The sinister targeting of Israel’s ambassador at the LSE

A mob waving flags and chanting slogans hounds a Jewish leader, forcing her to be bundled into a car and driven off for her own safety. These were scenes that might have been expected on 9 November 1938, when the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogroms raged across Nazi Germany, marking the beginning of the Holocaust. Instead, they took place 83 years later, on 9 November 2021, outside that august institution, the London School of Economics, in the heart of the British capital. The recent BBC series Ridley Road smugly suggested that antisemitism in this country was confined to decades past; real life is far more worrying.

Antisemitic, you say? That’s a bit strong. The baying crowd that surged around Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely last night, forcing her from the building under the protection of nervy security guards, would hardly think of themselves as such. They were pro-Palestine university students, fighting ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘Israeli apartheid’. In their minds, they were simply supporting the oppressed, sticking up for the underdog.