The anguish of being Jewish in Britain today

The first question every Jewish child hears in its cradle is this: Vesuvius has erupted, the Queen Mother has died, Liz Hurley's had a baby. "So," says the second greataunt down from the sabbath urn, "is it good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews?"

No prizes for guessing the answer at the moment. Religious or secular, rich or poor, Zionist or internationalist, British Jews are broadly agreed that this is the worst time for Jews since the Hitler era. Synagogues are being burned and cemeteries defaced across Europe. Devout young men in skullcaps have been attacked on the streets of London - and don't bother calling the police.

Anti- Semitic remarks abound at fashionable parties. The media have turned hostile, MPs won't return calls and liberal academics are organising a boycott of Israeli scholars. It seems, to most British Jews, a wildly disproportionate response to Ariel Sharon's war and the enduring West Bank occupation - for which many, privately, have little sympathy.

Why, they wonder, does the world expect Israel to withdraw before peace is established, while ignoring China's 40-year occupation of Tibet, Russia's of Chechnya and Turkey's of the better half of Cyprus? A double standard is at play, and that makes Jews uneasy.

Under pressure, they resort to history. One rabbi reminded his community last week that the blood libel - the odious allegation that Jews use Christian blood in their Passover cakes - originated in England with the case of William of Norwich in 1144. Britain was the first country to evict its Jews in 1290, and one of the last to enfranchise them in 1871. Disraeli, had he not converted, could never have entered Parliament. The veneer of civilised tolerance is a fairly recent gloss on the British way of life.

A furrowing of stress can be felt in the pales of Jewish settlement, those areas of north and north-west London where two-thirds of the 280,000 affiliated British Jews make their homes. Daily life on the Golders Green Road, never a carefree avenue, is lined with anxiety. The premier kosher restaurant has placed a guard at the door to deter would-be attackers. Strangers are searched before they can enter a synagogue.

Most London Jews have friends and relatives in Israel. For them, the violence is personal. A leading communal figure told me she was planning to evacuate her Israeli grandchildren if things got worse. My own daughter has interrupted a year of study in Jerusalem and come home at our insistence after finding herself a prisoner behind college walls, unable to go downtown with her friends for fear of suicide bombers.

The Jewish community takes care of itself. The Regent's Park mosque is ringed every Friday with a heavy police presence. Four nearby synagogues have appealed for extra protection but channels of co-operation are shutting down. There is a chilling account doing the rounds of a meeting between Jacques Chirac and the Chief Rabbi of France, who came to seek assurances of improved security. "How many Muslims in France?" said the president rhetorically. "Six times as many as Jews. Count the votes for yourself."

If things are bad for the Jews, they can only get worse. Every night on the BBC news, Orla Guerin cranks up the emotional toll of reportage - always going for a tear-jerking shot at the expense of impartial reason.

Jews reject British media coverage of the conflict as crudely sensationalist. Editorials calling for sanctions against Israel, including one last week in the Evening Standard, left Jewish readers dismayed at the shifting sympathies of their favourite papers.

They wonder what has happened to the British sense of fair play when it was Yasser Arafat, not Israel, who walked away from negotiations and ordered the resumption of violence. The suicide bombers are directly linked to his PLO organisation, his centre of command.

His words of peace in English are intentionally ambivalent. Arafat's Arablanguage television channel nightly extols the "way of martyrdom", recruiting new bombers. A London Jew of Iraqi origin has set up roundthe-clock monitoring of PLO media to expose their deadly intentions.

Even in English, the insincerity shines through. Last week on Newsnight, Arafat's information minister Yasser Abd Rabbo spoke repeatedly of a return not to the occupation borders of 1967 but to the pre-state lines of 1947, effectively confirming the PLO's aim to eradicate Israel should it ever get the chance. Jews have been left uncustomarily speechless by a blitz of Palestinian spin.

But behind their show of solidarity at events to mark Israel's 54th anniversary tomorrow night, London's Jews are more divided than ever on the direction the state is taking. Ariel Sharon is neither popular nor credible among them - a necessary evil, at best. "What else could he have done in the face of the Passover massacre?" is the closest they come to endorsing his latest war.

Many of the 300 communal figures who signed a peace petition in the Jewish Chronicle last month had never before uttered a word of public criticism. Others, angrier, have led the academic boycott. One acquaintance of mine has smuggled herself into Ramallah to stand shoulder to shoulder with beleaguered Palestinians.

The Chief Rabbi denounced the peace petitioners as " misguided" and the Lubavitch religious organisation has appealed for tribal unity, but Jews are jealous of their intellectual independence and maintain their right to dissent.

Anguish, however, is a unifying force. At prayers each morning, my rabbi reads out a lengthy supplication for peace and social harmony. Sharon's claim that Israel is fighting for survival may be hyperbolic, but Jews in Britain have not felt so insecure since Mosley's Blackshirts marched the streets - or so uncertain of their place in a society that seems to treat them with renewed suspicion and distaste.

One of the most startling trends of recent months is not the flight from Israel by casual students and fainthearted friends, but the sustained numbers of young British Jews who are leaving to make their homes in Israel. Britain, to many of its Jewish citizens, no longer feels like home.