By Solo Musaigwa

There's a letter from 1983 sitting in the British archives. It's typed on official 10 Downing Street letterhead, signed with an elegant flourish, and every word of it makes you want to scream.

Margaret Thatcher's office was responding to the Commonwealth Jewish Council, who'd written with concerns about Zimbabwe's Jewish community. Relations between Zimbabwe and Israel were deteriorating. There were fears . Reasonable, as it turned out about what that might mean for Jewish residents living under Robert Mugabe.

The response? A masterclass in saying absolutely nothing while sounding deeply concerned. "Thank you for your letter... I understand your fears... good record of religious tolerance... I shall certainly bear in mind your suggestion... only speak to him if I felt the effect would be helpful."

Translation: Thanks for writing. We've noted your concerns. Now please go away.

The attached Foreign Office memo is even more revealing. It admits there's "little substance" to the fears being expressed.Zimbabwe's relations with Israel are poor, but there's no evidence yet of discrimination. Then it gets honest about what really matters: raising this might "conflict with our efforts to put our bilateral relations back on an even keel." There are British air force officers to retrieve. Trade to protect. More important fish to fry.

This is how democracies become accomplices.

The Arithmetic of Atrocity

Fast forward to last Thursday morning. October 2nd, 2025. Yom Kippur the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and a man drives his car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester. He gets out with a knife. Two men are murdered: Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66. Three others lie in hospital with serious injuries.

The attacker, later identified as Jihad Al-Shamie, is shot dead by police. One of the victims still being determined, who appears to have been accidentally hit by police gunfire in the chaos. The congregation, bloodied and traumatized, brings out chairs and prayer books and continues their service in the street. Because what else do you do when someone tries to kill you for praying?

Britain's Chief Rabbi said what everyone in the community was thinking: "This is the day we hoped would never see, but which deep down, we knew would come."

They knew. Of course they knew. The UK recorded over 3,500 antisemitic incidents in 2024 the second-highest year on record. The first half of 2025 alone saw more than 1,500 incidents. Since October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza began, British Jews have been living in a pressure cooker of rising hatred.

And what did the government do with all those warnings? About what everyone always does: monitor the situation with concern, deploy some extra police during high holidays, and hope it doesn't get worse.

It got worse.

Gaza, Guilt, and the Jews Next Door

Here's where it gets complicated and where we desperately need honesty instead of platitudes.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has become a proxy for something darker. Legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy and there's plenty to criticize about the conduct of the war in Gaza, the civilian casualties, the humanitarian catastrophe has created cover for people who simply hate Jews. Not Israelis. Not the Israeli government. Jews.

Most British Jews have never set foot in Israel. Many are deeply critical of Netanyahu's government. Some actively support Palestinian statehood. None of them were in Gaza making military decisions. But when you're getting spat at on the tube or your synagogue needs armed guards on a Tuesday morning, those distinctions don't seem to matter much.

The Manchester attacker drove into a crowd of people whose only crime was gathering to pray. He wasn't making a political statement about occupation or settlements. He was killing Jews because they were Jews, in Britain, because of a war three thousand miles away.

And this is exactly the pattern that makes the 1983 letter so haunting. Different conflict, same mathematics. Some people's safety is always negotiable. Some communities are always expendable when weighed against larger geopolitical concerns.

The Silence of Allies

Since October 7th, something broke in how we talk about all of this. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, largely peaceful, fill streets across Britain. Reasonable people march for an end to civilian casualties in Gaza, for humanitarian aid, for a ceasefire. And mixed in with them sometimes are people chanting slogans that sound uncomfortably close to calls for Israel's destruction.

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Is it a call for freedom or an erasure? Depends who you ask. Jewish students stop wearing Stars of David on campus. Families in Manchester start talking about moving to Israel ironically, the place they're supposed to be fleeing to, from Britain.

Meanwhile, politicians tie themselves in knots trying to calibrate responses. Can't be too pro-Israel (war crimes in Gaza). Can't be too pro-Palestine (Hamas are terrorists). Can't acknowledge rising antisemitism too loudly (might seem like you're trying to silence Palestinian voices). Result? A lot of carefully worded statements and not much that actually protects anyone.

The 1983 playbook, updated for modern sensibilities.

The Boutique Genocide Problem

Zimbabwe's Jewish community in 1983 numbered around 5,000. Manchester's Jewish community today Britain's second-largest after London is maybe 30,000. In the grand scheme of international relations, these are rounding errors.

And that's the point, isn't it? The Foreign Office memo from 1983 basically admits this. There's "little substance" to the concerns. The situation doesn't warrant action that might "conflict with our efforts" on more important matters.

