The word “Hatzola” is Hebrew for “rescue”. That’s a fact I imagine most people in the UK – even many Jews, myself included – did not know before yesterday. They know now. For a few days at least, the name of the Hatzola organisation in north London, a volunteer-led ambulance service that caters to the local community, will be headline news, thanks to the arsonist who set fire to four ambulances in Golders Green in the early hours of Monday morning. And then it will be forgotten.
Here are some other facts about Hatzola. The first organisation was set up in New York in the 1960s to serve the Jewish community, but quickly spread to other countries. It one of the largest volunteer ambulances services in the world. While it is a Jewish-led organisation, it provides its services to anyone in need in the local area. The Talmud – the compilation of Jewish law and scripture – teaches that “to save a life is to save a world”. Hatzola is the embodiment of this principle that nothing matters more than human life, Jewish or non-Jewish. Orthodox Jewish volunteers will break Shabbat if called for an emergency. When the planes hit the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, Hatzola members were among the first responders on the scene. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hatzola volunteers assisted in transporting patients and assisted with the UK vaccine rollout.
There are six chapters in the UK. The north-west London branch which was targeted on Monday serves the areas of Hendon, Golders Green, Finchley, Mill Hill, Hampstead and Colindale. As well as being home to the epicentre of British Jewry, these areas house large communities of people from Indian, Bangladeshi, Romanian, Cypriot and Japanese heritage – plus many more. Hatzola is there for all of them, including the hundreds of Iranians who took to the streets of Finchley and beyond to celebrate the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March.
An Iran-linked terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though no one has so far been arrested and nothing is confirmed. Whoever they are, I doubt the individuals who chose to set out in the dead of night to set fire to ambulances knew much about the history of Hatzola. I doubt they would have cared, just as they didn’t care that the ambulances were in a residential area, and that the explosions caused by the igniting oxygen tanks shattered the windows in nearby flats and could well have led to casualties. Targeting a Jewish ambulance service, in a Jewish area, next to a Jewish synagogue – it is not hard to imagine what was going through their minds. This was, as Keir Starmer put it, a “horrific anti-Semitic attack”.
Horrific, yes. Surprising? No, not really, not anymore. Not for Jews, anyway. We have grown used to the reality that here in Britain – as in other countries – there are people who not only wish us harm but feel emboldened by global events to translate that wish into action. Graffiti on Jewish businesses, vandalism of Jewish schools, an escalation of threats against Jewish synagogues and community centres – since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, the Jewish diaspora worldwide has been on high alert, watching with despair as the actions of a government thousands of miles away have become a pretext for rampant anti-Semitism here at home.
More than 1,000 anti-Semitic hate crimes were reported in London in the past 12 months. A shul in Manchester was targeted on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. A Chanukah celebration on the beach was shattered by gunfire in Sydney, killing 15 people including a ten-year-old girl. Neither had any link to Israel, to the Netanyahu government or to the IDF. Still, it didn’t take long for the excuses to start pouring in. Yes, it was tragic a child had died, but think of the children dying in Gaza. Bondi Beach is 9,000 miles away from Palestine. But Jews are Jews. And to anti-Semites, to people who understand what “globalise the Intifada” actually means, a Jewish life taken in one part of the world is a good as another. The aim, after all, is to wipe us off the face of the planet.
If that particular fire was gradually dying down after the announcement of a ceasefire and fragile peace plan in Gaza in October, the Israeli-US strikes on Iran have poured petrol on the embers. In the past two weeks alone we’ve seen explosions at a synagogue in Belgium and a Jewish school in the Netherlands. Anti-Semitism seeps out in other, less overtly violent ways too. Last week, a report by the Union of Jewish Students found that one in five UK university students would be reluctant to have a Jewish housemate. What that actually means is that one in five feel comfortable revealing their anti-Jewish prejudice in a survey – one can assume the real figure is higher. Would those students be happy to admit they wouldn’t want to share a house with a Muslim, or Hindu, or a black or brown or Asian student? Or is it just Jews they have been taught it is acceptable to despise? Again, they weren’t asked about Israelis (though one wonders why hatred of a country’s government extends to hatred of its people when it regards Israel but not, say, when it comes to China’s treatment of the Uighurs). They were asked about Jews.
So, it is horrific but not surprising that Jewish community-run ambulances were torched in Golders Green. And horrific but not surprising, too, that the justifications keep coming. It took four minutes from me posting on social media about how this was an attack on Jews for the first comment to land that it was all Netanyahu’s fault. At the time of writing, my mentions are full of accusations of genocide, Zionist expansionism, Israeli war crimes and American imperialism.
Back in north London, Jews are used to carrying on. The day after the Bondi Beach shooting, I turned up at Golders Green and noted the enhanced security at the station, volunteer-led of course. The community wanted to make sure no one would get hurt at that evening’s Chanukah celebration. They wanted to keep us safe. As Peter Zinkin, a councillor for Golders Green, put it today: “We are good at disaster, unfortunately. The point is how do you stop the disaster occurring in the first place.” More police, more security can only go so far. Until we recognise this violence for what it is, see through the justifications and whataboutery that uniquely occurs when Jews are attacked, there will be more shootings, more knife sprees, more arson incidents. We will be horrified every time. We will not be surprised.
“Our phones haven’t stopped”, Hatzola representative Laurence Blitz announced today. “Our volunteers are responding to call-outs and our service continues unbroken.” Hatzola is still operating, ready to serve the whole north London community, regardless of what god they may or may not believe in. “To save a life is to save a world.”
[Further reading: How Covid fear shaped the meningitis response]
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Subscribe here to commentAs Einat Wilf has said antisemitism is in the collective unconscious of European and Middle Eastern cultures and the tropes are subtly learned early on and hard to erase.
Rachel says “The aim, after all, is to wipe us [Jews] off the face of the planet”. One problem is to get people to take the physical threat to us seriously. To asist in doing so I will add a quote from an interview in the New Statesman (no less!) in 2023 with John Jenkins a former British ambassador to the Middle East. :
Referring to various radical groups and militias he says:
“Israel is a very powerful mobilising issue because a lot of these groups think that the destruction of Israel is necessary to facilitate the return of the Hidden Imam. Shiism has this belief in the return of the Twelfth Imam, who entered into occultation sometime in the 9th century and will come back at the end of time as a Mahdi, [bringing about the] destruction of Israel, the destruction of the Jews. All these sorts of millenarian things – that we also saw with the Islamic State in a Sunni context – are present.”
I remember in Iraq, in 2009 or 2010, speaking to a former Iraqi national security adviser about [the president of Iran from 2005-13, Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad who famously left a seat at the cabinet table vacant just in case the [Twelfth] Imam turned up for a cabinet meeting. I laughed at this and the former national security adviser said, “Why are you laughing? Do you not believe that the Imam will return?” I said, “Well, it’s not that I don’t believe that the Imam will return. I’m Catholic after all, so I believe in the end of time as well. I just don’t think he’s going to turn up for Ahmadinejad’s cabinet meeting.” But this is present as a factor, and it has a symbolic importance for these groups that is quite hard to understand, I think, in the West, where the symbolic sphere in which we operate is so different, so secular”