Israel Advocacy Movement founder Joseph Cohen left the United Kingdom in the wake of the October 7 massacre, after enduring death threats, violence, and the authorities’ indifference to antisemitism, and sought refuge in Israel among Zionist peers, finding opportunities for his family and future, he explained in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
Cohen recalled how he had founded the IAM in 2014 after leaving another organization he had co-founded, Campaign Against Antisemitism.
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“When the Gaza war in 2014 finished, the antisemites almost disappeared. But what persisted was, ‘I don’t hate Jews. I just hate Israelis. I don’t hate Judaism. I just hate Zionism.’ And I realized this was the true battle,” said Cohen. “Opposition to the existence of a Jewish state posed the greatest threat to Jewish survival.”
Cohen launched social media channels exposing radical sentiment in the UK, documenting protests, or interviewing and filming activists in Hyde Park. During this enterprise, he was threatened, attacked, and constantly verbally harassed.
“I’ve had a knife pulled on me because I was wearing a jumper that said Zionist on it and wearing a kippah with tzitzit. I’ve been jumped on multiple occasions by gangs of Muslims in the UK,” said Cohen. “On multiple occasions, I’ve been assaulted, usually by more than one person. It’s usually a pack of people attacking.”
UK antisemitism skyrocketed after October 7
Antisemitism escalated again after the October 7 massacre, and had snowballed, “rolling down a hill,” getting “bigger and bigger, picking up every single form of antisemitism. And every single antisemitic community clambers on board. So you have the far Right getting involved. You have the Islamic fundamentalists getting involved. You have everybody bringing in traditional antisemitic tropes. They say it’s about Israel, they say it’s about Gaza – but then they start talking about the Talmud. So it’s completely interwoven. It’s antisemitism.”
There was not a day that went by that he didn’t receive a death threat, Cohen said. After so many violent and verbal attacks, he thought that the writing is on the wall, and it is only a matter of time before something terrible happens to British Jews. Cohen left the country, saying that he had to take his children’s future into account.
The current generation of UK Jews may be fine, according to Cohen, but he believes the UK to be on an unsustainable path, providing a fertile path for radicalism.
“I wanted to get ahead of the curve and move to a place where I felt that the police, the government, have my family’s interests at heart, will actually do everything they can to eliminate bigotry,” said Cohen. “I’d rather not stick around, particularly for my children. I don’t want to set them up to exist in a country that is growing increasingly hostile, when they can grow up in a country where there are incredible opportunities.”
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The October 2 Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation terrorist attack proved him right about the eventuality of violence against UK Jews, and Cohen doesn’t believe that such antisemitic murders will be the last seen by Britain. The Yom Kippur attack, which claimed the lives of three congregants, occurred not far from where Cohen lived. He urges his father to leave the country. His message is the same for the rest of British Jewry.
“The streets are already soaked with Jewish blood,” said Cohen. “Leave while you still can."
Cohen believes that the trajectory of Britain, which forced out Jews like himself, is propelled by a vast influx of radical Islamic migrants and a complacent government that is more concerned about not being seen as racist than taking a stand.
“The government, the institutions, are not capable of dealing with the threat that radical Islam poses. The UK has welcomed in millions of migrants from the Muslim world. Many of them come from countries that are deeply antisemitic, and they haven’t done anything to tackle that problem.
"And that problem will only get worse because immigration isn’t slowing in the UK. More and more people are moving there every year, and many of those people have hostile views to Jews. And just to really put that in context, they’re coming from countries that used to have very large Jewish communities. And when those governments adopted anti-Zionist policies, the outcome was the Jews were either forced to flee, or they were pushed out by the state itself,” said Cohen. “And I think Britain is on a trajectory to that same outcome.”
Cohen had worked earlier in activism promoting an initiative that emphasized commonalities between Judaism and Islam, in the hopes of fostering tolerance of one another, but by gaining access to the British Muslim community he saw how extensive the problems of antisemitism and Islam are. During his conversations at Hyde Park, he also experienced the UK police’s apathy and unwillingness to confront the problem.
A positive dialogue about a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Hamas War collapsed when groups of foreign Muslim men and youths began to heckle him and threaten to beat him. Two police officers allegedly witnessed the incident, but took no action to intervene. In another instance, when a gang of Kurdish Muslims jumped him, Cohen said, a policewoman turned and ran from the scuffle.