Some persecutions are too small to derail diplomacy. Some communities don't move the needle on trade deals or treaty negotiations. And by the time the warnings prove prescient, by the time the violence becomes undeniable, you're no longer preventing atrocity. You're managing aftermath.

Mugabe, as we now know, didn't stop with making life difficult for Jews. He made life hell for millions. The economic collapse, the political violence, the humanitarian disaster.It all came later, predictably, like dominoes falling in slow motion. But by then, expressing concern was easy because it cost nothing.

The Reasonable People Problem

Nobody in that Foreign Office was twirling a villain's mustache. They were professionals doing their jobs, balancing competing interests, maintaining diplomatic relationships. They probably went home and slept fine.

This is what makes systemic failure so insidious. You don't need evil people. You just need reasonable people in a system that consistently prioritizes stability over humanity, especially when the humans in question are few in number or politically inconvenient.

The Manchester attack came with all the usual responses. Prime Minister Keir Starmer flew back from a summit to chair an emergency meeting. He visited the synagogue. He promised a "more visible police presence." He said Britain would "defeat this rising hatred."

All perfectly reasonable responses. None of them address why 1,500 incidents in six months.That's roughly eight attacks on Jews every single day weren't enough to trigger something more than monitoring.

What We're Really Protecting

Since October 7th and the Gaza war, Britain has also seen a 13% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes. This isn't a competition of suffering. But it reveals something about how we've let the Middle East conflict poison community relations in Britain.

When Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy showed up at a vigil for the Manchester victims last Friday, he was booed. Shouted at. "Shame on you," they yelled. Because his government had recognized Palestinian statehood. Because in the grief-stricken arithmetic of that moment, recognizing Palestinian rights felt like it had emboldened the person who murdered their neighbors.

That's not rational. But grief and fear rarely are. And this is what happens when governments spend decades managing symptoms instead of addressing causes. When you respond to rising hatred with more police presence instead of asking why the hatred is rising. When you treat antisemitism and Islamophobia as separate problems instead of connected symptoms of a society that's lost the ability to protect vulnerable minorities from being used as pawns in other people's wars.

The Letters We're Writing Now

Somewhere, today, a diplomat is drafting a carefully worded response to concerns about another community, in another country, facing another crisis. The language will be sympathetic. The tone thoughtful. The conclusion: not now, not like this, not when it might complicate more important relationships.

Maybe it's about Rohingya in Myanmar, driven from their homes while we maintained diplomatic channels. Maybe it's about some other group you haven't heard of yet because they're still in the "expressing concern" phase rather than the "undeniable catastrophe" phase.

The pattern holds. Early warnings ignored. Bilateral relations prioritized. Measured concern expressed. Mass atrocities occur. Shocked response. "Never again." Repeat.

In twenty years, some researcher will find today's emails in an archive. They'll write articles marveling at how we could have known and done nothing. "How could they have seen this coming and still..." they'll ask, trailing off in disbelief.

But we do see it. That's not the problem. The problem is we've convinced ourselves that seeing is enough. That expressing concern is action. That monitoring the situation is intervention.

The Bill in Blood

The two men murdered in Manchester last week were grandfathers. Pillars of their community. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz went to synagogue on the holiest day of their year and never came home. Their families sat shiva this week while investigators tried to figure out which of them was killed by the terrorist and which was killed by the bullets meant to stop him.

That's the cost of waiting too long. That's what "monitoring the situation" looks like when you've let it fester. That's the bill that comes due when you prioritize diplomatic comfort over human safety.

And somewhere, in a government building, someone is writing another polite letter explaining why this particular concern, while completely understandable, doesn't quite rise to the level of action that might complicate more important matters.

Because there are always more important matters. Always bigger fish to fry. Always a reason why now isn't the right time, why this particular group's suffering doesn't warrant the political cost of actually doing something.

The 1983 letter should be required reading. Not as history. As warning.

Because we're not reading about mistakes of the past. We're reading the draft of our own future, written in careful bureaucratic prose that means nothing and changes nothing while people die.

Two men are dead in Manchester. Thousands more are looking over their shoulders, wondering if they're next. And somewhere, someone is writing a response that will sound perfectly reasonable, right up until the moment years from now when it becomes evidence of our collective failure.

Again.

Solo Musaigwa is a Zimbabwean writer, political commentator, and social critic whose work blends history, prophecy, and people’s voices into sharp indictments of power. He writes from within the traditions of the liberation struggle, amplifying the voices of mothers, widows, youth, exiles, and ancestors who demand bread, dignity, and freedom. He can be contacted on solomusaigwa.writer@gmail.com