How serious is Europe about fighting anti-Semitism?

Armed attacks against Jews in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris and Toulouse have shocked the world while incidents of everyday harassment have increased at an alarming rate.

By SAM SOKOL
François Hollande points at desecrated tombstones during a visit at the Sarre-Union Jewish cemetery, eastern France, on February 17. (photo credit: REUTERS)
François Hollande points at desecrated tombstones during a visit at the Sarre-Union Jewish cemetery, eastern France, on February 17.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
On one of my first trips to visit my in-laws in France, I was taken aback by the presence of armed police officers sitting in their patrol car outside of the synagogue several blocks from my wife’s childhood home.
Situated in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles, nicknamed Little Jerusalem for its high concentrations of both Jews and Arabs, the synagogue stood testament to the threat to the lives of my coreligionists in Europe.
Several years later, I recall sitting at my desk at The Jerusalem Post when I received word that someone had thrown a grenade into Sarcelles’s kosher grocers and hoped against hope that nobody I knew was inside.
Last summer during the height of Israel’s ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, violence returned to Sarcelles when a mob of angry young Arabs attempted to march on a local synagogue, only to be blocked by a counter-mob of Jews standing in front of the building’s high metal gates.
During the violence that gripped France, the Jews of Sarcelles felt besieged as their cars and businesses were burned by mobs chanting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans.
Such violence and the hate that fuels it have been on the rise throughout the continent in recent years.
Armed attacks against Jews in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris and Toulouse have shocked the world while incidents of everyday harassment have increased at an alarming rate.
Last September, Britain’s Community Security Trust, an anti-Semitism watchdog, reported that 300 incidents had occurred in July 2014, the highest level since it began keeping records in the early 1980s.
According to a recent report by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) British Jews are evenly split in their assessment of the severity of anti-Semitism, with around half of respondents saying that they feel that such sentiments are a “fairly big problem.”
Anti-Semitism “continues to be one of the top issues on the Jewish communal agenda, and efforts to combat it generate substantial funding. At the same time, British Jews have arguably never before been so confident about their Jewishness, and so open about displaying it in public,” the report said, adding that 80 percent of Jews polled indicated that “they have felt blamed by non-Jews, at least occasionally, for the actions of the Israeli government, purely on the basis of their Jewishness.”
Moreover, around one third of respondents reported being worried about themselves or those close to them “becoming a victim of anti-Semitic harassment or verbal attack.”
One fifth reported concerns over becoming the victim of a physical assault.
JPR likewise reported that one third of Italian Jews polled “thought that hostility towards Jews in public places had increased in the past five years, and a similar proportion thought that there had been an increase in desecration of Jewish cemeteries, vandalism of Jewish buildings and institutions and anti-Semitism in political life.”
Over 40% expressed concern over the possibility of verbal abuse or harassment, while 30% indicated that they were worried about those close to them suffering physical abuse as Jews.
According to a recent study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), 21% of French Jews reported experiencing at least one anti-Semitic incident during 2013.
In 2013 Israel and Jewish organizations worldwide called on the FRA to return a working definition of anti-Semitism that it had removed from its website.
A third of Jews from across Europe who were polled by the FRA in 2013 stated that they refrained from wearing religious garb or Jewish symbols out of fear, with an additional 23% avoiding attending Jewish events or going to Jewish venues.
While 66% reported anti-Semitism as having a negative affect on their lives, 77% did not bother reporting abuse or harassment. Almost a third were mulling emigration as a response to heightened anti-Jewish sentiment.
And while governments in France, Belgium and elsewhere have stepped up physical security of Jewish institutions, questions remain regarding the efficacy of efforts to eradicate the problem at its roots.
SPEAKING TO this correspondent last year, Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman had harsh words regarding Europe’s hate crimes reporting systems, stating that “there is no serious monitoring by continental entities.”
“We [the Jewish community] take the poll, we do the measuring and they’re not doing their job, they’re not monitoring.”
Pointing a finger at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and “even governments,” Foxman said that more must be done by national and European bodies.
Following the spate of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists against Jewish targets across Europe in recent years, communal leaders began clamoring for the formation of an anti-Semitism task force. In December anger erupted following a decision by the European Parliament to forgo creating such an entity despite initial support by a significant number of legislators.