“I don’t blame her. She’s a little policewoman. What is she going to do against a gang of thugs? She needed more support, but she turned and ran,” said Cohen.
There were other examples of willing blindness beyond attacks on Cohen. He filmed activists waving a jihadist flag at a protest, shouting in Arabic that Allah should curse the Jews, and shared the video with the Metropolitan Police. The police responded that they had consulted with their experts, who assured that the flag was a declaration of faith, and the other remarks were ignored. After some backlash, they had to bring an activist in for questioning, but Cohen doubted that anything further happened.
The police were afraid to confront the mobs, and it was easier to detain and push aside the victims than to address the problem. At one protest, a few days after October 7, Cohen attended a protest outside the Israeli Embassy. Protesters realized he was Jewish, and was “interfering with their celebration of the massacre” by filming. The mob started to come for him, but the police evacuated him and held the mob back.
“That’s a lot of police resources for one person,” said Cohen. “They tried to get me out safely before I was attacked. But nine times out of 10, it’s easier for them to move me than the mob. So they did; they got me out safely in that instance.”
However, in other instances, such as the Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match last Thursday, it was decided that Israeli fans would be banned from attending rather than risk antagonizing radicals. Cohen also referred to an August 29 incident in which a Jewish lawyer was allegedly arrested for antagonizing others by wearing a Star of David necklace when attending an anti-Israel protest.
The systemic problems extended into the Crown Prosecution Service and court system, Cohen related. He noted the 2021 event in which a convoy of cars drove from a Muslim community into a Jewish London community, calling out on loudspeakers for the rape of Jewish mothers and daughters. The men were charged, but the CPS dropped the charges because they didn’t think there would be a possibility for conviction. Last January, a man entered a Golders Green supermarket and tried to stab staff and patrons while demanding to know their position on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 34-year-old was given two suspended sentences.
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Cohen said that a great motivator for authorities not to act is the concern of being accused of racism. He noted that the cultural fear extends to civilian security sectors, where one security guard at the Manchester Arena didn’t approach the 2017 Ariane Grande concert bomber because he believed he’d be accused of racism. The fear of being labeled a racist led to situations like those in which the Jewish lawyer was detained for supposed antagonism.
“The British police and the prosecution service are so concerned and worried about being perceived as racist that they’ll fall into classical antisemitism without even realizing it,” said Cohen. “At the governmental level and the institutional level, the police force, the prosecution service, there almost needs to be a complete reeducation as to what antisemitism is, how do you recognize it, how does it manifest, because you can’t have a situation where Jews are being told that their presence is antagonistic.”
Cohen doesn’t have faith in the government, which includes “members of Parliament who were elected solely on an anti-Israel platform.”
“I live in Israel, so Israel is obviously fundamental to my existence, my identity,” said Cohen. “But if you’re an Englishman living in a village in Northumberland or Bradford or wherever you may well be, why on earth do you care about a conflict 2,000 miles away? It’s got nothing to do with your existence.”
The catalyst for much of the antisemitism, according to Cohen, is opposition to Jews “living as free people” rather than under an Islamic state or Western democracy.
A few days after October 7, Cohen realized how much that freedom resonated with him and created a separation between him and his colleagues.
He returned to work at his technology firm job, still coming to terms with “the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Logging into Zoom, all the meetings resumed as normal, and he saw no reason that it shouldn’t be so for his peers. When massacres occur in other countries, he wouldn’t be expected to pause his life. Yet the dissonance between acting out a normal life while living with the grief of October 7 made him feel like an alien in his own country.
“I have a great relationship with my colleagues, total respect for them. But I just didn’t feel like I belonged there at that moment. And so, going through that trauma, I realized that for thousands of years, 2,000 years, our ancestors have prayed and dreamed of living in this land. And I have the opportunity to. And so it would be foolish not to capitalize on that opportunity, and at least try to live in this country,” said Cohen.
Living in Israel is not easy, he shared, and his family is still learning the language. Yet the opportunities for Jews are greater, Cohen asserted.
“The quality of life here in Israel is incomparable to the UK,” said Cohen. “There’s an incredible country here waiting for you, where you cannot just watch Jewish history pass you by, but play an active role in the course of Jewish history. You can shape Jewish history, and you can move to Israel.”