Two Jewish men stabbed on a north London street. Two days later, the prime minister stood at a microphone and declared that a three-word chant should be a criminal offence.

The connection between those events is at once obvious and enormously complicated. Britain is watching two liberal values — free expression and community safety — collide with enough force to remake the rules of public protest.

On 29 April, Essa Suleiman, a 45-year-old British national born in Somalia, travelled to Golders Green, home to one of London’s largest Jewish communities. According to police, he was looking for “visibly Jewish” people. A 34-year-old man was chased and stabbed. A 76-year-old man was attacked at a bus stop. Both survived. The attack has been declared a terrorist incident; an Iran-linked group claimed responsibility.

This was not an isolated act. Two Jewish people were killed in an attack on a Manchester synagogue last October. Jewish ambulances were torched in Golders Green in March. An attempted arson targeted a Finchley synagogue. The national threat level has been raised to severe.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley says the threat to British Jews is now greater than it has ever been. They sit at the centre of what he called a “ghastly Venn diagram” of hate — targeted by the far left, the far right, Islamist extremists, and hostile states.

When Starmer visited Golders Green the day after the attack, he was heckled by protesters shouting “Keir Starmer, Jew Harmer.” He told the BBC he accepted the “depth of feeling” and would not criticise Jews who were “feeling very scared.” A prime minister, shouted at by the community he came to reassure. The rawness captured the bind.

The chant and the cumulative weight

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Starmer singled out “globalise the intifada” — intifada being Arabic for uprising — as language that must be prosecuted. At a separate news conference, he went further: “If you stand alongside people who say ‘globalise the intifada’, you are calling for terrorism against Jews,” he said. “It is racism, extreme racism.”

Jewish groups call the phrase incitement to violence. Pro-Palestinian organisations say it represents peaceful resistance. The Metropolitan Police has been arresting people for using it since December.

But Starmer went further. He said some protests might need to be banned outright, not just policed more strictly. The issue, he argued, was cumulative: repeated weekly marches have left Jewish families feeling under siege, changing routines, avoiding certain streets. “Many people in the Jewish community have said to me, it’s the repeat nature, it’s the cumulative effect,” he said.

Who decides where speech becomes threat

Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has called for a full moratorium on pro-Palestinian marches, arguing it is “clearly impossible” for them not to incubate antisemitic language. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has backed a temporary ban.

The Stop the War Coalition condemned antisemitism but said it was “wrong” to connect demonstrations to attacks on Jews. Green Party leader Zack Polanski accused Starmer of “using the pain and fear of Jewish people to threaten further authoritarian restrictions on peaceful protest.” Your Party warned against “weaponising the abhorrent stabbings to take away our civil liberties.” The Liberal Democrats took the middle ground: marches should continue only when safe, with police equipped to arrest those who cross into incitement.

A precedent others will cite

Britain has already crossed one threshold. Last month, the government approved the first outright ban on a protest march since 2012, blocking the Al Quds Day demonstration in London. A government-commissioned review of public order and hate crime law — ordered after the Manchester killings — is overdue, expected in February and still unpublished.

Other European capitals are watching. France, Germany, and the Netherlands have all struggled with where protest language about Israel and Palestine becomes criminal incitement. The precedents Britain sets will be cited across the continent.

The question is not whether antisemitic violence demands a response. It does, urgently. The question is whether a democratic government can criminalise a slogan and restrict the right to march without eroding the freedoms it claims to defend. The Nakba Day march on 16 May will be the first real test.

Sources