Ruth Dudley Edwards: Unless we want the 1930s back, it’s time for us all to show our support for our Jewish neighbours

Living in England, which is still, I believe, the most tolerant country in the world, I had felt what I realised was a foolish sense of security for my Jewish friends.

It hadn't occurred to me, still feeling complacent about the routing out of anti-semitism from the Labour Party, that that filthy prejudice would find a new home among the Greens under the guise of progressivism.

But it has.

And, because there seemed to be no limits to the twists and turns in the soap opera that is playing on the UK political stage at the moment; their new leader, Zack Polanski - who has admitted he privately apologised to Jeremy Corbyn for criticising his leadership of Labour over anti-semitism - is an anti-Zionist Jew.

There seems to be no cause too extreme for Comrade Polanski —open borders, abolition of the monarchy, a wealth tax that would drive the remaining wealthy tax payers out of the country, and anything else likely to appeal to the young and ignorant.

Like several of my conservative friends I will be voting today tactically for any candidate who might help keep out anti-semites.

It will distress me not to be able to show support for the brilliant, principled Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who has been delivering master classes on the stump on how to stand up to bigots, but she’ll know what’s going on.

Before anyone, yet again, denounces me for singling out anti-Jewish prejudice, may I draw attention to some facts.

Here are the rates of UK religious hate crimes in the last year per 10,000 population against the perceived religion of victims: Jewish: 106, Muslim: 12, and 18 other religions.

And to all those who say their anger with Jews was because of the behaviour of Israel subsequent to the massacre of October 7 2023, here’s a corrective from the great historian Simon Schama.

During the period between that and the beginning of the Israeli military campaign “there was no sympathy that was subsequently lost by the ferocity of that campaign.

“What we saw - especially on campuses was the celebration or rationalisation of the mass murder, sexualised sadism and torture and hostage taking as legitimate resistance against colonial oppressors irrespective if they were children, Nova festival goers, elderly holocaust survivors, people who had spent lives working for peace.”

It was Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien — the best friend of unionists in the Republic — who pointed out in the 1980s that anti-semitism is a light sleeper.

And so once more it has woken up.

“The slaughter”, wrote Schama, “excited a thirst for more not less Jew-killing and not the end of occupation but the end of Israel.”

We have arson and stabbings on our doorstep in the UK and anti-Jewish mob hysteria.

Unless we want the 1930s back, it’s time for us all to show our support for our Jewish neighbours.

I’ll be at the anti-semitism march in London on Sunday with badge and banner.

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l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and also of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice