(Bloomberg) — It was when the two cars draped in Palestinian flags whizzed past the bar, their occupants screaming “f— Israel” out the windows, that Orel Scheinin and his two Israeli friends decided to cut short their night out in Amsterdam.
One of Scheinin’s friends requested a taxi in the city centre, only to receive a call from the driver asking if he was Israeli — and rejecting the booking. It wasn’t until later, once the men had separately made their ways home, Scheinin says, when they realized that they’d been caught up in the violent clashes between Israeli football supporters and rioters that were unfolding around the Dutch capital.
Scheinin’s experience offers a glimpse into how the war in Gaza is reverberating thousands of miles away. All over the world, the conflict has inflamed both anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism and blurred the boundaries between them — but Europe’s particular history of persecution has left the region’s Jewish population bewildered and fearful.
“Antisemitism has made an eerie comeback in the western world,” said Eva Illouz, a French-Israeli sociologist living in Paris.
While there have not been any comprehensive surveys focusing on antisemitic incidents in Europe since the beginning of the war in Gaza, homes and businesses have been vandalized with antisemitic and pro-Hamas graffiti. Antisemitic slurs have been chanted in the streets, and instances of physical violence against Jews have increased. Political polarization is putting additional pressure on European countries to contain antisemitism without aggravating social tensions.
At the same time, Arab and Muslim people in Europe are also facing extreme levels of discrimination and violence. In the past year, mosques have been vandalized, hate speech has proliferated, and far-right politicians in countries including Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany have openly attacked members of those communities.
In their efforts to fight antisemitism, officials across Europe have embraced legal measures alongside strengthening security at synagogues and other Jewish spaces. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s party has presented legislation to criminalize comparisons of Jews to Nazis and support for Hamas. Earlier this year, Sweden joined Germany in making Holocaust denial illegal. In Germany, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a contentious resolution which denies state funding to scientific or cultural efforts that the government deems antisemitic.
These efforts have been dogged by controversy, however, over what exactly constitutes antisemitism. Some European states, and the European Commission, have adopted the definition put forth in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, which includes 11 criteria for identifying antisemitism, seven of which focus on Israel.
To Illouz, the sociologist, an honest approach to confronting antisemitism must involve acknowledging that critiques of Israel aren’t always strictly political. She believes that in certain circles, going after Israel has simply become a socially acceptable way to espouse antisemitic beliefs. Antisemitism today is “more difficult to identify because it is mixed with legitimate critiques of Israeli policies,” she said, adding that discrimination against Jewish people “has changed shape, from race to politics, from antisemitism to anti-Zionism.”
Others argue that the concept has expanded over time to reflect a broader political agenda. “Traditionally, antisemitism has been understood to mean any attack on the equal rights of Jewish people,” explained David Feldman, director of Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at University of London. “Since 2000, however, antisemitism increasingly has been redefined by Jewish leaders, NGOs and Israel to encompass anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel’s continuing occupation and settlement of land gained in the 1967 war, and the treatment of Palestinians generally.”
Peter Ullrich, a fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin Technical University, said that although he supported widening the concept to include Israel-related discrimination, he worried that the move has had a distorting effect. Enlarging the definition of antisemitism, he said, has “unfortunately led to an almost exclusive focus on criticism of Israel as if it were the major threat — which is empirically not true.”
Human rights organizations and legal scholars have expressed concern that a definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with hate speech against Jewish people could be used as a tool to silence legitimate political criticism and curtail free speech. They have also warned that such measures could be used by extremist politicians to target other minorities under the guise of protecting Jews.
In 2021, a group of academics published the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism to address such concerns. The document broadly defines antisemitism as actions and statements that discriminate against Jewish people irrespective of politics.
Debate over antisemitism has been particularly heated in Germany, where laws to “protect Jewish life” have been loudly championed by the far-right AfD party and used against Jewish critics of Israel.
That was illustrated on Tuesday night during a screening in Berlin of a prize-winning documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli film collective about Israeli military efforts to expel residents of a town in the West Bank. Some three million Palestinians and roughly half a million Israeli Jews call the West Bank home, and according to Israeli nonprofit Peace Now, over 50 square kilometres of land in the region has been annexed since the beginning of January — more than in any previous calendar year. On Monday, right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich expressed his wish for Israel to annex the entire West Bank in 2025.
The film, “No Other Land,” was at the centre of a fraught debate in February, when one of the Israeli filmmakers characterized Israel’s operations in the West Bank as a form of “apartheid” during an award speech at the Berlin film festival, drawing rebukes from German officials. The controversy resurfaced this week when the website of the Berlin city government described the film as having “antisemitic tendencies” in a posting for Tuesday’s event.
“You are weaponizing this word, antisemitism, which carries so much weight for me as a Jewish person,” Yuval Abraham, one of the Israeli filmmakers, said in a panel after the screening. He described how accusations of antisemitism from German politicians earlier this year led to a wave of death threats against him and incited a “right-wing mob” to invade his mother’s house in Israel, temporarily forcing her to flee.
A week after riots unsettled Amsterdam, authorities are still piecing together how the violence unfolded. According to Dutch police, the evening before a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Amsterdam-based team AFC Ajax, some Israeli fans set Palestinian flags on fire and destroyed a taxi. Then, would-be assailants on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters, and on Monday night, rioters chanting antisemitic epithets shot fireworks at a tram.
In the wake of the violence, Dutch King Willem-Alexander announced that the Netherlands had failed the Jewish community “again.” Billionaire Bill Ackman said he would seek to remove Pershing Square Holdings Ltd.’s listing from Euronext’s exchange in Amsterdam. And in an X post on Wednesday, right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders took a more provocative stance.
“No more ‘Jew hunts’ in this country, I do not accept it,” Wilders wrote, referencing a term used by the rioters. “And punish the perpetrators — especially Moroccans — very severely, take away their Dutch nationality and deport them.”
Such comments were among the factors that contributed to the near-collapse of the Dutch government on Friday, after a cabinet minister of Moroccan descent stepped down, citing a culture of inappropriate, off-colour jokes by fellow cabinet members, according to a ministry spokesperson. Had other ministers in her party also chosen to quit, it would have toppled the ruling coalition led by Wilders’ Party for Freedom.
Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema attempted to deescalate the situation earlier in the week by addressing concerns from the Muslim community that the government response to the violence had been one-sided. “Antisemitism is far too common in all layers of society,” she said. “But I will not allow an entire population group to be labeled as antisemitic, nor pro-Palestinian demonstrators as antisemitic.”
According to Ullrich from Berlin Technical University, the proliferation of public protests and activity around the conflict in Gaza has made it especially difficult to get a handle on antisemitism. Even if demonstrations are peaceful in nature, he said, they offer an “opportunity structure for antisemitic incidents” which can then be amplified by media coverage.
Meanwhile, authorities fear that these issues — and the very real threats facing Jewish and Muslim people — will not disappear anytime soon. Scheinin, the Israeli man who was out in Amsterdam the night of the attacks, felt singled out in the Netherlands long before tensions burst out into the open. He had several close friends cut him off on account of the war, without bothering to ask about his beliefs. He’s grown accustomed to potential partners rejecting him on dating apps for being Israeli.
After four and a half years trying to build a life in Amsterdam, he’s giving up. Last week, he decided to move back to Israel.
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