THE arson attack on four ambulances belonging to the Hatzola Jewish community service is an unambiguous act of anti-semitic hate.

The torched vehicles were parked next to a synagogue: the perpetrators are targeting Jews because they are Jewish. While there were mercifully no casualties, the outrage is clearly intended to make Jewish people across Britain feel unsafe in their own neighbourhoods.

That must be unequivocally condemned. The decision to target ambulances is especially sinister, the wanton destruction of community assets that exist to save lives.

An attack on one is an attack on all. This is literally true in the case of Hatzola volunteer service, which works for the whole community in liaison with the NHS. We all know the pressures on our health service and the importance of ambulance response times in a medical emergency. People could yet die as a result of this crime.

Condemnation must be unhesitating. Socialists must also be alert to the social context that breeds such hate and ready to confront the narratives that make excuses for it.

Britain is an increasingly divided society riven by insecurity and suspicion, promoted rather than challenged by the majority of politicians.

Some seek to exploit incidents like this to double down on division: few will be surprised that Nigel Farage doesn’t wait for evidence before associating the arson attack with small boats, indeed with hypothetical Iranians arriving on them.

The Reform UK leader is inconsistent, cheering on a war likely to create Iranian refugees and then painting those refugees as an enemy, but it doesn’t mean the propaganda won’t be effective.

We should be wary too of attempts to tie a crime under investigation to specific foreign conflicts or actors. Community Security Trust chief executive Mark Gardner claims the ambulance burnings “fit firmly into Iranian and Iranian-linked operations,” but the insinuation that the Iranian state could be involved is unevidenced and dangerous given the huge escalatory risks present in an already catastrophic conflict.

At the same time, we have to recognise that the arsonists’ motives may be linked to the wars engulfing the Middle East and clear in demolishing the twisted logic that holds Jewish people responsible for the actions of states like Israel or, in an ominous but increasingly prominent trend, the United States or Britain.

The Make America Great Again (Maga) movement in the United States is fracturing over the Iran war, with supporters who took Donald Trump at his word when he claimed to oppose “forever wars” angry that he turns out to be the most aggressive warmonger the White House has seen in decades.

That’s all to the good in itself, but one current presents this as the subversion of the president’s original agenda by an outside actor — Israel. Some on the US far right blame Jews explicitly, but the notion that Trump was tricked into war by Israel has far wider currency, and indeed featured in the resignation letter of counter-terror chief Joe Kent.

Of course Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has long pressed for this war, and quite possibly convinced Trump it would be easier than it has turned out.

But as Communist Party of Israel Knesset member Ofer Cassif told the Morning Star, Trump’s aggression is global — as we’ve seen from the Caribbean to Greenland — and his determination to tear up international law consistent. There is no need to posit some hidden hand behind his attack on Iran and doing so is fertile ground for anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We must reject these when they circulate on the left as well as the right.

Our duty is to stand with people of any race or religion targeted for who they are, to confront anti-semitism as we do all forms of racism, and to work — difficult as it is — for working-class unity against a capitalist system that uses racist ideologies to divide those it exploits.