Europe should know better than most places how prejudice enters public life.
It rarely arrives with trumpet blasts. It doesn’t begin with the most extreme law imaginable, announced in language that leaves no doubt about its purpose.
It advances through smaller measures, administrative rules, trade restrictions, professional exclusions, and supposedly principled exceptions.
Each step is defended as limited and reasonable. Each is presented as a response to a particular dispute. Yet the cumulative effect is far more dangerous than any single policy.
In September, the United Kingdom and France announced restrictions on trade involving goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which their governments regard as illegal under international law.
Similar policies have already been adopted or pursued by European countries including Norway, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
Supporters describe these measures as a means of distinguishing between Israel and the territories. They say the restrictions target settlements, not Jews, and amount to economic pressure in support of international law.
That argument cannot simply be dismissed. Governments are entitled to criticize Israeli policy. Israel, like every country, must be open to scrutiny.
But Europe must also examine what these policies do in practice and where their logic will lead.
Businesses operating in the affected areas don’t employ only Jewish Israelis. They also provide jobs and income to Palestinians and other Arabs. A ban intended to punish one group damages the livelihoods of others. That fact should puncture the comforting assumption that economic restrictions are clean, precise, or cost-free.
The enforcement of such measures raises further concerns. In some European countries, travelers face baggage inspections at points of entry.
Goods believed to have originated in restricted areas are to be confiscated, with fines or other penalties potentially imposed. What begins as foreign policy can quickly become personal: a label examined, a purchase questioned, a traveler treated with suspicion.
Britain’s wider policy choices also deserve scrutiny. The government has placed restrictions on certain materials connected to Israel’s defense while deciding to admit more people from Gaza.
Each decision may be defended on its own terms, but together they raise difficult questions about consistency, security and the standards being applied. A democratic government owes its citizens candid answers, not slogans.
None of this means that modern Europe is Nazi Germany.
Careless historical comparisons can cheapen the Holocaust and obscure the real issues of the present. Still, history is useful precisely because it teaches us to recognize patterns before they reach their most monstrous form. And antisemitism has a long, repugnant history.
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, they did not begin with the machinery of mass murder. They began by excluding Jews from the civil service before further measures pushed Jews out of law, medicine, education, culture, and business.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship and prohibited relationships between Jews and those classified as being of “German or related blood.” By 1938, open persecution had become a feature of everyday life.
The endpoint was not visible to everyone at the beginning. That was part of the danger.
Each measure prepared the ground for the next. The state taught the public to see Jews as a separate category, then as an unwelcome category, then as a threatening one.
Delusion and hypocrisy within the Nazi leadership were spread through every available medium until exclusion seemed normal, cruelty seemed defensible, and neighbors learned to look away.
Straightening blurred lines in Europe
Again, today's trade restrictions are not the Nuremberg Laws. They must not be described as though they were. The warning lies elsewhere: discrimination rarely announces its final destination when it begins.
It becomes acceptable by degrees. First comes the special rule. Then the exception. Then the punishment. Eventually, a whole population may find itself treated not as individuals but as representatives of a hated identity.
That is why European leaders must draw a firm distinction between opposing Israeli government policy and creating conditions in which Jews, Jewish businesses, or anyone connected to Israel becomes an acceptable target. The line may be clear in a legal memorandum yet dangerously blurred in public life.
Antisemitism does not require an official declaration. It thrives in insinuation, selective outrage and double standards. It grows when Jewish citizens are asked to answer for the actions of a foreign government. It grows when attacks on Jews are excused as political anger. It grows when institutions condemn hatred in principle but hesitate when Jews are its victims.
Europeans should be careful – not because every criticism of Israel is antisemitic – but because antisemitism has always been skilled at disguising itself in the respectable language and spread in the social media of its age.
And hatred rarely remains confined to one community. The habits required to isolate Jews – collective blame, dehumanization, and selective enforcement – can be turned against immigrants, political dissidents, and other minorities.
Once a society accepts that one group may be treated by different rules, the principle of equal citizenship begins to rot.
Europe’s responsibility is not to silence debate. It is to conduct that debate without allowing policy to become a vehicle for prejudice.
History doesn’t repeat itself neatly. But it does leave early warnings for those willing to see them.
Europe ignored them far too many times in the past. It must not do so again.
Dr. Michael J. Salamon is a psychologist specializing in trauma, abuse, and the psychology of terror, and is director of ADC Psychological Services in Netanya and Hewlett, NY.
Louis Libin is an expert in military strategies, wireless innovation, emergency communications, and cybersecurity, and is an adjunct professor at the US War College.