“In recent weeks, synagogues in Toronto, Detroit, Liège, and Rotterdam, as well as a Jewish school in Amsterdam, were targeted by firebombs, shootings, and a vehicle ramming. Public condemnations were swift in every case. In Belgium, where I grew up, the military now has to stand guard outside Jewish sites. That Jews in the heart of 21st-century Europe need military protection to go about their lives is a sign of societal failure.
Yet in Belgium, as elsewhere, we often hear a troubling ambiguity in the public discourse that follows these attacks. On the one hand, we are told that it is wrong to target Jewish communities. On the other hand, we are told that it is understandable why people might do so in response to Israel’s actions.
These two ideas cannot coexist. If attacks on Jews are repeatedly explained as an understandable reaction to events in the Middle East, the message is that it’s natural – or even legitimate – for anger about Israel to translate into hostility toward Jews. Instead of insisting that this translation must stop, we end up conveying that, while we wish the attacks had not happened, we can understand why they did…”
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