Antisemitism is a Problem Across the British Isles

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

As we enter the fourth year of the wars of “October 7,” things in the British Isles keep getting worse.

In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded 924 antisemitic incidents in 2015. It recorded 3,700 in 2025: a fourfold rise in 10 years, and the second-highest annual total in the Trust’s history, exceeded only by the 4,298 incidents of 2023.

In fact, the U.K. recorded the biggest rise in antisemitic incidents last year of any country with a major Jewish population outside Israel, according to a report by the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism. Incidents rose by five per cent compared with the previous year, the largest increase among the seven countries.

Two of the highest profile attacks this year were in London, where two people were stabbed in the same Jewish neighbourhood, Golders Green, in April, and where arsonists torched four ambulances run by a Jewish group, which were parked next to a synagogue on a residential street, in March. 

In September 2025 Britain recognized Palestinian statehood in a coordinated move with Canada and Australia. Last June, it was among 12 countries that have backed restrictions on trade with what Britain considers illegal Israeli ⁠settlements in the occupied West Bank. Critics accused the left-wing Labour government of sanctioning Israel as a ploy to win back Muslim voters from the far-left, anti-Israel Green Party and others.

Conservative lawmaker Tom Tugendhat called the sanctions announcement “performative politics.” Britain’s Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis saw the announcement as “a truly dark day for British Jews.” He warned that the effect of such policies could “further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews.”

University campuses across Britain have become sites of intense conflict over Israel, Gaza, Zionism, and antisemitism. Campus protests and confrontations have raised difficult questions about the boundaries between protected political expression and conduct that intimidates, excludes, or discriminates against Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. After all, antisemitic expression may emerge without taking the form of overtly antisemitic language.

Anti-Jewish violence is a symptom of British non-integration. Demographically and culturally, Britain is a very different country from what it used to be. In 1991, the foreign-born population was seven per cent of the country. By 2021, it had reached 16 per cent. In London, where most of Britain’s Jews live, the demographic shift has been even more dramatic. In 1991, the foreign-born population was around 20 per cent; today it is 41 per cent. Across Britain, ethnic ghettoization, Islamist radicalism, sectarianism, and white counter-mobilization are all familiar and constant problems.

In Ireland, antisemitism grows by leaps and bounds. A 2024 poll found 71 per cent of Irish agreed the Palestinians live under “apartheid.” Last summer, Trinity College Dublin became the first Irish university to sever ties with Israeli institutions. Not only has it divested from companies with links to the Israel Defence Forces, but it has cut all research projects involving Israeli universities and even refused to allow Israeli students to attend Ireland’s oldest university as part of long-standing exchange programs.

One well-known Trinity College graduate, the Irish novelist Sally Rooney, has barred her novels from being translated into Hebrew by Israeli publishers. She, too, draws links between Ireland and Gaza: “Israeli settler colonialist techniques have been inherited and refined from the practices of British and European imperialism,” she declared. She openly supports Palestine Action and has stated that if it makes her “a supporter of terror” under British law, “so be it.” Ireland has not proscribed the group as a terrorist organization.

Even Eurovision has found itself a victim of this new Irish radicalism. Ireland refused to enter the song contest in May in protest at the participation of Israel, and the Irish state broadcaster chose not to televise the event. Micheal Martin, the prime minister, backed the boycott.

Pro-Palestinian activists, supported by members of left-wing parties including People Before Profit and the Socialist Party and students, have led protests against Israel, in the National March for Palestine and other activities.

Last November, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) called on the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to banish Israel, on the grounds that the Israel Football Association (IFA) had organized leagues in West Bank settlements and failed “to implement and enforce an effective anti-racism policy, in breach of UEFA statutes.”

The most recent anti-Semitic act was the attempt to erase the name of the late Israeli President Chaim Herzog from a park in Dublin. Herzog is best known for his dramatic opposition, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to the United Nations “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975. He was also an Irish Jew; his father, Isaac Herzog, was chief rabbi in Ireland before taking the same position in the newborn Jewish state.

This problem also extends to Northern Ireland. Ireland’s past troubles are romanticized and then linked to Palestine’s present; the IRA and Hamas are presented as freedom fighters. On the International Wall in Belfast, a large mural displays the bond between Ireland and Gaza’s causes, with two hands clasped through prison bars, one arm draped in the tricolour, the other in the Palestinian flag.

