Jews hounded out by local weather of concern in London’s Little Palestine

The London borough of Tower Hamlets, as soon as the protect of the kind of salt-of-the-earth British working-class sorts portrayed within the BBC’s Fifties drama Call The Midwife, isn’t a pleasant place to be any extra. Especially if you’re Jewish.

Today, the streets are festooned with pink, white, inexperienced and black Palestinian flags, which cling from lamp-posts alongside buildings daubed with crude graffiti attacking Israel — even denying its proper to exist.

Yet, because the Mail found this week, a lot of the residents of the borough, which has the very best proportion of Muslim residents within the UK, simply get on with their each day lives.

Women in burkas store for greens on the busy borough’s principal artery, Ben Jonson Road. And the native mosques, 47 of them on the final rely, hosted hundreds of worshippers at Friday prayers yesterday.

At the city corridor, the 45-strong council is dominated by male Bangladeshi Muslims. Many give up Labour for the Aspire Party shaped 5 years in the past by controversial borough mayor Lutfur Rahman, who loudly calls for an instantaneous ceasefire in Gaza.

According to 1 anxious councillor, many officers are so politicised that they sport pro-Palestinian lanyards handed out to them by their commerce unions.

And Tower Hamlets isn’t an remoted case. What is occurring within the borough dubbed ‘Little ­Palestine’ has implications for all of Britain. It is a microcosm of the mayhem that has consumed our nationwide politics following the murderous invasion of Israel by the Palestinian terror group Hamas on October 7 final 12 months.

Only yesterday Robin Simcox, the Government’s counter-terrorism tsar claimed that pro-Palestine ­protesters are turning London right into a ‘no-go zone for Jews’.

A feminine Tower Hamlets councillor just lately tried to minimize the influence of the flags and different provocative paraphernalia by telling a British TV station that they ‘are only in line with what people here believe about Palestine’. Nevertheless, the flags give the looks that one neighborhood has seized management and desires to make life tough for everybody else.

‘We feel they would like to see the back of us,’ one profitable Jewish lady in her 40s, who lives within the space, advised me this week. ‘Anti-Semitism is being ­normalised here in Tower ­Hamlets. The majority seem to think this is perfectly all right.’

Jewish folks in Tower Hamlets — and elsewhere in London — at the moment are so frightened they’re ­planning to up sticks: both shifting to a different a part of the capital, quitting London altogether and even leaving the nation looking for a spot of security.

The gravity of the disaster was highlighted a couple of days in the past by Gideon Falter, chief government of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. He predicted, within the Evening Standard newspaper, that half of London’s 145,000 Jews could uproot from their properties amid rising hostility in the direction of them up to now 5 months.

‘We are aware of people who have left the country,’ mentioned Falter. ‘It is the biggest untold story, the effect it’s having on Jewish ­households, this mass intimidation [after October 7]. The cumulative impact is devastating.’

He added: ‘We have seen anti-Semitism skyrocket in British life.

‘On our streets, campuses, workplaces, there is anti-Jewish vitriol. Children are being told to hide their blazer badges [on the way to school]. Synagogues are being guarded; kosher shops are being attacked. The majority of Jewish people are afraid to show their Jewishness in public. It is Britain succumbing to a racist mob.’

After October 7, Palestinian flags instantly sprang up throughout Tower Hamlets. The vile graffiti appeared simply as rapidly. In November, a ‘school walkout for Palestine’ — orchestrated, it’s thought, by the identical Islamic and exhausting Left-wing agitators over­seeing London’s weekly pro-­Palestinian protests — attracted the help of 300 youngsters of all ages. They marched via the borough chanting and screaming: ‘Israel is a terrorist state.’

Meanwhile, activists tied Palestinian flags to each entrance at Victoria Park, an oasis of greenery with a bandstand and lake. ‘It just doesn’t sit proper with me,’ mentioned one Jewish Tower Hamlets resident, who was interviewed on the time. ‘It feels like one particular ­community is staking a claim and the whole area has changed.’

