INSIDE LONDON’S LITTLE PALESTINE
Jews hounded out by a climate of fear. Synagogues under guard. And Palestinian flags hanging from council lamp-posts
THe London borough of Tower Hamlets, once the preserve of the sort of salt-of-the-earth British working-class types portrayed in the BBC’s 1950s drama Call The Midwife, is not a nice place to be any more. especially if you are Jewish.
Today, the streets are festooned with red, white, green and black Palestinian flags, which hang from lamp-posts alongside buildings daubed with crude graffiti attacking Israel — even denying its right to exist.
Yet, as the Mail discovered this week, most of the citizens of the borough, which has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in the UK, just get on with their daily lives.
Women in burkas shop for vegetables on the busy borough’s main artery, Ben Jonson Road. And the local mosques, 47 of them at the last count, hosted thousands of worshippers at friday prayers yesterday.
At the town hall, the 45-strong council is dominated by male Bangladeshi Muslims. Many quit Labour for the Aspire Party formed five years ago by controversial borough mayor Lutfur Rahman, who loudly demands an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
According to one worried councillor, many officials are so politicised that they sport pro-Palestinian lanyards handed out to them by their trade unions.
And Tower Hamlets is not an isolated case. What is happening in the borough dubbed ‘Little Palestine’ has implications for all of Britain. It is a microcosm of the mayhem that has consumed our national politics following the murderous invasion of Israel by the Palestinian terror group Hamas on October 7 last year.
Only yesterday, the Government’s counter-terrorism tsar claimed that pro- Palestine protesters are turning London into a ‘no-go zone for Jews’.
AfeMALe Tower Hamlets councillor recently tried to play down the impact of the flags and other 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 appearance that one community has seized control and wants to make life difficult for everyone else.
‘We feel they would like to see the back of us,’ one successful Jewish woman in her 40s, who lives in the area, told me this week. ‘ Anti- Semitism is being normalised here in Tower Hamlets. The majority seem to think this is perfectly all right.’
Jewish people in Tower Hamlets — and elsewhere in London — are now so frightened they are making plans to up sticks: either moving to another part of the capital, quitting London altogether or even leaving the country in search of a place of safety.
The gravity of the crisis was highlighted a few days ago by Gideon falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against AntiSemitism. He predicted, in the evening Standard newspaper, that half of London’s 145,000 Jews may uproot from their homes amid growing hostility towards them in the past five months.
‘We are aware of people who have left the country,’ said falter. ‘It is the biggest untold story, the effect it’s having on Jewish families, this mass intimidation [after October 7]. The cumulative effect is devastating.’
He added: ‘ We have seen antiSemitism 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 immediately sprang up all over Tower Hamlets. The vile graffiti appeared just as quickly. In November, a ‘school walkout for Palestine’ — orchestrated, it is thought, by the same Islamic and hard Left-wing agitators overseeing London’s weekly pro-Palestinian protests — attracted the support of 300 children of all ages. They marched through the borough chanting and screaming: ‘Israel is a terrorist state.’
Meanwhile, activists tied Palestinian flags to every entrance at Victoria Park, an oasis of greenery with a bandstand and lake. ‘It just doesn’t sit right with me,’ said one Jewish Tower Hamlets resident, who was interviewed at the time. ‘ It feels like one particular community is staking a claim and the whole area has changed.’
But things were soon to get worse. By early December, according to a response sent to one local resident, the council had received 355 complaints about the flags and ‘related paraphernalia’.
It has refused to release any meaningful information about how it intends to deal with the regalia, claiming that to go public will ‘endanger life’. And many of the flags on the council’s property have stayed put.
A report last month by the Community Security Trust, which collects data on anti- Semitic crime, found there were 4,103 incidents of ‘anti- Jewish hate’ in the UK last year — an alarming two thirds coming soon after October 7 and 60 per cent in London.
They happened so quickly after the Hamas attack that, according to the Trust, they were clearly a ‘celebration’ of the terror group’s actions rather than a reaction to the retaliatory ground offensive by Israel which began three weeks afterwards.
