Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey of
2024 found that 96 per cent of Jewish respondents had encountered antisemitism
online or offline in the 12 months before the survey, and that 76 per cent
avoided wearing or displaying items that would make them recognizable as Jewish
in public.
Antisemitism in Austria remained at alarmingly high levels
last year, reaching its highest point since records began. The Antisemitism
Reporting Center of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), the official
body tracking antisemitic incidents against Austria’s Jewish community,
released its annual report in April documenting 1,532 cases in 2025.
Last November, protesters rallied in Vienna against an event
dedicated to Franz Dinghofer, an Austrian politician who was a self-confessed
antisemite and a Nazi party member. They were protesting an event called the
Dinghofer Symposium that they say is antisemitic. The far-right Freedom Party
of Austria (FPO) members countered that they remember Dinghofer as a statesman in
the period between World War I and World War II.
In Belgium, Jewish communities are described as tight-knit
but insecure, and constantly aware that their citizenship and prosperity don’t
guarantee their acceptance or safety. Too often, writes Brandeis University
historian Flora Cassen, who grew up in the country, “governments and the media
treat attacks on their Jewish communities as a front in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, not as an attack on their own citizens.” In March, there was a car
burning in the Jewish quarter of Antwerp. As well, a synagogue in Liège was
damaged by an explosion in what the country’s interior minister called “an
antisemitic act.”
In France, antisemitic violence has intensified while the
experience of protection has weakened. Jewish students face harassment framed
and justified as political expression. Synagogues operate behind security.
Wearing a kippah can require calculation. These are no longer marginal
experiences; they have become familiar features of Jewish life in places that
once felt self-evidently safe. Since 2000, between 80,000 and 100,000 Jews have
fled France -- more than 20 per cent of the community.
More troubling still is the ideological shift. Antisemitism
is increasingly reframed as political critique, social protest, or resistance
to power. Jews are often excluded from the moral category of vulnerable
minorities. The very frameworks designed to protect them can struggle to
recognise them as victims.
A staggering number of antisemitic incidents has now become
normal in France -- 1,320 in 2025 is nearly double the already extreme 851 in
2014. But what’s more interesting is the shift in social permission to openly
hate Jews.
The far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) Party in France has
been accused by academics and ministers of antisemitism after their de facto
leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and
party members marched with Islamist-linked NGOs during Gaza protests. The LFI’s
popularity has been on the rise in polling ahead of next year’s presidential
election, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. Ninety-two per cent of
French Jews believe that the LFI contributes to antisemitism in France.
Mélenchon took advantage of nationwide student protests in
early October. To advance his political prospects, his strategy appears to be
to capitalize on the discontent currently roiling the country. Mélenchon has
also accused authorities of repression with a racist undertone, since many of the
protesters are Muslim. No surprise, then, that Palestinian flags have appeared at
the protests.
Although Mélenchon was known in the 1990s as a hardcore
secularist, by 2020 he had allied himself with Houria Bouteldja, co-founder of
the “decolonial” (anti-West) Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR). Under
Bouteldja’s influence, Mélenchon began to utter questionable remarks on the
Jews. The way Mélenchon uses the idea of uniting against one enemy by speaking
of Israel “is similar to the way Hitler used to speak about the Jews,”
according to Israeli Ambassador to France Joshua Zarka. So it’s no surprise
that French president Emmanuel Macron, getting more and more unpopular,
recognized a Palestinian state in 2025.
Germany has cracked down on speech and demonstrations that
assert support for Palestinians and accuse Israel of atrocities, part of a
national policy toward antisemitism, defined over decades in the shadow of the
Holocaust and sharpened recently under the helm of Felix Klein, the first
federal commissioner for combating antisemitism. Many Jews say they feel safer
under such bans. The Central Council of Jews in Germany recommended Klein for
his appointment as antisemitism czar. Some human rights groups have objected,
however, saying the bans limit free speech and criminalize legitimate
expressions of support for the Palestinian cause.
Disputes over Israel recently erupted at the Buchenwald
concentration camp memorial, as both Israel’s critics and its defenders claim
the Holocaust for their terrain. The anti-Zionist group Kufiyas in Buchenwald
announced a demonstration there on April 11, the anniversary of its liberation,
in protest against a German court’s decision that the site could refuse entry
to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. The court said that wearing a
keffiyeh to send a political message “would endanger the sense of security of
many Jews, especially at this site.” The Buchenwald protest was condemned by
the European Jewish Congress, and Klein said it marked a “new low point in
the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
In an election held Sept. 20 in Berlin, the left-wing Die
Linke came in first, winning 25.7 per cent, more than doubling its 2023 share. Israel’s
ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. Philipp
Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the newspaper
of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote that party was “riddled with
people who hate Jews and Israel.”
Italy in April announced that it was declining to renew a
longstanding defence agreement with Israel, a sharp reversal for Prime Minister
Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government. Opposition parties had put pressure on
the government for over a year to suspend the renewal. Marco Grimaldi, an
opposition lawmaker, said the decision was “a victory” for those who had
protested Israel’s military offensive in Gaza over the last three years.
On Oct. 3, 2025, there was a nationwide general strike,
which the labour union leaders officially called “to support the residents of
Gaza and a humanitarian aid mission.” While mass anti-Israel rallies gripped
other parts of Europe, Italy’s were the most numerous.
Recent Italian demonstrations of “solidarity” with Palestine
saw protesters carry Palestinian flags, flags of Italian labour unions, and red
flags with hammers and sickles. Some of the banners had the words, in Italian, “yesterday
partisans, today anti-Zionists and anti-Fascists,” and declared support for
“Palestinian resistance.”
