As Israel ramps up its military reaction — in turn triggering a humanitarian crisis in Gaza — antisemitism is likely to spike, just as it always does when conflict in the region escalates.
If anyone had any doubt as to whether the Western world is still teeming with antisemitism, the displays of jubilant pro-Hamas rallies in various European and American cities, and the avalanche of social media posts rejoicing in the carnage of the attack on southern Israel, should have disabused them of the notion.
Last week’s butchery by Hamas gunmen struck many as a gruesome throwback to the “Holocaust of bullets” by the Einsatzgruppen — the mobile Nazi death squads that conducted mass shootings of Jews in Poland and Ukraine as their horrific contribution to the ‘final solution.”
But that hasn’t stopped the hate speech — nor the pro-Hamas demonstrations — bringing activists from the far left and far right together with radical Islamists.
In the wake of the attack, “antisemitic rhetoric spiked across social media platforms, particularly on extremist favorites 4chan and Telegram. This includes a rise in the use of phrases that call for violence against Jews, Israelis and Zionists,” noted America’s Anti-Defamation League.
In the United States, white supremacists celebrated, with the antisemitic National Justice Party’s Mike Penovich declaring on Telegram: “Hats off to the Palestinians for taking bold and courageous action.” The only drawback, one New Jersey white supremacist noted on a Telegram channel, was that there would now likely be “a new batch of migrants coming to America. Privileged supremacist Jews fleeing chaos they provoked like the cowardly rats they are.”
Over in the United Kingdom, a woman at a leftist pro-Hamas rally in the normally sedate coastal town of Brighton announced to reporters that the carnage Hamas wrought was “beautiful and inspiring.” And in Manchester, Dana Abuqamar, president of the Manchester Friends of Palestine, told local media she was “full of pride and joy.”
Also in Britain, Rivkah Brown, an editor for the leftist Novara Media — which bills itself as “New Media for a Different Politics” — proclaimed that it was a “day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide.” Brown later deleted the post, claiming her “instinct was to show unreserved solidarity with a Palestinian resistance I knew would be demonised,” without questioning whether it is possible to demonize the diabolical.
However, Brown wasn’t the only one on the far left to cloak their sentiments by citing democracy and human rights — surely inappropriate words to use when it comes to Hamas, an organization that hardly values either and has been proscribed as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and the European Union.
Indeed, Hamas did run in elections in 2006, only to subsequently seize full power over Gaza in a military clash with Fatah — the lead faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hamas hasn’t held elections since and now rules with an iron fist, brooking no dissent, and resorts to torture and executions to maintain its repressive one-party rule, as documented in an Amnesty International report in 2014.
But factual history didn’t seem to perturb pro-Hamas demonstrators this week, whether it was those in Berlin handing out baklava before Israeli blood had dried or those in Barcelona, where LGBTQ+ flags were unfurled even though gay sex is punishable by up to a decade of imprisonment in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, thousands defied a government prohibition on pro-Hamas rallies in Paris, with police using tear gas and water cannons to disperse them. Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez said he was concerned rallies would be “the scene of behaviors, slogans and acts of a principally anti-Jewish nature, inciting racial hate and making excuses for the (Hamas) terrorist attacks.”
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin also told French radio last week that 100 antisemitic acts had been recorded since the Hamas attack, most involving graffiti displaying “swastikas, ‘death to Jews,’ calls to intifadas against Israel.” French police said they’d received a flood of complaints about antisemitic hate speech and the glorification of terrorism online.
And according to the Community Security Trust, which represents British Jews on issues of racism and policing, antisemitic incidents in Britain increased by more than 300 percent last week.
What these pro-Hamas celebrations — both online and on the streets — have in common is the intellectually facile conflation of Hamas with “Palestinian.” These are not the same.
Hamas’ local popularity has declined in recent years, with a July survey of Gazans showing that 70 percent of those polled supported the idea of it standing aside and having Gaza run by the Palestinian National Authority, which governs the West Bank. Sixty-two percent said they wanted Hamas to maintain a ceasefire with Israel.
This valorization of the pogrom in southern Israel also comes amid a resurgence in antisemitism, especially in Europe — the open resurfacing of an ancient hatred that seems ingrained. In Europe, there’s been a documented uptick in attacks on Jewish buildings and cemetery vandalism over the last several years, as well as increased social media baiting and physical assaults. In 2018, in the wake of a spate of cemetery desecration and Yellow Vest baiting of a prominent Jewish intellectual in France, President Emmanuel Macron had vowed to fight antisemitism, saying it was “the antithesis of Europe” — alas it may not be.
In December of the same year, an EU study found that hundreds of Jews in a dozen member countries had reported physical and verbal abuse over the previous 12 months. And over a third of the 16,000 French Jews polled said they avoided attending Jewish events out of fear.
Also in 2018, CNN, in collaboration with pollster ComRes, surveyed 7,000 individuals across Europe, which resulted in the alarming finding that antisemitic stereotypes were alive and well across the Continent and memory of the Holocaust was starting to fade. Over a quarter of those polled believed Jews had too much influence in business and finance, and nearly one in four said they had too much influence on conflicts and wars across the world. A third said they had only heard a little bit or nothing at all about the Holocaust.
But even before the events of last week, Jewish leaders had been warning that the spread of antisemitic prejudice from the far right — where it has generally been confined since 1945 — over to left-wing populists was particularly alarming.
And indeed, in the wake of the Hamas attack, the reaction from some segments of Europe’s “progressive” left has been the most jolting, made even more so by their frequent use of the words “Jew,” “Zionist” and “Israeli” without drawing any distinctions.
In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leader of France Unbowed — has refused to condemn the attack and hasn’t registered repugnance at the slaughter either. Mélenchon and his party describe Hamas simply as “the Palestinian forces.” And Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has accused the party of using its anti-Zionism as “a way of masking a form of antisemitism.”
Meanwhile, in Catalonia, the far-left Popular Unity Candidacy party justified the Hamas attack on the grounds that Israel has been “perpetuating a genocide of a territory for decades. The territory resists and fights against misery and injustice” — again, there was no condemnation. In Spain, the far-left Podemos party posted that the violence in Israel and Gaza was the fruit of Israel’s occupation, also avoiding outright condemnation.
And in Scotland, Green lawmakers Maggie Chapman and Ross Greer shared their support for the Hamas attack, with Greer posting that “Palestinians have a clear right under international law to defend themselves, including by attacking their occupiers.”
Traditionally, the most vicious antisemitic rhetoric and violence has come from far-right and Islamist extremists. But as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) noted in 2019, “Far-left antisemitism nonetheless has a significant and pernicious impact on Jewish communities, stoking an increase in harassment, abuse and threats against Jews.”
Of course, elements of Europe’s left have had a long history of conflating Jews, Zionism and Israel — something that some scholars put down to the influence of Soviet propaganda, which used antisemitic tropes to push anti-Zionism and portray Israel as a colonial project of the U.S., according to the ISD. These features continue to play out in the far left’s rhetoric today, often portraying Israel as a racist Western colonial outpost.
So, as Israel takes revenge for the worst terror attack in its history and mounts a massive military operation in a bid to wipe out Hamas — in turn triggering a humanitarian crisis in Gaza — antisemitism in Europe is bound to surge, just as it always does when the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates.
Source : Politico