And despite public statements against anti-Semitism by a growing number of leaders it took Federica Mogherini, European Commission president and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, until March to officially endorse the creation of a continental task force on anti-Semitism.
Speaking with Mogherini earlier this year, a delegation from the European Jewish Congress called on the EU to appoint a special commissioner to deal specifically with anti-Semitism.
Prof. Robert Wistrich, head of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of anti-Semitism, said the lack of centrality in monitoring and reporting anti-Semitic acts was incredible.
“[T]his demand has been made by a number of Jewish organizations,” he said, “if you don’t have a special commissioner you don’t really have an address or a central agency or an individual who is ultimately working with the backing of the authority of the European Union.
“My view is that the response of European governments as a whole has been very weak and ineffective,” he continued.
“At the present time we still don’t have an agreed definition of what anti-Semitism really is and certainly not a definition that has any legal [standing].... When you don’t have even a minimal agreed definition of what it is you are trying to combat I don’t see how you could possibly be very successful doing that.”
Part of the problem, Wistrich believes, is that European officials are not prepared “to take onboard the notion that the delegitimization of Israel is any part of the definition of anti-Semitism.”
Moreover, he said, while leaders in the UK, France and Germany have taken strong stands against anti-Semitism, implementation of agreements on measures to combat prejudice have been applied in an “extremely uneven” manner across Europe.
“When I attended the first OSCE meeting that was held in 2003 in Vienna, at that time there was hope that European governments as a whole would commit themselves on a national basis to monitoring anti-Semitism, and that has only been very partially fulfilled. There are many governments that don’t do it at all.”
THIS UNEVENNESS also applies to issues of Holocaust education and can be traced back to a reluctance to implement policies that would ameliorate the problem, Wistrich believes.
“It’s very hard to talk about Europe as a whole in this respect... it’s enough to say without speculating what the motives for this reluctance are, that it’s a fact that the record is dismal, that even on an issue where you would expect that there would be real unanimity, like, let’s say Holocaust denial being criminalized, the fact is it has been in almost half of the EU states, I think 13 out of 28. That means the other 15 have not done so,” Wistrich said. “So you see, we talk about Europe, but this is a Europe which is extremely divided on this issue and the importance it attaches to it and even in the best cases of countries that have had relatively good practices again I think it’s a low priority and this is true also in the educational sphere.”
Even in countries such as France, which have made good efforts to deal with the problem, the situation is problematic because “the fact is it hasn’t succeeded.”
There is no magic wand that can fix the problem, he asserted.
“What you have, if you take the French case – but I think it’s true virtually across Europe – is a tremendous indifference and apathy of civil society. So what is a government going to do? [It can police], as the French government did, it can mobilize 10,000 troops and it can put them in various strategic positions to protect Jewish synagogues, schools and community centers and so on. It can do that for a time. Then what?” he asked. “Once they go we will have another violent incident and the fundamental causes have not changed in any way and that will surely happen.
We can say with near certainty it will happen again.”
Wistrich believes that unless Europeans face up to the treatment of Israel in the media and the link between Muslim immigrant populations and anti-Semitism, all the efforts being made are “no more than tinkering with the surface of things.”
“You have the denial, for instance, that there is any relationship between so-called criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism but in fact most of what goes by the name of criticism of Israel is feeding, on a daily basis, the growing demonization of the Jewish state, which in turn spills over I would say almost with mathematical inevitability into some form of dislike, hostility or even loathing of Jews,” he explained.
“Governments treat the whole Muslim issue as taboo.
They won’t touch it. They will rarely ever admit that there is such a thing as Muslim anti-Semitism. For political reasons they won’t admit it. So we have this kind of paralyzing political correctness. It’s very difficult to even take the first step in the right direction, and that’s not going to happen.”
IOANNIS DIMITRAKOPOULOS, head of the FRA’s Equality and Citizens’ Rights Department, believes differently, however.
Speaking to the Magazine by phone from Vienna, Dimitrakopoulos announced that his organization was planning on holding a colloquium on “combating anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hatred” in Brussels this October.
Many Jewish organizations have objected to the juxtaposition of the two issues given the role of Muslim immigrants in attacks against Jewish communities there.
And while Dimitrakopoulos believes that more should be done about anti-Semitism, he also believes that it cannot be decontextualized and cut away from other prejudices.
