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You are listening to an art media podcast.

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It's Monday, may 4th. This episode was recorded at 6pm new york time on Sunday. I'm deborah pardes and this is arknews daily. For more than two years, Jewish communities across the Western world have been sound. Antisemitic attacks are on the rise and governments have been responding with little more than words. But it seems that's starting to shift.

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We should not deal with this with kid gloves. We spent a lot of time hoping that this was a temporary thing and it would go away. It's not. It's a national emergency.

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That's Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenak speaking to CBS News. After last week's stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, police called it a terrorist incident. But the most striking development didn't happen on the streets. It happened inside a political party. Last week, police arrested two of the UK's Green Party candidates on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. The investigation had been opened a week earlier, before the Golders Green stabbing. The two candidates are Saika Ali and Sabine Mere. Ali had shared a photo of an armed man in a Hamas headband captioned Resistance is freedom. She also posted a cartoon suggesting Israel was blackmailing US politicians with the Epstein files and blamed the 911 attacks on Israel. In now deleted Facebook posts, Mayre posted an image of a man holding a sign that read ramming a synagogue isn't anti Semitism, it's revenge. She also shared an image of Auschwitz with the implication that Israel's actions were worse than the Nazis because the Nazis, quote, had to hide what they were doing. The Green Party has increasingly become the center of a larger scandal around antisemitism. According to The Telegraph, nearly 20 Green Party candidates running in upcoming local elections have posted offensive material, including one who called Jewish people cockroaches.

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Antisemitism is an old, old hatred. History shows that the roots are deep.

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Beyond the arrests, the broader government response in recent days was more forceful than anything we've seen in a while. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced there would be more police outside synagogues and Jewish schools, faster sentencing, and called for the prosecution of people who chant globalize the intifada at protests for more than two years, that chant echoed through the streets of London. At weekly protests, local largely unchallenged. The fact that Starmer is now saying it should be prosecuted is a big shift. The same pattern is playing out in Canada. On Friday, police upgraded charges against four people from a Nov. 25 mob attack on an anti Israel student event, adding public incitement of hatred and rioting while masked. Police chief Myron Demkeev said his force has made over 500 arrests connected to anti Semitic activity since October 7. But Jewish leaders say the crackdown is still lagging behind the threat. They're calling on Canadian leaders to label synagogue attacks as domestic terrorism and to set up a national antisemitism task force. In Britain, Jews remain worried about future attacks. Community leader Levi Shapiro said Starmer had, quote, run out of words. The first real test of whether the response so far means anything comes Thursday in Britain's local elections. If voters don't punish the Green Party, the lesson for British politics might be that antisemitism doesn't move votes. There's a weapon Hezbollah has been using against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon that Israel can't jam, can't easily shoot down and didn't fully prepare for. It's a small drone, about the size of a shoebox. It costs a few thousand dollars or less. It's not guided by radio signals but by a thin fiber optic cable that trails behind it as it up to 15 or 20 miles long. That cable is what makes it so dangerous. Israel has relied on electronic jamming to take out conventional drones, but that doesn't work here. Last Thursday, one of these drones slammed into a group of Israeli soldiers near the village of Kantara in southern Lebanon. A 19 year old soldier, Sergeant Lim Benhamo, was killed. Two others were wounded. A separate drone attack wounded 12 other soldiers near the border community of Chomera. One analyst said northern Israel is starting to look like eastern Ukraine. Crisscrossed with abandoned fiber optic cable, these drones have been a defining feature of the war there for two years now. Hezbollah has brought them to Israel's northern front. And Israeli officials say the military was not fully prepared. Even though it wasn't surprised. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video on Saturday saying he ordered a special counter drone project a few weeks ago. His message was essentially we're working on it, but it will take time. For now, the military is improvising, using physical nets to protect vehicles and buildings. But the ongoing ceasefire with Lebanon complicates things. It limits how aggressively Israel can respond. And army officials say their hands are tied. The ceasefire was brokered by the US and extended just last week. Netanyahu has been pushing Washington to loosen the constraints, but the US has said no. And now the Knesset is getting involved. More than a third of the Foreign affairs and Defense Committee signed a letter demanding an emergency meeting on what they called, quote, the failure of the interceptors and the abandonment of the home front. The meeting was called after Channel 12 reported that the government repeatedly refused to fund Arrow 3 interceptor missiles, even after two massive Iranian attacks earlier in the war. Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Batsal El Smotrich have been summoned to answer for it. The implications run deeper than a single front. Israel has spent decades building a security model around precision air power, layered missile defense and the assumption that technology favors the side with the bigger budget. The fiber optic drone upends that logic. A thousand dollar device can defeat jamming systems that cost millions. That same calculus is forcing every modern military to rethink what air defense actually means. For Israel, the reckoning is happening in real time, under fire, with a ceasefire limiting its options, the biggest question ahead is one the cabinet will face within weeks. Will it go back on the offensive in Lebanon or keep pulling back? If officials conclude the truce is giving Hezbollah a leg up, the calculus on resuming strikes could change fast. On Friday, the student senate at the New School in New York voted to strip funding from its Hillel chapter. If you don't know Hillel, it's the main center for Jewish student life on many American campuses. There are chapters at eight hundred and fifty colleges across the country. The New School Student Senate declared its chapter not in good standing, citing ties to violations of international law, specifically volunteer programs that send students to Israeli military bases and birthright trips to Israel. It appeared to be the first time a student government anywhere in the country had voted to cut off its Hillel chapter, but the university stepped in and said no. A spokesperson for the New school said that the Student senate does not have the authority to determine the recognition, funding, eligibility or official status of registered student organizations. He added that Hillel remains in good standing as it has always been. The administration's response is part of a broader pattern at ucla. Last month, the student government condemned an on campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage omer Shemte, a 24 year old who was held in Gaza for 505 days after being abducted from the Nova music festival. The student government published a letter saying that bringing Shem Tov to campus was an example of selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence. The university publicly censured the student government for it. The federal government has also been cracking down. In February, the administration sued ucla, alleging administrators routinely ignored and failed to report employee complaints of antisemitism since October 7th. And a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress last week that would block federal research funding to any university accepting money from Qatar, China, Turkey or other listed adversaries. But the underlying shift in how Americans think about Israel, that's not something an administrator can override with a memoir. Going forward, the issue isn't just whether universities step in to protect Jewish life on campus. It's whether anything is actually changing the minds of students. I'm Deborah Pardes, and this is ARC News Daily. See you tomorrow,