The Mossad defines its mission with crystal clarity as “to gather intelligence, thwart threats, and guarantee the security of the State of Israel and the Jewish people worldwide.” For most Western readers, that mandate sounds like something meant for Tehran, Beirut, or Gaza. Yet today the unthinkable question arises once again in the center of Western life: What happens when Jews are no longer safe in the very societies that proclaim themselves the guardians of human rights?
The list of recent antisemitic events is long: Holocaust survivors burned alive while pleading for the release of innocent hostages. Young couples murdered days before their engagement. Jews stabbed during holiday celebrations, executed in their homes, hunted in synagogues, and targeted at beaches and community events. Meanwhile, killers and their supporters shout genocidal slogans that Western elites excuse as “political expression.”
What distinguishes this moment in history is not merely the persistence of antisemitism, but its normalization – its transformation from social taboo into moral fashion, public stance, and even foreign policy.
Beyond the incidents perpetrated by individuals and groups linked to terrorism, we are also witnessing an entire leadership structure in the West that actively works to grant amnesty to the perpetrators of antisemitic crimes.
Institutional antisemitism
Antisemitism today does not thrive in spite of institutions, but through them.
Courts excuse explicit calls for violence. Politicians relativize murder as “context.” Ministers mock Jewish children kicked off a plane. Media figures flirt openly with genocidal language while wrapping themselves in the vocabulary of justice. The message is that Jewish safety is conditional and expendable.
We see police and security forces misleading the public into blaming Jews, refusing to protect them in the face of clear security risks, and providing alibis for criminals who openly confess their intention to intercept and harm this minority. We see authorities across Europe willing to discriminate against, cancel, and ostracize Jews from institutional, academic, and sporting life.
The social contract collapses the moment the state decides that one group of citizens is too controversial to defend; when law enforcement calculates repercussions before protection.
This is how it metastasizes. First comes the lie: Jews provoke hatred. Then the policy: Jews must be restricted “for their own safety.” Finally, the purge: Jews are removed from public life to preserve social harmony.
European sequence
Europe knows this sequence far too well.
Since the October 7 attack, the West, and especially Europe, has been experiencing a pornographic display of antisemitism unheard of since the buildup to World War II. Obscene, excessive, and performative, the hatred is no longer whispered; it is flaunted.
Universities host rallies that flirt openly with genocidal chants. City centers echo with slogans that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Exhibitionism replaces ethical responsibility, and inverted moral outrage becomes a substitute for thought.
The West is pushing the most persecuted minority in history to the point of communal exhaustion. Communities are permanently on guard. Jews are beginning to ask the questions that once belonged to another century: “Should we hide?”; “Should we leave?”; “Can we trust the authorities who are supposed to protect and represent us?”
People from all parts of the globe are free to wander the streets of any European capital, speak their native language, and express their most twisted justifications for the tyrannical regimes from which they come, without any fear for their physical safety, much less death. Jews, on the other hand, are beginning to have their freedoms curtailed.
This asymmetry exposes the lie at the heart of Western moral performance. Multicultural tolerance collapses when confronted with Jews. All identities are protected except the one that history has taught us is the most vulnerable.
Solidarity is everywhere, except when it involves the Jews or Israel.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) identified the double standard as the cornerstone of antisemitism. Never has that definition been more painfully accurate. When non-Jews die, the world marches. When Jews die, it depends on the context. Jews are blamed for the ideologies that victimize them.
Israel, in this landscape, is not the cause of antisemitism but its mirror. The existence of the sovereign Jewish state exposes the fantasies of those who prefer Jews powerless, apologetic, and defenseless. It does not exist because of the Holocaust; the Holocaust happened because there was nowhere to go.
Israel stands as a historical lesson in Jewish refusal to wait another 2,000 years for permission to survive.
Who will protect the Jews?
So, the question is no longer theoretical: If Western states cannot – or will not – protect their Jewish citizens, who will?
The Mossad was born not simply to operate where security collapses or states abdicate their duties but also to carry the sovereign obligation of safeguarding the minority it has sworn to protect – a minority that history has taught cannot outsource its survival.
The West can still confront antisemitism as the civilizational disease it has always been, or continue sacrificing Jews on the altar of moral cowardice. But history is unforgiving to those who mistake appeasement for virtue.
If Western states cannot, or will not, protect their Jewish citizens, who will?
With forces and groups in the West that do not hide their intentions – and states that even share their belligerence against Jews – if the Mossad ever has to operate again in the West, it will be because Europe has abandoned the Jews – once again.
The writer is a fellow postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia, University of Zaragoza, and Oxford University, specializing in communication and politics with a focus on contemporary antisemitism. He has provided briefings on antisemitism to Spain’s Justice Ministry and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. www.juliolevitkoldorf.com