“Tackling anti-Semitism is part of a wider effort to tackle prejudice and intolerance and somebody who suffers from a hate crime and hate speech can be Jewish, can be Muslim, can be lesbian or gay, can be Roma, can be a member of minorities that live within societies in Europe.... I think that the approach to single out each one and see how we can tackle each one has not worked out, and its very important to see how we can build up a common approach to this,” he said.
“Nobody is denying that there are problems between the groups, but one needs to look at it also from a common perspective,” he added.
However, while Wistrich believes that the issues of Muslim immigration and anti-Semitism are inextricably linked, Dimitrakopoulos says that the academic is “arguing that Muslim populations by definition have a problem with Jews [or] are anti-Semitic which I don’t think is the case.”
While serious efforts are under way to physically secure Jewish communities, Dimitrakopoulos stated that he believes that “what we see is very little in terms of efforts made at local or national levels other than sort of broader events such as conferences where the issue is being discussed.”
He said that the FRA is working with national governments to improve their reporting regimes and believes that real progress will be made soon.
He said that there are four areas in which more work must be undertaken: education, pushing back against racist political discourse; ridding the media of harmful stereotypes; and having Jewish communities reach out to engage with their gentile neighbors so that the “broader population [can] learn more about Jewish history, culture and so on.”
This includes civics and history classes where the role of Jews in building modern Europe is explored beyond their role as victims during the Holocaust.
LIKE WISTRICH, Michael Whine, government and international affairs director at the Community Security Trust and the UK’s independent member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, believes that EU member states have been slow to implement reforms aimed at combating anti-Semitism.
While European bodies realized there was a problem as far back as the early 1990s and “put in place a number of really very good agreements,” adoption of their recommendations has not been going as well as one would hope, he said.
“Implementation problems include, but are not limited to: Failure by many states to fully transpose or utilize EU Common Framework Decision of 2008, which requires criminalization of incitement to hatred and Holocaust denial; OSCE Ministerial Agreement of 2009, requiring instigation of a complete criminal justice process of dealing with incitement; OSCE Berlin Declaration requiring states to properly combat anti-Semitism; and ECRI General Policy Recommendation on Antisemitism, requiring combating and educating about anti-Semitism,” the CST said in a statement to the Magazine.
“The question is why with all this legislation on the European level are things not going better? And there are several answers to that. First is that states are not necessarily following through the way they are expected to,” Whine said. “There are two inspection regimes, that of the OSCE and that of FRA, and they particularly focus on anti-Semitism, so you will see from the published data from inspection regime that something between a third and half of the states really don’t do anything.”
He said that only the UK, France and Finland have implemented all of these policies, but asked “how come they are doing everything properly and yet they’ve got things happening? “The answer to that question is it’s not just the law.
You can’t legislate away the problem. It’s a matter of education, it’s a matter of culture it’s a matter of the problems within society.”
Spain is one country that has made good progress, he added, citing efforts by the police and public prosecutor’s office to improve relations with civil society organizations and to implement “model training for police and criminal justice agencies.”
While most of violent incidents originate from Muslims, there is still a strong far Right in several countries such as Hungary and Greece, but this more traditional European anti-Semitism has not led to the elevated levels of danger present in countries such as France and Belgium.
Continental Jews are involved in lobbying for stronger action on the issue of anti-Semitism, said Orly Joseph, the spokeswoman for the European Jewish Congress.
“In the previous mandate we set up an informal working group on anti-Semitism which consists of MEPs from different countries and various political groups who wish to raise awareness and engage on the issue of anti-Semitism only. This group has, under this new mandate, over 90 supporting members who actively work together to bring our concerns to the EU arena,” she explained.
Baron Julien Klener, the head of Belgium’s Jewish Consistory, said local governments in his country have been discussing the issue intensely, and that on the European level he was recently invited to address a working group on anti-Semitism and the contemporary Jewish reactions to the situation.
However, not everybody is as sanguine.
“I personally have doubts if Europe finally understands the danger of anti-Semitism,” said Eli Ringer of the Flemish Forum of Jewish Organizations. “It looks as if they forget the history of the ’30s and ’40s.
The great difference between now and the ’30s is of course that in Western Europe there is actually no state anti-Semitism, maybe only blindness and no courage to take strong initiatives.”