Trump's Jerusalem Decision Is Reigniting Anti-Semitism In Europe

This article originally appeared on VICE News.

When US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week, world leaders warned of a fiery response across much of the Middle East and the greater Muslim world. Few predicted significant blowback in Europe.

But less than a week on, Trump’s announcement has become a flashpoint on the continent, with a series of anti-Semitic incidents reported in its wake. In Sweden, a synagogue in Gothenburg and a funeral chapel at a Jewish cemetery in Malmö were targeted with firebombs over the weekend. Anti-Semitic chants were reported at anti-Jerusalem protests in Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as in Sweden, while in the Netherlands, a kosher restaurant was vandalized.

The incidents prompted immediate condemnation by politicians and Jewish groups alike — as well as from Christian and Muslim leaders — and cast fresh light on anti-Semitism in Europe, more than seven decades after the Holocaust. Though Jews have faced persecution in Europe for centuries, there are growing concerns among Jewish groups, anti-racism organizations, and politicians that a new wave of anti-Semitism in Muslim immigrant communities has been inadequately confronted by authorities. This, they say, has allowed anger toward Israel to spill over too frequently into outright anti-Semitism and calls for attacks on Jews as a whole.

“I absolutely believe they’re doing too little, all over Europe,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said. “If you ask Jewish leaders and young Jews living in Europe, they see that this is the beginning of the end of Jewish life in Europe, which would be a great tragedy.”

In Sweden, prosecutors are trying to make sense of firebombing on the synagogue, which they believe was motivated by Trump’s Jerusalem announcement.

Three young men — two Syrians and a Palestinian, all of whom had migrated to Sweden in recent years — are suspects in the attack, which prosecutors say may have involved a dozen more perpetrators.

The firebombing followed an anti-Israel rally in Malmö Friday, where protesters could be heard chanting threats like “We’re going to shoot the Jews” and “Jews should remember that the army of Muhammad will return.” Police said the chants alone could constitute illegal threats against a minority.

Jonathan Leman, a researcher at Expo, a Swedish magazine that investigates racist and anti-Semitic movements, said besides threats from the far right and radical Islamists, Sweden’s 20,000-strong Jewish community also faced an emerging strand of “Middle East-related anti-Semitism” that typically becomes more pronounced during times of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

The threats have created a climate of fear for local Jewish communities, especially those in cities with significant populations of Middle Eastern descent, said Leman. They were the product of an anti-Semitic worldview that saw local Jewish communities as indistinct from Israel.

“The Israeli government, Israelis, and Jewish people around the world all melt into one thing,” Leman said.

Indeed, throughout Swedish cities, anger toward Israel has repeatedly crossed the line from legitimate criticism of the Jewish state to anti-Semitic hate speech and threats, said analysts.

So much so that when the Israel-Palestine issue makes front-page news, cities like Malmö feel the reverberations, a byproduct of increased migration from Middle East ern countries, said Freddy Gellberg, spokesman for the Jewish community in Malmö, a Swedish city with a well-documented history of anti-Semitic threats and attacks.

“We are facing this new type of anti-Semitism from people who came from the Middle East in the past 10 to 15 years, and it can be quite violent,” Gellberg said.

European leaders are starting to take a stronger stance on the issue. After the latest wave of incidents, politicians in Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands issued powerful rebukes, stating that anti-Semitism has no place in their societies and that the expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment in recent days went beyond acceptable political protest.

“I’m terribly upset over the attack on a synagogue in Gothenburg… and calls for violence against Jews at a demonstration in Malmö,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said Sunday, while announcing in increase in security around Jewish institutions. And in Germany, officials from Chancellor Angela Merkel down have denounced their country’s protests.

“Calling for the murder of Jews has nothing to do with freedom of opinion,” Stephan Mayer, a politician from Christian Social Union, told Die Welt, while government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Monday: “You have to be ashamed when hatred of Jews is displayed so openly on the streets of German cities.”

Josef Janning, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Berlin office, said that the recent incidents had put the political views of immigrant communities under new scrutiny.

While Europe had a long legacy of latent anti-Semitism, which has been on the rise with the ascent of the populist fringe right, the recent rallies in Sweden and Germany had been mostly organized by Arab Muslim communities, with significant input by the large Turkish population in Germany.

Janning said he believed that there was some validity to criticisms that European governments had been less vigilant to anti-Semitism from immigrant communities than they had been to similar prejudice from the far-right.

“European authorities have been rather soft on the issue of what political beliefs migrants bring. Part of the reason is they believed it didn’t matter because they would not articulate them — which is apparently not true,” he said.

“I think this issue will now receive larger attention, even though most people would say there’s very little we can do about it, other than to say that German state authorities disapprove.”

Leman said that in Sweden there had been “unanimous condemnation” of the latest incidents, a response he said was encouraging especially because there’d been a tendency among elements of the political Left in Sweden “to not only not take this seriously but also blame the victims themselves and have a tolerance for anti-Semitism.”

Leman also worried that the political Right would capitalize on the current debate around the new wave of anti-Semitism to smear Muslims wholesale. “One type of bigotry does not justify another,” he said. Focusing solely on these recent incidents could obscure the equally present threat Jews face from the far right. As recently as April, a Jewish center in Umea, in northern Sweden, for example, was forced to close its doors following a campaign of intimidation from a neo-Nazi group.

What was needed, he said, was universal condemnation across the political spectrum that anti-Semitism, in all its forms, was unacceptable, followed up with a concerted effort to root out this enduring prejudice from Swedish society.

“We need to do more in the short term to get these people convicted – because there are too many people in who commit hate crimes who aren’t – and we need to more in the long-term to do something about anti-Semitic attitudes,” he said. “We need to see anti-Semitism as a broad problem, one that can’t be understood just by looking at just one segment of society.”