One of the most striking moments of Sweden’s election campaign came during a recent televised party leaders’ debate. Simona Mohamsson, leader of the Liberal Party and Sweden’s Minister for Education and Integration, appeared wearing a Star of David.
The symbolism was difficult to miss. Mohamsson was born Simona Mohammed. Her father is Palestinian and her mother Lebanese, from a Shia Muslim background. “I wear the Star of David for the children who do not dare to in today’s Sweden,” Mohamsson explained.
She then turned on the Left Party – formerly Sweden’s Communist Party – over revelations that its MPs had sent letters of support to Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist attacks in which Israelis were killed. “I think the Left Party needs to be held accountable for sending love letters to Hamas and spreading fear on our streets,” she said.
The reaction proved her point. Mohamsson was subjected to a torrent of abuse in pro-Palestinian circles on social media, including death threats and attacks from prominent activists and commentators associated with the movement. Yet she has refused to back down. Nor is she alone. Gulan Avci, a former Liberal MP, has also begun wearing a Star of David in solidarity with Swedish Jews, as has Anna Tenje, Sweden’s Minister for Older People and Social Security.
For British readers, there is something depressingly familiar about the controversy. The UK has already experienced a prolonged national argument over antisemitism on the political left during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. The lesson from that period should have been obvious: when repeated cases of antisemitic rhetoric, conspiracy theories and indulgence of extremists emerge within a political movement, they cannot simply be dismissed as isolated incidents or criticism of Israel.
Sweden has yet to have a comparable reckoning. The controversies surrounding the Left Party have accumulated steadily since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. On the very day Hamas terrorists were murdering civilians in Israel, Anfal Mahdi, then a senior Left Party politician in Malmö and a member of the party’s national executive, declared that “Gaza has just broken out of prison”. Against the background of what was unfolding in southern Israel, the statement was widely understood – at the very last – as a grotesque response to the massacre.
Then came Orwa Kadoura, deputy chairman of the Left Party in Malmö, who was filmed clapping and raising his arms while demonstrators chanted slogans in support of Hamas and Hezbollah. He had also shared social-media posts expressing support for Hamas’s October 7 attack, as well as an image of Benjamin Netanyahu with a devil’s tail drinking the blood of Gazans – imagery condemned by the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism as invoking classic antisemitic blood-libel themes.
Yet the party initially allowed Kadoura to remain. Only after almost two months of controversy and discussions with the national leadership did he resign from his positions and leave the party in September 2024. And even then, the Malmö branch did not repudiate him. It publicly lamented his departure, praised him as an important activist and said it hoped he would soon return.
Another controversy followed when then-MP Lorena Delgado Varas shared an image claiming that Zionist Jews control the world through banks, media and political influence. The party called the post unacceptable. But again, condemnation came more quickly than consequences. Months passed before the party finally removed Delgado Varas from its parliamentary group and demanded that she relinquish her political positions. She refused to surrender her parliamentary seat, prompting the party to begin proceedings to expel her. Before that process was completed, however, Delgado Varas left the Left Party herself and remained in parliament as an independent.
Then there was Kristofer Lundberg, former chair of the Left Party’s local branch in Angered. He called for the PFLP and DFLP to be removed from terrorist listings and told a demonstration that “the Palestinian resistance movement needs weapons” against what he called “the Zionists.” This was not some obscure organisation being discussed at an academic seminar: the PFLP is designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.
In June, the Swedish newspaper Expressen published an investigation identifying 25 additional Left Party politicians and election candidates accused of promoting antisemitism, glorifying terrorist organisations, praising dictatorships or questioning the Holocaust. A significant number subsequently withdrew or were removed.
The broader atmosphere in Sweden makes this more serious still. Since October 7, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have repeatedly featured antisemitic rhetoric alongside expressions of support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the PFLP. Sweden’s small Jewish community, numbering around 20,000, has increasingly been confronted with the poisonous notion that Jews should be held collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government simply because they are Jewish.
In the months following October 7, Sweden recorded almost five times as many antisemitic hate crimes as during the corresponding period a year earlier. Surveys of Swedish Jews have painted an equally disturbing picture: more than four in five have said they feel unsafe displaying Jewish symbols, while nearly half have discussed leaving the country because of antisemitism. These are extraordinary figures for a country that prides itself on tolerance.
Britain’s experience should serve as a warning. Labour’s antisemitism crisis became so corrosive precisely because the problem was for too long treated as a succession of controversies rather than as something requiring a fundamental political and moral response.
Sweden now faces its own test. That is why Mohamsson’s Star of David mattered. And the wave of hatred directed against her for wearing it only made the message more powerful. In Sweden today, simply wearing a Star of David has become an act of political courage.
Perhaps there is a broader message here: the answer to antisemitism is not to hide Jewish symbols or conceal support for Israel, but to wear them openly and express that support publicly.
Daniel Schatz is a political scientist, author and writer on international affairs. He has served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Georgetown University
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