THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM

In Europe and the U.S., rising political forces on both the right and the left have revived old patterns that scapegoat Jews for society’s ills

By Yaroslav Trofimov

The Wall Street Journal
July 12, 2019

When France’s Yellow Vests began to protest weekly last November, it was about President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise fuel taxes. Within a few months, it also started to be about the Jews.

Signs that labeled Mr. Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and a slave of the Rothschilds, a reference to the president’s past employment with the investment bank, became a fixture of the demonstrations. In February, several Yellow Vest protesters—since disavowed by the movement—assaulted the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on the doorstep of his Paris home, yelling, “You will die,” “Zionist turd” and “France is for us.”

“When there is a world-wide economic and social malaise, people look for scapegoats—and the Jews have always served as scapegoats,” said Francis Kalifat, the president of CRIF, the council uniting France’s Jewish institutions. “Anti-Semitism creates bridges between the far right and the far left: They have such a hatred in common that they come together.”

In France and other Western societies, the proliferation of new political forces that challenge the established liberal order—from both the right and the left—has revived old patterns of vilifying the Jews as the embodiment of the corrupt elites supposedly responsible for society’s ills.

Meanwhile, unfiltered social media has pushed these anti-Semitic tropes, long confined to the fringes, into the mainstream of public debate. On any given issue—from economic inequality to the financial crisis to immigration and terrorism—old and new conspiracy theories blaming the Jews have gained new traction, abetted by the political polarization and general crisis of confidence permeating Western democracies.

“Latent anti-Semitism is being activated,” said David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. “Populist politics is not inherently anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories are not inherently anti-Semitic, but both very easily lend themselves to an anti-Semitic turn and easily become anti-Semitic.”

This change comes after an unusual, postwar golden age that Jewish communities enjoyed across Western Europe and the U.S. over the past several decades. After the horrors of the Holocaust, a commitment to minority rights, religious freedom, an inclusive vision of nationhood and a human-rights-based liberalism seemed to be the bedrock of political life in Western democracies. While anti-Semitic prejudice persisted in some areas, overt anti-Semitism seemed taboo.

“Liberal democracies have been good for the Jewish people. Civil rights have been critical to our success in societies which, in the absence of these rights, over centuries and millennia systematically discriminated against and marginalized Jewish people,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “The trend away from liberal democracies is bad for the Jewish people, period.”

As anti-Semitic discourse again becomes normalized in the West, the number of incidents targeting Jews has surged in the U.S. and Europe.

Until the past few years, the biggest threat came from Islamists and disaffected Muslim youths, particularly in the troubled banlieues at the edges of French cities. France, home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community, has suffered a string of killings of Jews, including the deadly 2015 assault on a Paris kosher supermarket claimed by Islamic State. Anti-Jewish harassment remains commonplace in distressed neighborhoods where working-class Muslims and Jews live side by side.
“The Jews who lived in the banlieue have been leaving. Daily life has become impossible there,” said French Sen. Esther Benbassa, who represents many suburbs of Paris.

The West’s new wave of anti-Semitism, however, is increasingly coming from new quarters: from the nativist far right, with its fear of “the other” and dreams of racial purity, and from the extreme left, which often identifies Jews with the capitalist elites it seeks to destroy and glorifies Palestinian militants.

Sen. Benbassa, who supported the Yellow Vests’ economic demands, said that skinhead far-right activists twice assailed her with anti-Semitic insults during the recent demonstrations; other Yellow Vests—who, like many in the movement, can’t abide anti-Semitic prejudice—came to her rescue.

When another far-right extremist shouting anti-Semitic slurs and seething over immigration gunned down 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, he claimed more lives in one swoop than an entire decade of Islamist violence against Jews in France. Including that shooting—the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history—the total number of reported physical assaults on Jews in the U.S. more than doubled last year to 39, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In April, another far-right extremist opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing a 60-year-old woman .

In the U.K., the number of anti-Semitic incidents has been rising for each of the past four years, reaching 1,652 in 2018, compared with 960 in 2015, according to the Community Security Trust, which monitors threats to British Jews. (Most of the identified perpetrators were white and non-Muslim.) And in France, the number of reported anti-Jewish incidents rose 74% to 541 last year, according to the country’s interior ministry. That may be just the tip of an iceberg: Last year, a European Union survey of European Jews found that 79% of those who experienced anti-Semitic harassment didn’t report it to authorities.

A critical difference between today’s anti-Semitism and its pre-World War II iterations is the existence of Israel—a prosperous democracy and an undeclared nuclear power that is nearing the historic threshold of being home to the majority of the world’s Jews. On one level, Israel represents a guarantee of security should things get dramatically worse—a “life insurance policy” for diaspora Jews, as Mr. Kalifat of CRIF puts it. Already, tens of thousands of French Jews have invested in property in Israel or acquired Israeli passports.

But on another level, Jews in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere are regularly blamed for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—a minority within one country being held accountable for the policy decisions of the government of another. Sometimes this dynamic can take on softer forms, such as when Jewish students on American college campuses—where the movement to boycott Israel is strong—face pressure to repudiate any connection to the Jewish state. Sometimes, it can become violent. During the 2014 Gaza war, some pro-Palestinian protesters in France—unable to attack Israeli interests—burned down several Jewish-owned businesses instead. “When you diabolize the state of Israel, you end up diabolizing the Jews,” Mr. Kalifat said.

