Australia / Israel Review

Six years ago, Israel’s tenth President Reuven Rivlin said, “For us, it is clear as daylight. Antisemitism is a presence in society that corrupts society itself. We try to explain to the whole world that if you don’t fight against antisemitism, it will hit your societies.” 

Europe is still processing a number of elections that have changed the continent dramatically. The far-right appears within touching distance of the French presidency in 2027. It missed out on a majority and the prime minister’s office in a second round of national parliamentary voting on July 7 only after the warring political tribes of the far left, greens and liberals managed to agree that the Rassemblement National (National Front) was worse than their own substantial differences. 

In the European Parliament elections in June, despite some horrific SS gaffes and a Chinese spy uncovered in their offices in Brussels, the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party came second in Germany. The Liberal Belgian Prime Minister was in tears after being abandoned at the ballot box. In the European Parliament, the Liberals are now lagging in fifth place, as the ultra-conservative Patriots faction led by Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and the more moderate but still right-of-centre ECR group took the third and fourth spots respectively. The Christian Democratic centre remained top, with the Socialists, spared blushes by a surprising result in Italy, coming in second. 

In the mid-90s, French Prime Minister Alain Juppe forced his cabinet to sit through a controversial movie about riots in the French banlieues (poor suburbs largely inhabited by immigrant families) called La Haine (“Hate”). 

Following the brutal racist gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in the outskirts of Paris in mid-June, Emmanuel Macron urged his Education Minister to ‘hold a dialogue’ on racism and hatred of Jews, to prevent hateful speech with serious consequences from infiltrating the classrooms. 

Yet it is likely too late for dialogue. Classrooms are not just infiltrated but saturated with hate. They were already saturated when Mr Samuel Paty, a teacher, was decapitated for attempting to create a dialogue on freedom of expression. And this sickness has spread well beyond the classroom. It is in universities; it is on the streets. It prevents football matches between Israel and Belgium in Brussels being held on security grounds. In short, it infects everything. 

It is a simple fact, borne out in the long and frequently depressing arc of history, that once the virus of hate is inside society, it won’t rest until it has infected the entire body. Since October 7, antisemitism has risen in some EU countries to levels last seen in the short days ahead of Kristallnacht. 

Europe’s leadership had for too long treated antisemitism like a gardener who neglects the growth of weeds. It’s as if they said, “It’s only a small one, affecting a tiny percentage of the garden, what harm can it do?” Since October 7, we’ve gotten an answer.

Europe’s dramatic swerves to the far-right and far-left can in large part be attributed to this neglect. In La Haine, a main character in the movie says, “La haine attire la haine”: “Hate attracts hate”. 

Jewish communities across the continent represent an early warning system to European governments. We are hyper-aware of hate, not only because history has made us so, but because we represent – as has often been stated – the canary in the coal mine. 

We warned that the “protests” calling for the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state were dangerous; that the appropriation of the swastika by pro-Palestinian groups used in demonstrations was dangerous; that chants in favour of a global intifada were dangerous; that the sight of masked keffiyeh wearing people terrorising, assaulting and insulting Jewish students on campus, and indeed Jews in the streets, was dangerous. We said anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism, leading to the targeting of Jews and their institutions everywhere.

We warned. We shouted. And we have been ignored. The voters flocked to the margins, giving them voice and, in many cases, power. 

These are very dangerous times in Europe.

In one of the most famous lines of La Haine, the main character says that what is happening “is the story of a man falling off a ten-storey building, who as he passes each floor, keeps repeating to himself, ‘so far so good, so far so good.’ But what is important is not the fall, but how you land.”

President Rivlin was correct, and so too was Alain Juppe. The time has come to convene every cabinet in Europe to really talk about why hate is winning, and how Europe can land safely. Jewish communities, as the targets of this hate, can help in these vital discussions, but only if our increasingly urgent voices are finally heeded in a serious way.