Dutch Jews have long been used to seeing security and armed
police in front of their schools, synagogues and gatherings. Since a school and
a synagogue were attacked over two days in March, an unsettling feeling has
spread among Jews in the Netherlands. Assailants struck Jewish buildings -- a
religious school in Amsterdam, where most Dutch Jews live, and a synagogue in
Rotterdam. Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam called the blast at the school a
“targeted attack against the Jewish community.”
Before the Holocaust, the Netherlands had a robust Jewish
population. The Nazis deported 75 per cent of Dutch Jews to death camps, the
highest such rate in Nazi-occupied western European nations. Today, the Jewish
population of the Netherlands is estimated at about 35,000 people, just 0.2 per
cent of the country’s 18 million residents.
“I am mostly angry,” declared Menno ten Brink, a rabbi at
the Liberal Jewish Community in Amsterdam. The explosions have had a big impact
on Dutch Jews and the wider society, added Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch national
coordinator for combating antisemitism. Antisemitism has been increasing over
the last decade or so, he said, with an “exponential increase” since October
2023.
Relations between Israel and Norway have plummeted to
historic lows, with Oslo becoming one of the Palestinians’ staunchest
supporters in Europe. Norway became the first European country to announce that
it would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav
Gallant following the International Criminal Court’s issuance of warrants
against them, and it then joined South Africa in its International Court of
Justice case against Israel.
“I find it shameful that we have one of the most anti-Israel
governments in Europe,” MP Himanshu Gulati, chairman of the Israel Allies
Caucus in the Norwegian Parliament, has remarked. Not surprisingly, the
Norwegian government has recognized. a Palestinian state.
In May, Norway’s higher education minister indicated that
she did not intend to punish a university professor who praised Hamas’s Oct. 7
massacres in Israel because he had “the same freedom of expression as everyone
else.” Sigrun Aasland was referring to Bassam Hussein, a professor at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology (NTNU), who on April 21, during a lecture
before the Socialist Forum in Trondheim, said that the Oct. 7 massacres were
“the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century.”
Norway’s Foreign Ministry put out a bill this fall before
its parliament that would send Norwegian citizens and companies to prison for
buying from, selling to, building for or investing in businesses owned by Jews
who live in the West Bank. Negligent violators get six months.
In Portugal anti-Israel sentiment punctuates the actions of
the political press. The most significant antisemitic events that occurred in recent
years included demonstrations for better housing that targeted local Jews whose
personal names were published in newspapers, bomb threats against the country’s
largest synagogue and the Holocaust museum, which was called a “brothel that
teaches the lie of the 6 million,” and hate messages written on the facades of
Jewish homes to identify “Zionist pigs.”
Following October 7, 2023, antisemitic and antizionist
incidents surfaced more visibly in public spaces and academic institutions.
High-profile incidents include verbal electoral harassment against Jewish
community figures like writer Esther Mucznik, acts of vandalism directed at the
Lisbon Synagogue, and hostile propaganda targeting Jewish and Israeli students
at the University of Coimbra
The far-left Sumar Party in Spain is part of socialist Prime
Minister Pedro Sanchez’s ruling coalition. Their support has been strongest in
areas with high Muslim populations, with party members attending demonstrations
with Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent groups and Gaza protests organized by
Islamist-leaning networks. Members also pushed for Spain to recognize a
Palestinian state, which it did in 2024, while also referring to Israel as an “apartheid
state.”
The political left spread a narrative across social media
asserting that the recent migrant invasion by Moroccans of Spain’s Ceuta
enclave is part of a vast American-Israeli conspiracy to destroy the
country. Spain’s Transportation Minister supported the theory on social
media while Gabriel Rufian, a spokesperson from the Spanish Congress,
asserted that the U.S. and Israel were flooding Europe with migrants to “blackmail”
the country.
In Sweden, debates about antisemitism loomed large
throughout the recent election season, despite the country’s small population
of Jews, who number about 20,000 in a country of more than 10 million people.
Politicians on all sides repeatedly sought to position themselves as the best
defenders against antisemitism.
Aron Verständig, who chairs the Official Council of Swedish
Jewish Communities, said that while he appreciated gestures of solidarity with
the Jewish community, he worried that politicians hurling accusations of
antisemitism against each other could reduce Jews to a weapon of political
debate. “Of course, it’s good that our situation is discussed and people are
interested in what happens to the Jews here in Sweden -- but on the other hand,
there’s a risk that we are becoming a tool.”
Simona Mohamsson, Sweden’s minister for education and
integration, who is of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, wore a Star of David
during a televised debate. A member of the center-right Liberals, she wore the
symbol “for the children who do not dare to in today’s Sweden.” She criticized
members of the Left Party for “flirting with extremists.”
Since 2023, the war in the Middle East has been a defining
trigger for antisemitic incidents in Switzerland. For the Jewish community, this
has been a constant strain for more than three years.
Pro-Palestine activists are very active at Swiss
universities. There have been anti-Israel demonstrations, some of which were
associated with calls for violence and antisemitic slogans. The one in Bern in October
2025 stands out in particular because there was a massive outbreak of violence.
In the larger cities of Switzerland, offensive graffiti relating to the
conflict in the Middle East is omnipresent.
Here and
there we see small improvements on the continent, but not enough to turn things
around. The ancestral Jewish knowledge that
safety can collapse with terrifying speed, even in civilised societies, begins
to return.
