jewish History, under the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
“Many of these visits were organized as a propaganda instrument. In all the cases, they wanted to interfere with the journalist and to influence his work. They tried something similar with Edward when he came,” he added.
“They felt that the Jews are so influential, especially in the relationship with the United States,” Serotta said in an interview.
“In their mind, everything that was Israeli, Jewish, or American Jewish was deemed like an important piece of influence to use for their political PR at that time,” said Serotta, who eventually moved to Europe and in 2000 founded the Centropa nonprofit archive aimed at preserving Jewish memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the former Soviet Union.
Centropa was purchased by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2024.
Given Serotta’s obsession with documenting history, Cioflâncă said he was surprised to learn that his friend had never viewed his Securitate files. Several years ago, he asked Serotta if he’d like to see them.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t think I was important enough to have any,” Serotta recalled.
Cioflâncă found some 300 pages of documents. The informants had tried to influence the photojournalist, saying that the World War II killings of Jews in the region were “a marginal moment,” Cioflâncă noted. “They wanted to make sure that their reputation remained clean, that they were not collaborators” with the Nazis.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, at least 380,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
“I was there for a matter of several weeks,” Serotta said. He recalled “a very tense atmosphere. Nothing worked properly. We barely found food in stores. It was awful.”
And he is still astonished that the Securitate spent so much time following him. “It’s funny stuff.”
“Many Securitate officers were pretty stupid,” Serotta said in the interview. “They were so distorted in doing their job that they didn’t have this sense of [the] ridiculous and humor.”
Moreover, “their [photo] equipment, first of all, was not very good. Secondly, they were usually doing it surreptitiously: behind a wall or a door or something or something like that. But as the old expression goes, the pictures are great because I look young. I look like a casting reject from ‘Flashdance.’”
Serotta, for the most part, ignored or was unaware of the surveillance, except for when the only two cars on remote roads, hour after hour, were his and that of a spy on his tail.
And yet the trip to Romania was priceless. On one of his first visits to a Jewish community in Romania, he said to himself, “Wow, this is interesting. This is like the old country.”
“Then I said, ‘It’s not like the old country. It is the old country, and I’m in it,’” he added. “From that moment on, I felt like I had opened a door, and I’ve never come back through it.”
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Avraham Burg, longtime fixture of Israeli left, meets Tucker Carlson on his own turf
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson has set off alarm bells among many Jewish groups and even some conservative allies by hosting conspiracy theorists, grilling the U.S. ambassador to Israel and dabbling in sinister-sounding theories about Benjamin Netanyahu and Chabad.
But on Monday a notable Israeli opted to appear on Carlson’s show: former politician and left-wing figurehead Avraham Burg. And their talk was demonstrably cordial — though not without some gentle ribbing.
“Listen, Tucker, I cannot stand you,” Burg told his interviewer over a video call. “But you’re a nice person, so I talk with you.”
“I’ll take that as a half compliment,” Carlson responded, laughing.
A former speaker of the Knesset, interim Israeli president and onetime chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and World Zionist Organization, Burg today remains an outspoken member of Israel’s dwindling left. A proponent of positions like post-Zionism and the Palestinian right of return that are deeply unpopular in Israel, he is also a frequent Netanyahu critic and current member of Hadash, an Israeli far-left party with Communist roots.
In his newsletter, Burg explained his decision to appear on Carlson’s show by saying the influential podcast host was “one of the most powerful voices in today’s American Right.”
“This interview was born out of a genuine desire to step outside familiar patterns and meet the person behind the public image that has been built around him, not out of prior agreement and not out of any need to adjudicate, but out of a willingness to seriously engage with the challenges he poses to the political and cultural discourse of our time,” Burg wrote in his Substack.
In a veiled swipe at other Jewish groups and Israeli leaders that have denounced Carlson, he added, “Carlson manages to touch a raw nerve of an American society whose doubts are deepening, and the temptation is to dismiss that with slogans. I chose not to do that.”
Indeed, throughout their 90-minute conversation, Burg did not push Carlson on the more outlandish claims the pundit has made on his shows in the past, even as he noted he watched the show frequently. He did object to Carlson’s past contentions that Israel would consider using nukes against Iran, as well as to Carlson’s rejection of the question of whether Israel “has the right to exist.”
Another area of pushback came when Burg insisted that, contrary to Carlson’s claims, Israel doesn’t have a consistent security policy, let alone a grandiose religious or conspiratorial vision.
“I listened to you very carefully in the last couple of weeks, and the way you try to conceive the Israeli strategy, from Netanyahu’s 40-year life mission to the greater land of Israel,” as biblical, “Messianic” or “eschatological,” said Burg. “I envy you that you really believe that we have something like that.” However, he added, “It doesn’t work that way.”
He instead focused on what he referred to as the Israeli mindset, which he called “a very, very hard, stiff-necked” one. Israelis, Burg said, do not believe in a “win-win” solution to their conflicts with their neighbors: “We live in a zero sum game.”
