Prince Harry has warned of Britain’s “deeply troubling rise in anti-Semitism” following a string of antisemitic attacks directed against the country’s Jewish community.
In an op-ed published Thursday by British left-wing magazine The New Statesman , Harry outlined his fears for what he called “a divided kingdom” and urged people to separate their protests against the Israeli government from prejudice towards Jewish people.
He did not explicitly name Israel in the piece. Instead, he referred to states whose actions “raise serious questions under international humanitarian law” and acknowledged “images from Gaza, Lebanon and the wider region– of devastated communities and entire neighbourhoods levelled and reduced to rubble – have shaken people to their core.”
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack in October 2023, has prompted worldwide protests and an independent United Nations inquiry concluded last September that the country had committed genocide against Palestinians in the enclave.
But Harry warned that these “two realities” of protest and prejudice “are being dangerously conflated.”
“When anger is turned toward communities – whether Jewish, Muslim, or any other – it ceases to be a call for justice and becomes something far more corrosive,” he wrote.
Harry referenced recent “lethal violence in London and Manchester,” referring to an attack which killed two Jewish worshippers at a Manchester synagogue in October and the stabbing of two Jewish men in broad daylight in north London last month.
Before that stabbing, London’s Jewish community was already reeling from several antisemitic attacks targeting synagogues and other communal buildings.
“We cannot answer injustice with more injustice,” Harry said. “If we do, we don’t end the cycle, we extend it. The only way to break it is to refuse to pass it on. That means being unequivocal: standing against anti-Semitism wherever it appears, while recognising that anti-Muslim hatred and all forms of racism draw from the same well of division.”
He also said he was “acutely aware of my own mistakes,” an apparent mistake to the time he wore a Nazi costume to a costume party in 2005.
While Britain’s royal family are careful to avoid overt interventions into politics, Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have become much more outspoken since they stepped back as working royals.
