When synagogues are attacked, the response should be unequivocal condemnation. Yet what has followed the recent wave of assaults on Jewish houses of worship – from suburban Detroit to Toronto, Rotterdam, Liège and Oslo – is something more insidious: an impulse to contextualise.
The mayor of Dearborn, hometown of the man who targeted the Detroit synagogue, pointed out that the suspect had lost relatives in an Israeli strike – a framing quickly amplified by global media outlets.
But what bearing can such details possibly have on an attempt to murder Jews at a synagogue in the US? In any other context, the idea that a terrorist’s grievances might somehow explain violence against worshippers thousands of miles from the conflict in question would be recognised immediately for what it is: morally obscene.
As Rabbi Jen Leder of Temple Israel in Detroit – the synagogue the attacker crashed his truck into – put it, any connection drawn between the suspect's family losses and an attack on an American synagogue is “intensely anti-Semitic and inappropriate”.
The terrorist’s brother killed by an Israeli strike, it later emerged, was a Hezbollah commander – a detail that attracted considerably less media attention. Whether this points to orchestration by Tehran remains unclear. But the possibility that some of these attacks across North America and Europe may be coordinated rather than spontaneous only makes the instinct to explain them through Israeli policy all the more troubling. The Iranian regime has called for Israel's destruction and plotted terror against Jews worldwide long before the current round of conflict.
The New York Times displayed a similar instinct. Its headline noted that the Michigan synagogue had been dedicated to the creation of the Jewish state – again introducing “context” that implies a connection with Israel that somehow bears on an antisemitic terror attack.
If historical context is truly the aim, then another fact bears mentioning. By 1941, the year the synagogue was founded, more than a million Jews had already been murdered by the Nazis. The machinery of extermination was accelerating while much of Europe collaborated or looked away. The lesson many Jews drew from those years – that without sovereignty in their ancestral homeland they would remain fatally vulnerable – underscores precisely why the Jewish state remains necessary, not why its existence or policies might somehow “explain” attacks on synagogues.
This impulse to contextualise anti-Jewish violence does not arise in isolation. It is sustained by a broader climate in which Israel itself is routinely maligned as uniquely evil. The demonisation of Israel – hateful discrimination in its own right – is what fuels the current wave of murderous hostility towards Jews.
The Netherlands offers a telling example. After the synagogue attacks in the Netherlands, the prime minister proclaimed: “In the Netherlands there must be no place for antisemitism.” The sentiment would carry more weight, though, had the same government not, just days earlier, backed South Africa’s frivolous genocide case against Israel.
The consequences of this demonisation are visible across Western societies, not least here in Britain. Just months after the Heaton Park synagogue terror attack that left two people dead, the social climate facing Jews remains deeply troubling. On university campuses in particular, the pattern is unmistakable. A survey published on Monday by the Union of Jewish Students found that one in five students would be reluctant or unwilling to share accommodation with a Jewish housemate.
Such attitudes do not emerge in a vacuum. They grow in a culture that increasingly treats hostility towards Jews as understandable once it is framed through the prism of Israel.
A society that begins to explain attacks on Jewish children has already taken several dangerous steps down the wrong path. The task now is not to contextualise such violence, but to confront – clearly and unflinchingly – the ideological climate helping to produce it.
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