“‘I want to win alone. I want you to be dead. I want to humiliate you. I want to cancel you,’” Burg said, explaining that mindset. “‘Whomever you are, you are my enemy.’ And when you look at this philosophy, you understand where comes the political rhetoric that every adversary, never mind who [he is], minor or major, but at the end of the day, he is a Hitler.”
Israelis, Burg claimed, are also isolated from much of the English-language media, and reflexively dismiss any media criticism of their actions as antisemitic, creating “a thick filter that enables us to reject any kind of legitimate criticism.”
Carlson, who himself has offered various denunciations of the Israeli mindset on other episodes, took a soft approach to interviewing Burg. He praised Burg as “a pretty brave guy,” citing a recent op-ed in which the Israeli had opposed war with Iran, and ended by stating, “This conversation has really been a blessing for me.”
He avoided testier subjects he had raised with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and other guests in recent episodes, such as suggesting genetics testing for all Israelis to test the Jewish claim to the Holy Land, or musing that the Chabad Hasidic movement orchestrated the war as a means of building the Third Temple.
Whether his audience appreciated the apparent sincerity is an open question. On YouTube, commenters variously described Burg as complicit in Israel’s failings despite his politics or offered backhanded praise for the ways he confirmed their worst suspicions about Israelis. “If what he’s saying is true then what an unbearable group of people,” read one comment.
On X, Carlson’s other main platform, prominent pro-Israel Jews denounced Burg as a Communist and traitor to Israel.
Burg’s willingness to find common cause with Carlson was the latest sign of how some on the Jewish left, finding little appetite among institutional Jewish groups and Israeli society for sustained pushback against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Iran, may be looking instead to fringe voices on the right, where anti-Israel sentiment is also growing.
American Jewish left-wing intellectual Norman Finkelstein has appeared on Candace Owens’ podcast, while Israeli left-wing activist Miko Peled has aligned with Carrie Prejean Boller, a former religious liberties commissioner under Trump who was ousted over her stated Catholic opposition to Zionism.
Also this week Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, a leading progressive critic of Israel, praised former Trump counterterrorism director Joe Kent — another recent Carlson guest — as “a brave man” for resigning from his post while citing his opposition to war with Iran. Kent’s resignation letter accused Israel not only of manipulating Trump into war but also of having started the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, raising concern among American Jewish groups and providing further fodder for antisemitic elements on the right. (Beinart criticized aspects of the letter as “faulty” in his Jewish Currents essay, which was publicly assailed by a former magazine board member.)
For Burg and Carlson, the meeting revealed more similarities than differences in their worldviews. Toward the end of their talk, Burg expressed optimism that his grandchildren’s generation “will stand up and say, ‘We are ready to defend the legitimate Israel, but we’re not ready to sacrifice our life or to sacrifice the life of others on the altar of this craziness.’ This day is close.’”
“That’s a very reassuring thing to hear,” Carlson responded, in agreement.
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King Charles named patron of British Jewish security nonprofit following ambulance attack
(JTA) — King Charles has been named the first-ever patron of a British Jewish security nonprofit, a move announced in the wake of an arson attack that targeted four ambulances owned by a Jewish volunteer emergency service in north London.
The Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, announced that King Charles had accepted the role — indicating a royal’s endorsement of a cause — during an annual fundraising dinner Monday night, where British leaders condemned the attack.
“His Majesty’s longstanding commitment to promoting tolerance, inclusion and interfaith understanding align closely with CST’s mission to protect British Jews and CST is honoured by this recognition and looks forward to working under His Majesty’s patronage to further its vital work across the country,” CST wrote in a statement.
While the attack is being investigated as an antisemitic hate crime but not a terrorist incident, counterterror officers have been leading the investigation after an Islamist group claimed responsibility for the attack. (The same group also claimed responsibility for synagogue bombings in Belgium and the Netherlands.)
“It is too early for me to attribute last night’s attack in Golders Green to the Iranian state … but whoever was responsible, the impact is serious,” London police chief Mark Rowley said at the annual dinner on Monday.
Police believe three suspects were involved in the attack, although no arrests have been made yet. Security footage of the scene of the attack in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of London, appeared to show three individuals approaching the ambulances parked outside the Machzike Hadath Synagogue.
In the wake of the attack, Rowley pledged to deploy over 250 additional police officers to protect Jewish communities and the British government announced it would provide four replacement ambulances to Hatzola.
In a speech at the dinner, British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that antisemitism was on the rise and vowed that those responsible would be “pursued and made to face the consequences of their vile actions.”
“It is so warped it defies words,” Mahmood said of the arson attack. “This was more than an attack on four ambulances; it was more than an attack on one organisation or on one community. It was an attack on this country and on us all.”
In the days following that attack, donations to fundraising campaigns on behalf of Hatzola reached nearly $2 million following a plea from the organization for urgent support.
“We are launching an urgent appeal to rebuild what has been lost — we cannot to afford to let our life-saving work be put on pause,” Hatzola said in a statement. “We need immediate support so we can source: new ambulances, strengthening security, equipping the teams, restocking and ensuring we can continue to respond safely and effectively in every emergency.”
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