But issues have been quickly to worsen. By early December, based on a response despatched to 1 native resident, the council had obtained 355 complaints concerning the flags and ‘related paraphernalia’.

It has refused to launch any significant details about the way it intends to cope with the regalia, claiming that to go public will ‘endanger life’. And lots of the flags on the council’s property have stayed put.

A report final month by the ­Community Security Trust, which collects knowledge on anti-Semitic crime, discovered there have been 4,103 ­incidents of ‘anti-Jewish hate’ within the UK final 12 months — an alarming two thirds coming quickly after October 7 and 60 per cent in London.

They occurred so rapidly after the Hamas assault that, based on the Trust, they have been clearly a ‘celebration’ of the phobia group’s actions moderately than a response to the retaliatory floor offensive by Israel which started three weeks afterwards.

When the Mail requested Tower Hamlet residents for his or her views on the flags through UK Lawyers For Israel and different Jewish teams, we obtained an avalanche of responses.

Many have been from non-Jews — atheists and Christians amongst them — who share the Jewish neighborhood’s concern of the ­pro-­Palestinian fervour sweeping the borough.

One, a 54-year-old knowledge engineer known as William, had this to say: ‘I have been a Tower Hamlets resident for ten years and, until recently, found it pleasant and safe. However, the continued spread of these flags makes me feel I am living in a dystopian world where we all have to believe in one thing. The flags are obviously in support of Hamas . . . there were no flags put up when Russia invaded Ukraine or when the women protesters were murdered in Iran. From my own window, I can see three flags. I am having others’ ideological beliefs projected into my private house.’

But when William, an atheist, contacted the police, he was advised — extremely — that the antagonistic flags have been a ‘litter issue’ and, as such, one thing for the council to cope with.

‘They advised me against getting a fruit-picker to take them down myself. Yet there are 130 within 500 metres of my home. I am neither Jewish or Muslim, but I grew up in Belfast, and I know flags are there to intimidate and create boundaries.’

We obtained nonetheless extra alarming accounts from Jewish folks. One mom in her early 50s, who we’ll name Miriam (all of the names of Tower Hamlets’ residents on this article have been modified at their request as a result of they’re afraid for his or her security), says she is ­planning to maneuver out.

‘I am the mother of a boy who goes to primary school in the ­borough,’ she says. ‘We have lived here for four years but we are leaving, even to go abroad, before he goes to secondary.

‘This week, 11 flags hung outside his school. There is graffiti calling for a boycott on “apartheid Israel” on a wall nearby.’

Her son is the one Jewish baby in his class. Many of the others are of Muslim Bangladeshi heritage and from a neighborhood with radical tendencies.

It was this space that produced the three so-called ‘Jihadi brides’, together with schoolgirl Shamima Begum, who ran away with two mates to affix ISIS.

‘The other pupils ask my son if he supports Israel or Palestine. When he says Israel, the others get upset or cross with him,’ provides the mom, who’s a author. ‘I was naïve to move to Tower Hamlets but my grandfather grew up here in the East End during the 1920s and I thought I was returning to family roots.’

Nothing might be farther from the reality. There at the moment are fewer than 1,400 Jewish folks within the borough, which has a inhabitants of 341,000, a 3rd of Bangladeshi start or background.

Miriam has develop into anxious about brazenly carrying her Star of David necklace and admits she watches over her shoulder when she walks again house at night time from the station to her home close to Ben Jonson Road.

‘It is difficult for my son at school. I no longer feel I belong in Tower Hamlets. There is one ­dominant community and I, as a Jew, don’t slot in.’

These are tragic phrases, not just for members of our British Jewish inhabitants, however for the nation. Another distressing testimony from Tower Hamlets got here from an NHS physician, aged 44, who lives near a Church of England ­major faculty.

For nearly three weeks ­following the October 7 ­bloodbath, he fought the ­council, with the assistance of Jewish teams, to get vile anti-Semitic graffiti saying, ‘Israel=Scum’, scrubbed off a wall close by the place pupils may see it. ­‘Can you imagine if it had said “Women are scum?” ’ asks the ­physician. ‘How long would it have lasted? In Tower Hamlets, ­blatant anti-Semitism is being normalised. I grew up in Finchley, North ­London, with a big Jewish ­community, many of them still my friends.

