THERE has been a horrifying increase in anti-semitic incidents across Britain since the start of the present Gaza crisis. The left cannot ignore this.

Latest figures indicate nearly 900 such incidents occurring in just 25 days, the highest total for such a period since the Community Security Trust began tracking anti-semitism in 1984 — 600 per cent up on the same period last year.

These include 40 assaults, 94 direct threats, 60 instances of damage to Jewish property and nearly 700 of abusive behaviour, more of it in person than online. Most have occurred in London.

It should be noted that there has also been a terrible rise in Islamophobic incidents. That is of course worthy of separate comment, but combining the two evils as one can lead to overlooking specific features.

The first thing to say is that the Jewish community deserve unconditional solidarity against this racism. It apparently needs repeating that Jewish people in Britain bear no responsibility for the actions of the Israeli government.

Most, but not all, Jews in Britain feel a degree of affinity with Israel. That is by no means the same thing as endorsing the conduct of its far right government. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jewish people have joined demonstrations of solidarity with the people of Gaza.

However, even those who follow their official communal leadership in backing Israel in no sense deserve abuse or violence. Some 70 per cent of British Jews have family living in Israel — it is scarcely surprising that they feel traumatised by the Hamas attack with its multitude of civilian victims.

The Holocaust is not just history, but a present fear for many Jews.

Two things in particular have not helped the left address the anti-semitic evil. 

The attacks on Corbyn’s Labour — often malicious or mendacious but not always without some foundation — have led to an instinctive assumption of bad faith by anyone drawing attention to anti-semitism, amplified since by Starmer’s cynical hounding of Labour’s anti-zionist Jewish members.

Furthermore, the fact that government ministers condemn any support for the Palestinian people — the peaceful BDS campaign or the description of Israel as an apartheid regime, a point accepted by many authorities — as “hatred” poisons the politics.

If everything is anti-semitic then before long nothing is. The definition provided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, heavily oriented towards Israel, has failed to secure consensus.

Some on the left blunder into anti-semitic attitudes through embracing a conspiratorial rather than a Marxist understanding of the ills of our society. Capitalism and imperialism are organic systems of oppression, not the manipulations of sinister cabals.

Not even the most demented racist asserts that black people control the mass media or the global banking system. Yet such insinuations continue to be made against Jews.

As 19th-century German socialist August Bebel remarked, this is the “socialism of fools.”  Anyone thinking the British labour movement has had no such fools should study Henry Hyndman or Ernie Bevin.

It is the Palestine solidarity of fools too. The depredations of the Israeli state owe nothing to Jewishness. Need it be pointed out that Britain and the US have done still worse in the Middle East this century alone? The system of imperialism is the root enemy.

The pressing need today is demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, bringing relief to the suffering Palestinian people. Beyond that, a democratic solution to the crisis must be secured, in the interests of all the people of Israel/Palestine.

Anti-semitism obstructs that possibility. It also defaces our society while terrorising a vulnerable community. The left must find the voice to express these truths.