Turning things around won’t be easy, given how intertwined all this is with the ongoing wars in the Middle East.

 

Despite Problems, U.S.-Mexican Trade Negotiations Continue

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

While Canadian-American trade negotiations are at an impasse, U.S.-Mexican talks continue and seem to be moving towards a deal.

The divide-and-conquer tactic is not new for U.S. President Donald Trump. In Trump’s first term, when U.S. officials were negotiating the CUSMA free trade deal, they also pushed ahead with negotiations with Mexico, while threatening to jettison Canada.

In an interview with The New York Times this past January, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, maintained that there was no “natural reason” that CUSMA needed to be one pact. “We’re not wedded to any particular agreement or format of an agreement simply because it’s there,” he explained.

U.S. officials began meeting with the Mexican government about a separate trade deal in January, and Mexicans say they are optimistic, even though Washington has criticized Mexico for welcoming investment from Chinese factories, which can then export their products to the United States under the preferential terms of the trade deal. Trump also wants to broaden liberalization of Mexico’s energy sector, and to advance a range of other manufacturing, labour, and farming-related goals.

In 2025, Mexico became the top trading partner of the United States, above China and outpacing Canada, for the first time in 30 years. Mexico to overtake Canada as the main buyer of American goods: U.S.-Mexico trade reached a record $94.8 billion in July with Canada second at $62.8 billion.

More than 80 per cent of Mexico’s exports -- cars, appliances, fresh produce -- now go to the United States. Each day, approximately one million individuals and 40,000 trucks cross the border. In 2024, roughly $800 billion of goods were transported across the border, and over one billion dollars in commerce between the two countries occurs daily. Mexico is the top source of both automobiles and automobile parts imported into the United States.

Of course, non-economic friction between the two countries revolves around illegal migration and drugs, especially fentanyl, coming into the U.S. This leaves Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in a bind. She must appease President Trump enough to avoid threatened air strikes while firmly standing up for Mexican sovereignty and maintaining her own domestic political support. She has kept trade flowing and tariffs manageable while defusing calls for military strikes from MAGA elements who view the country as more of an enemy than an ally.

“We have a president on the Mexican side who is more interested, much more interested, in cooperating than her predecessor was,” Roberta Jacobson, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told Atlantic magazine journalist Nick Miroff, who covers immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, referring to former President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. “I think she has done an amazing job navigating that minefield.”

Mexico’s security cooperation with the United States had fallen to a low point under Lopez Obrador, who lashed out at the Drug Enforcement Administration after U.S. agents arrested a former Mexican defence minister at Los Angeles International Airport and accused him of working with traffickers. Lopez Obrador ordered Mexico’s military to shun the agency.

Sheinbaum has drawn a red line at U.S. strikes on Mexican soil and insisted that they would not happen. Her government has set other firm limits on what it considers to be nonnegotiable matters, rejecting the possibility of joint operations that would allow armed U.S. forces to embed with Mexican troops.

Mexico’s national identity is deeply entwined with the legacy of U.S. conquest and imperial bullying. So this remains out of the question for members of Sheinbaum’s leftist Morena party, the Movement for National Regeneration, which has held the reins of governance in Mexico since 2018.

As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervention cost the country half its territory. The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 resulted in the acquisition of more than 1.3 million square kilometres of Mexican territory by the U.S., including all of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Texas had already been acquired.

For Morena, therefore, the sovereignty of the nation comes first, even before its own capacity to police itself, and before the safety and lives of its citizens. But the prime beneficiaries of this approach have been the drug cartels, which control somewhere between a third and a half of Mexico, according to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

Now, however, Mexico’s drug smugglers are under pressure. There has been a slowdown in drug trafficking at sea since the U.S. began striking smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The cartels are already contending with the loss of revenue from human smuggling and extortion payments because of Trump’s border crackdown.

On April 19, a vehicle carrying four officers engaged in an anti-drug operation in the northern state of Chihuahua crashed, and all four were killed. Two were CIA officers. Americans had died in an operation on Mexican soil, apparently in cooperation not with the Mexican federal government, but the government of the state of Chihuahua, which is controlled not by Morena but by the rival PAN, the National Action Party. This was hugely embarrassing to Sheinbaum.

However, on Sept. 14 she authorized the entry into Mexico of 139 U.S. Army troops to participate in joint training exercises with Mexican military personnel in Chihuahua. After all, a major trade deal still hangs in the balance.