For Jews across the world, waking up to news of an anti-Semitic attack has become an experience which is sadly all too familiar. Each time, we think that we can no longer be shocked. There are no more red lines that can be crossed, we think. We must be past the worst of it. And yet, we keep being proven wrong.
The latest event in this long series took place in Amsterdam. The BBC called it “clashes” between football fans, but this was no ordinary football hooliganry. Masked men kicked and punched Israelis on the streets, as they lay unconscious and defenceless. “I’m not Jewish,” begged one fan, before he was hit in the face. Another offered his attackers money, in the desperate hope that they could be persuaded to leave him alone. “Cancerous Jews,” shouted the frenzied mob, as they so viciously assaulted their victims. They took pleasure in beating up Israelis, satisfying a pent-up lust for Jew-hate.
From the city of Spinoza, once a refuge for persecuted Jews across Europe, videos circulated of scenes which we once hoped had been consigned to a bygone era. In a Western democracy, Jews pleaded for their safety on the streets, so failed by the authorities. It is difficult to resist the poignance of the anniversary of Kristallnacht – the 1938 pogrom of Jewish owned businesses across Nazi Germany – coming up this weekend. On Thursday night, Amsterdam more resembled the city of Anne Frank than the Mokum, or safe haven, as it is referred to in Yiddish.
After the senseless horrors of the Holocaust, Europe vowed “never again”. Jews would enjoy rights and protections, and anti-Semitism would become forbidden in polite society. This uneasy new normal continued for nearly eighty years. While anti-Semitic incidents took place, particularly when violence flared up in the Middle East, they did not define Jewish life. Authorities cracked down, and politicians of all stripes roundly condemned this hatred.
On October 7 last year, everything changed. Anti-Jewish racism proved itself to be a light sleeper, and increasingly came to shape the contours of the Jewish experience. The streets, universities, and institutions of Europe ignited with Jew hatred. Students proudly paraded through their campuses, voraciously screaming for violence against Jews. “From London to Gaza, globalise the intifada,” they shouted.
Across Europe, it stopped being socially expensive to incite hatred if the targets were Jews. For much of the Left, including among those who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racists, Jews and Israelis became the acceptable target of prejudice and bigotry. It should have been far from surprising that these threats and incitement would lead to the painful consequences we have seen in the videos from Amsterdam, proudly shared on social media by vicious attackers convinced that their assaults of Jews were virtuous. Globalise the intifada, they say?
The situation has gradually worsened over the past year. Across the world, Zionism has been used as a term of abuse. To believe in a Jewish homeland is to lose your membership of the community of the good, as the sociologist David Hirsh calls it. Once this premise is accepted, the unjustifiable can be so easily justified.
Scenes across the UK from recent weeks – of protests outside a Jewish community centre hosting a Left-wing conference on Israel, of the stealing and decapitation of the bust of Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and of the graffitiing of pro-Israel organisations – should be condemned rather than celebrated. Authorities appear to be unwilling or unable to crack down on these shameless displays of hatred and the British Jewish community feels increasingly vulnerable.
The horrific display of hatred on the streets of Amsterdam should be a warning to us all, for these scenes can so easily be repeated on the streets of London. Authorities must take Jew-hate seriously if we are to stop this. But this must come in addition to a deep societal reckoning with the permissibility and acceptance of anti-Semitism. The implications of not doing so do not bear consideration.
Claudia Mendoza is CEO of the Jewish Leadership Council