WHEN the Mail asked Tower Hamlet residents for their views on the flags via UK Lawyers for Israel and other Jewish groups, we received an avalanche of responses.
Many were from non- Jews — atheists and Christians among them — who share the Jewish community’s fear of the pro-Palestinian fervour sweeping the borough.
One, a 54-year-old data engineer called 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 personal space.’
But when William, an atheist, contacted the police, he was told — incredibly — that the antagonistic flags were a ‘litter issue’ and, as such, something for the council to deal 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 received still more alarming accounts from Jewish people. One mother in her early 50s, who we will call Miriam (all the names of Tower Hamlets’ residents in this article have been changed at their request because they are afraid for their safety), says she is planning to move 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 only Jewish child in his class. Many of the others are of Muslim Bangladeshi heritage and from a community with radical tendencies.
It was this area that produced the three so-called ‘Jihadi brides’, including schoolgirl Shamima Begum, who ran away with two friends to join 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,’ adds the mother, who is a writer. ‘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 could be further from the truth. There are now fewer than 1,400 Jewish people in the borough, which has a population of 341,000, a third of Bangladeshi birth or background.
Miriam has become worried about openly wearing her Star of David necklace and admits she watches over her shoulder when she walks back home at night from the station to her house near 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 fit in.’
These are tragic words, not only for members of our British Jewish population, but for the country. Another distressing testimony from Tower Hamlets came from an NHS doctor, aged 44, who lives close to a Church of England primary school.
FOR almost three weeks following the october 7 massacre, he fought the council, with the help of Jewish groups, to get vile anti-Semitic graffiti saying, ‘ Israel= Scum’, scrubbed off a wall nearby where pupils could see it. ‘Can you imagine if it had said “Women are scum?” ’ asks the doctor. ‘ How long would it have lasted? In Tower Hamlets, blatant antiSemitism 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 explained: ‘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 woman, would agree. She runs an internet agency, while her partner owns a flooring company near the borough. They are planning to emigrate to Spain, keeping a ‘bolt hole’ in London because she has two grown-up children who she wants to return to visit.
‘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 adult education centre. She is a true East Ender, born and bred, and — although an atheist — has Jewish blood, and relatives caught up in the Israel crisis.
Describing herself as a ‘bit of a fighter’, she tears down the pro-Palestine and anti-Semitic posters when she walks through the streets from her flat to work.
one day a month ago, she was taunted by a group of teenage ‘Asian’ boys who believed she was Jewish. They shouted ‘ Free Palestine’ at her.
on another occasion in February, she came across a gathering organised by the Socialist Workers Party at St Paul’s Church in 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 preparing to host the event, 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 worried local resident is software designer James, married with two children, who says he is furious at the ‘recent intimidation and violence towards Jewish people in London’.
The 40-year- old Christian lives in the heart of the borough in Poplar and says he is surrounded by flags. ‘They have clearly been put up by people who believe they speak for the residents of Tower Hamlets,’ he told me.
‘Due to the council’s lack of action, I have gone out several times and removed them from lamp-posts in my area. Some were put back up. I removed them again.
‘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 should take advice from the experts. The Mail has discovered a pro- Palestinian social media site which advises users in Tower Hamlets, and other hotbeds of anti- Semitic activists, how to buy a Palestinian flag and secretly hang it from a lamp-post using a ladder.
Entitled ‘ Flags for Palestine’, the site’s headline blurb says: ‘ Show your support for the struggle by raising the flag’. It goes on to instruct ‘volunteers’ to work in a team of four, use a telescopic ladder to attach the flag (which should be 150 x 90cm) to the lamp-post out of reach using two zip ties. Usefully, it advises exactly where to buy the necessary equipment.
The site adds: ‘ 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 the team must act as ‘lookout’, adding: ‘The flag should be put at a minimum of 12 foot (double your height).’
At one stage, it tells readers to video the event after Fajr (an Arabic word for dawn) and post it online ‘to encourage others’.
Revealingly, it adds: ‘ Choose lamp-posts owned by the council as they are less likely to be taken down.’
All this is very depressing for a Britain increasingly riven by sectarianism — one in which a growing number of British Jews are being hounded out by vile, anti-Semitic mobsters.