Some, he pointed out, were scared, living under the radar and afraid to speak out.

At his hospital, in another part of London, medics with obviously Jewish names have, since ­October 7, turned over their badges so their religion cannot be identified by patients: ‘How has it come to this?’

He defined: ‘The lamp-posts where the flags still fly are paid for by council taxpayers in Tower Hamlets. My view is that public property is being hijacked for political purposes.’

Angela, a 58-year-old Jewish lady, would agree. She runs an web company, whereas her accomplice owns a flooring firm close to the borough. They are planning to to migrate to Spain, conserving a ‘bolt hole’ in London as a result of she has two grown-up youngsters who she needs to return to go to.

‘The Tower Hamlets flags are just a manifestation in micro form of what the country can expect in the future. It is oppressive, unnecessary, and uncomfortable to view. Try putting up an Israeli flag, even in Golders Green or Hendon, and see what happens. I have no links to people who live in Tower ­Hamlets any more.’

And take Shelley, 47, who teaches arts and crafts at a Tower ­Hamlets grownup training centre. She is a real East Ender, born and bred, and — though an atheist — has Jewish blood, and relations caught up within the Israel disaster.

Describing herself as a ‘bit of a fighter’, she tears down the pro-Palestine and anti-Semitic posters when she walks via the streets from her flat to work.

One day a month in the past, she was taunted by a bunch of teenage ‘Asian’ boys who believed she was Jewish. They shouted ‘Free ­Palestine’ at her.

On one other event in February, she got here throughout a gathering organised by the Socialist ­Workers Party at St Paul’s Church within the borough. ‘It was going to be held later in the evening. I saw that the adverts for it at the church said: “Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and ­Jordan — can the Arab masses free Palestine?”’

She confronted an official, who was getting ready to host the occasion, asking: ‘Why is this happening in a church? Why are you letting anti-Semites come in here?’ But she was hustled out on to the pavement.

Another anxious native resident is software program designer James, married with two youngsters, who says he’s livid on the ‘recent intimidation and violence towards Jewish ­people in London’.

The 40-year-old Christian lives within the coronary heart of the borough in Poplar and says he’s surrounded by flags. ‘They have clearly been put up by people who believe they speak for the residents of Tower Hamlets,’ he advised me.

‘Due to the council’s lack of motion, I’ve gone out a number of occasions and eliminated them from lamp-posts in my space. Some have been put again up. I eliminated them once more.

‘I have tried taking down those a bit further afield, but it is very risky because ­specialist equipment is needed and it is hard to not look suspicious when travelling around with it.’

Perhaps he ought to take recommendation from the specialists. The Mail has found a pro-Palestinian social media web site which advises customers in Tower Hamlets, and different ­hotbeds of anti-Semitic activists, how one can purchase a Palestinian flag and secretly cling it from a lamp-post utilizing a ladder.

Entitled ‘Flags for Palestine’, the location’s headline blurb says: ‘Show your support for the ­struggle by raising the flag’. It goes on to instruct ‘volunteers’ to work in a crew of 4, use a ­telescopic ladder to connect the flag (which must be 150 x 90cm) to the lamp-post out of attain utilizing two zip ties. Usefully, it advises precisely the place to purchase the ­obligatory tools.

The web site provides: ‘Choose a date and time for your operation. Midnight onwards is strongly advised. Select a meeting point and choose at least five major locations in your area for the placements.’

It instructs that one of many crew should act as ‘lookout’, including: ‘The flag should be put at a minimum of 12 foot (double your height).’

At one stage, it tells readers to video the occasion after Fajr (an ­Arabic phrase for daybreak) and put up it on-line ‘to encourage others’.

Revealingly, it provides: ‘Choose lamp-posts owned by the council as they are less likely to be taken down.’

All that is very miserable for a Britain more and more riven by ­sectarianism — one by which a rising variety of British Jews are being hounded out by vile, anti-Semitic mobsters.