The diabolization of Israel certainly lies at the heart of the crisis in Britain’s Labour Party—a movement that used to attract the bulk of the U.K. Jewish vote and that 85.6% of British Jews now see as harboring significant anti-Semitism, according to an August-September 2018 poll for the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Jewish newspaper.

In nearly four years of being led by Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of Israel and Zionism, Labour has experienced so many anti-Semitic incidents within its ranks that in May, the party found itself under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an antiracism watchdog created by a previous Labour government. Mr. Corbyn has described leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and was recorded saying that “Zionists” don’t “understand English irony” despite spending their entire lives in the country. He vigorously denies that he or his party are anti-Semitic.

“Jews in this country are held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government in the way we wouldn’t demand for, say, British Pakistanis. It’s the way that is not applied to any other minority,” said Luciana Berger, a member of Parliament who had to be protected by police at last year’s Labour conference and quit the party in February.

Several people—from both the far right and the left—have been arrested and sentenced for making anti-Semitic threats against Ms. Berger, a former parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. Ms. Berger said that she is often asked whether Jewish life in Britain could continue under a Corbyn government. “It comes up all the time: Do we have to leave the country?” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

In the U.S. Democratic Party—which attracted 72% of the American Jewish vote in last year’s midterms—rising criticism of Israel’s policies has also sometimes spilled into anti-Semitic language. In February, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” suggesting that money from a pro-Israel group helps dictate U.S. foreign policy; she apologized after condemnation by her fellow Democrats in Congress.

Though President Donald Trump has expressed hope that such incidents would prompt a “Jexodus” toward him and his party, so far, there is little evidence of it happening: Some 71% of American Jews hold an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump, according to a surveycarried out in April-May for the American Jewish Committee, or AJC—a figure unchanged from the year before.

Several American Jewish organizations have repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump’s own remarks, such as saying in 2017 that the anti-Jewish protesters in Charlottesville included “very fine people” and, in October 2016, that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks” to enrich “global financial powers.”

Mr. Trump strongly denies any anti-Semitism and points to his staunch support of Israel. Indeed, unlike among traditionally liberal American Jews, Mr. Trump has become widely popular in Israel, where 79% of Jews approve of his handling of the relationship with their country, according to a poll conducted for the AJC in April. Building strong bonds with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Trump has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, where a planned new town has been named Ramat Trump in his honor.

In addition to cultivating Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, Mr. Netanyahu has wooed nationalist and populist governments in Hungary, Austria, Brazil and elsewhere that have defended Israel in international forums. As with Mr. Trump, that has made Israel even more of an issue in many countries’ domestic politics—and created unusual strains in the ties between the Jewish state and those countries’ overwhelmingly liberal Jews.

“It’s something new for us: We have never been in a situation of big tension between the governments of very friendly countries and their Jewish communities,” said the veteran Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who until last year headed the Jewish Agency, a body responsible for Jewish immigration and ties with the diaspora.

Some of the West’s new nationalist and populist forces have embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s Israel because of political calculations, including the need to mask anti-Semitism in their own ranks. Many others, however, admire the Jewish state’s successes and values, from growing its economy and building up its military to elevating tradition, culture and faith.

Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has made protecting Europe from a “Muslim invasion” the cornerstone of his policies, is a case in point. “In the world today, there are basically two types of leaders: There are the globalists and the patriots,” Mr. Orban, a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, said in 2017. “And it is beyond question that the current prime minister of the state of Israel is a member of the club of patriots.”

Yet Mr. Orban has also sought to rewrite Hungary’s history, portraying his country as an innocent victim of Nazi Germany and playing down its participation in the Holocaust. That has opened up a rift between the leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community and Mr. Orban’s government. “They want a proud Hungarian nation without black spots,” said Andras Heisler, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, whose mother was deported to Auschwitz by Hungarian police.

Mr. Heisler, who has frequently criticized Mr. Orban’s rhetoric targeting Muslims and his attacks on the Jewish billionaire George Soros, acknowledged a paradox: Despite their apprehension about Hungary’s political course, Jews walking through Budapest in religious garb are much safer today than those in the liberal democracies of Germany or France. “In Hungary, there is anti-Semitism, but there are no physical attacks,” Mr. Heisler said. “We can go with a kippah in the street.”
Contrast that with Germany, where the government’s commissioner on anti-Semitism warned Jews in May not to wear kippahs for their own safety—advice that sparked an uproar and was withdrawn.

In Sarcelles, a town north of Paris with a large Jewish community and a much larger population of Arab and African Muslim origin, Rene Banon’s pharmacy in the Flanades shopping center was burned down during anti-Jewish riots sparked by the Gaza war in 2014. These days, he frets about local Jewish youths wearing prayer shawls and yarmulkes as they walk to the local synagogue on Sabbath. “This could be seen as a provocation,” Mr. Banon said in his rebuilt pharmacy on a recent afternoon. “They shouldn’t be doing it in such a difficult period.”

Such fears—and experiences—of daily harassment, often perpetrated by Muslim youths, have pushed a fraction of French, German or Austrian Jews to support far-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties, disregarding these movements’ anti-Semitic overtones. That is a dangerous mistake, warned Mr. Kalifat, the head of France’s CRIF.

“The best bulwark against Islamists is not the far right. It is democracy,” Mr. Kalifat said, pointing to the torrent of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that has poured from far-right activists within the Yellow Vest movement in recent months. “If the extreme right wants to fight Islamists, that doesn’t make it our friend—because I know that it will be Islamism and Muslims at first, but then it will be the Jews.”