In the space of just one week last month, according to CRIF, the umbrella group for France’s Jewish organizations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd’s chants and banners included “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats.”
That same weekend, in the Barbes neighborhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: “Israhell,” read one banner.
In Germany last month, Molotov cocktails were thrown into the Bergische Synagogue in Wuppertal — previously destroyed on Kristallnacht — and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to “destroy the Zionist Jews... Count them and kill them, to the very last one.”
Bottles were thrown through the window of an anti-Semitism campaigner’s house in Frankfurt, an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg and an Orthodox Jewish teenager was punched in the face in Berlin.
In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared Israel’s actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: “Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone,” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”
Across Europe, the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organizations have long observed a noticeable spike in anti-Semitic incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares.
However, according to academics and Jewish leaders, this time it is different.
More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the expression of a much deeper and more widespread anti-Semitism, fueled by a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a decade.
“These are the worst times since the Nazi era,” said Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews.
“On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed, the Jews should be burned’ — we have not had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans is not criticizing Israeli politics, it is just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. Also, it is not just a German phenomenon. It is an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it is very clear indeed,” he added.
CRIF president Roger Cukierman said French Jews were “anguished” about an anti-Jewish backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and humanitarian opposition to the current fighting.
“They are not screaming ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris,” Cukierman said last month. “They are screaming ‘Death to Jews.’”
CRIF’s vice president Yonathan Arfi said he “utterly rejected” the view that the latest increase in anti-Semitic incidents was down to events in Gaza.
“They have laid bare something far more profound,” he said.
Nor is it just Europe’s Jewish leaders who are alarmed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the recent incidents “an attack on freedom and tolerance, and our democratic state.”
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has spoken of “intolerable” and clearly anti-Semitic acts.
France, whose 500,000-strong Jewish community is one of Europe’s largest, and Germany, where the post-war exhortation of “Never Again” is part of the fabric of society, are not alone. In Austria last month, a pre-season friendly between Maccabi Haifa and German Bundesliga team SC Paderborn had to be rescheduled after the Israeli side’s previous match was called off following an attempted assault on its players.
The Netherlands’ main anti-Semitism watchdog, CIDI, had more than 70 calls from alarmed Jewish citizens in one week last month; the average is normally three to five. An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jewish women were attacked — one beaten, the other the victim of arson — after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies.
In Belgium, a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: “We don’t currently sell to Jews.”
In Italy, the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: “Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade;” another: “Jews, your end is near.”
Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from San Dona di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews.
There has been no violence in Spain, but the country’s small Jewish population of 35,000 to 40,000 fears the situation is so tense that “if it continues for too long, bad things will happen,” the leader of Madrid’s Jewish community, David Hatchard said.
The community is planning action against El Mundo after the daily paper published a column by 83-year-old playwright Antonio Gala questioning Jews’ ability to live peacefully with others.
“It is not strange they have been so frequently expelled,” he wrote.
Studies suggest anti-Semitism may indeed be mounting. A 2012 survey by the EU’s Fundamental Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight European countries — between them, home to 90 percent of Europe’s Jewish population — found 66 percent of respondents felt anti-Semitism in Europe was on the rise.
So what is driving the phenomenon? Valls has acknowledged a “new, normalized” anti-Semitism that he says blends “the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the devastation of Israel and hatred of France and its values.”
Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a London-based charity that monitors anti-Semitism both in Britain and on the continent, also identifies a range of factors.
Successive conflicts in the Middle East have served up “a crush of trigger events” that have prevented tempers from cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006 and the three Israel-Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have “left no time for the situation to return to normal,” Gardner said.
In such a climate, three brutal anti-Semitic murders in the past eight years — two in France, one in Belgium and none coinciding with Israeli military action — have served “not to shock, but to encourage the anti-Semites,” leaving them “seeking more blood and intimidation, not less,” he added.
In 2006, 23-year-old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead in Paris by a group calling itself the Barbarians Gang, who subsequently admitted targeting him “because he was a Jew, so his family would have money,” they said.
Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead seven people, including three children and a young rabbi outside their Jewish school. In May this year, Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, thought to have recently returned to France after a year in Syria fighting with radical Islamists, was charged with shooting four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.
If the French establishment has harbored a deep vein of anti-Jewish sentiment since long before the Dreyfus affair, the influence of radical Islam, many Jewish community leaders say, is plainly a significant contributing factor in the country’s present-day anti-Semitism.
However, so too is a straightforward alienation that many young Muslims feel from society, Gardner said.
“Often it is more to do with that than with Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police station as a synagogue. Jews are simply identified as part of the establishment,” he said.
While it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Muslims, some of the “anti-Semitic elements” Germany has seen at recent protests could be “a kind of rebellion of people who are themselves excluded on the basis of racist structures,” said Peter Ulrich, a research fellow at the Center for Anti-Semitism Research (ZfA) at Berlin’s Technical University.
In France anti-Semitism has become “a portmanteau for a lot of angry people: radical Muslims, alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left,” Arfi said.
However, “a process of normalization, whereby anti-Semitism is being made somehow acceptable,” is also to blame, he added.
One culprit is the controversial comedian Dieudonne.
“He has legitimized it. He has made acceptable what was unacceptable,” Arfi said.
A similar normalization may be under way in Germany, according to a study last year. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, e-mails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60 percent were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses — something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.
Almost every observer pointed to the unparalleled power of unfiltered social media to inflame and to mobilize. A stream of shocking images and Twitter hashtags, including #HitlerWasRight, amount almost to indoctrination, Arfi said.
“The logical conclusion, in fact, is radicalization: On social media people self-select what they see, and what they see can be pure, unchecked propaganda. They may never be confronted with opinions that are not their own,” he said.
Additional reporting by Josie Le Blond, Kim Willsher, John Hooper and Ashifa Kassam
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