{"id":65552,"date":"2021-06-23T17:05:12","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T15:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=65552"},"modified":"2021-06-23T06:51:16","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T04:51:16","slug":"29-05-36","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=65552","title":{"rendered":"Jews Feel Safer in Europe\u2019s Conservative East Than Its Liberal West"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Commentary\"<\/a>Jews Feel Safer in Europe\u2019s Conservative East Than
\nIts Liberal West A pervasive false impression.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Evelyn Gordon<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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This might be a contributing factor to the higher antisemitism in the West.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Joint Distribution Committee\u2019s International Center for Community Development surveyed 893 Jewish leaders and professionals from throughout Europe and found that in general, Jews felt safe everywhere. Nevertheless, there was a stark difference between Eastern and Western Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the east, a whopping 96 percent of respondents felt safe, while only four percent felt unsafe. In the West, 76 percent felt safe, and 24 percent felt unsafe. Respondents from places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania\u2014countries routinely accused of having anti-Semitic, borderline fascist governments\u2014felt safer than Jews in liberal countries like France and Germany by a 20-point margin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, \u201cWestern European respondents were more likely to consider antisemitism as a threat than were Eastern Europeans, and to report deterioration in the situation from earlier surveys,\u201d the JDC\u2019s report said. Nor is this mere subjective perception: Other studies have found that Jews are much more likely to experience physical violence in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe. In 2017, for instance, Hungary\u2019s 100,000 Jews didn\u2019t report a single physical attack<\/strong><\/span><\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> while Britain\u2019s 250,000 Jews reported 145.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jews in both regions expected anti-Semitism to worsen over the next five to 10 years, with the result that combatting anti-Semitism \u201cranked among the top three communal priorities\u201d for the first time since the survey began in 2008. Nevertheless, the East fared better than the West on this score, too. \u201cA significant regional difference emerged on expectations of increasing antisemitism with those in Western Europe considerably more pessimistic (75 percent) than those in the East (56 percent),\u201d the report read.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are two reasons for all these seemingly counterintuitive results, which, as the report noted, are a \u201creversal of the situation \u2026 over the past two centuries.\u201d The first is the politically incorrect fact that violence against Jews in Europe comes mainly from Muslim anti-Semites rather than either the right-wing or the left-wing variety (see, for instance, the shootings at a Jewish museum in Brussels, a Jewish school in Toulouse, and a kosher supermarket in Paris). And in Western Europe, liberal governments spent decades implementing liberal immigration policies that have produced large Muslim populations. Eastern Europe has very few Muslims, initially because decades of Communist rule made these countries economically uninviting and more recently because rightist governments have imposed restrictive immigration policies.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second reason is more speculative since correlation doesn\u2019t necessarily mean causality. Nevertheless, as the report noted, the findings are suggestive: \u201cHostility towards Israel in the general society is perceived to be fiercer in Western Europe; 88 percent of leaders from Western Europe considered that the media in my country regularly portrays Israel in a bad light<\/em>, as opposed to only 36 percent from Eastern Europe [italics in original]. This might be a contributing factor to the higher anti-Semitism in the West.\u201d Here, too, objective data seems to support this hypothesis: Whenever Israel launches a major counterterrorism operation, anti-Israel sentiment spikes along with anti-Semitic attacks<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Everyone except anti-Semites understands that Israeli actions don\u2019t justify attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but rampant anti-Israel sentiment often makes anti-Semites believe that society will tolerate such attacks as long as they can be portrayed as \u201canti-Israel.\u201d And this belief is hardly unfounded. To take just one example, consider the notorious case of a German synagogue firebombed in 2014. Both the trial court and the appeals court ruled<\/strong><\/span><\/a> that this wasn\u2019t an anti-Semitic crime, but merely an overly zealous form of political opposition to Israel\u2019s war against Hamas in Gaza. Consequently, the perpetrators received mere suspended sentences.<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, hostility toward Israel in the surrounding society encourages anti-Semitic acts among people who already hold anti-Semitic beliefs. And since hostility toward Israel emanates primarily from the left these days, it\u2019s no surprise that such hostility is higher in liberal Western Europe than conservative Eastern Europe. Thus, both of the main contributors to anti-Semitism in Europe today\u2014Islamic anti-Semitism and left-wing hostility toward Israel\u2014are more prevalent in the liberal West than in the allegedly \u201cfascist, anti-Semitic\u201d countries of Eastern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of the above implies that right-wing anti-Semitism isn\u2019t a real problem; it obviously is. Nor does it imply that Eastern Europe\u2019s right-wing governments have a clean bill of health on anti-Semitism; they have been responsible for some undeniably problematic acts and statements. It certainly doesn\u2019t guarantee that nationalist parties won\u2019t turn against the Jews tomorrow, as a prominent European rabbi warned<\/strong><\/span><\/a> last week. The British Labour Party\u2019s swift transformation into an anti-Semitic cesspool shows just how quickly Jew-friendly attitudes can disappear. And it doesn\u2019t mean America\u2019s situation is necessarily analogous; the U.S. is too different from Europe for easy parallels to be drawn.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet to pretend, as many American Jews do, that right-wing anti-Semitism is the only kind we need to worry about flies in the face of reality, at least as it has played out in Europe. The European reality similarly belies the claim that rightist governments are, by definition, bad for the Jews. And given that reality, Netanyahu\u2019s close relations with conservative European governments could actually help combat anti-Semitism in those countries by bolstering their positive attitudes toward Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

The world is a great deal more complex than the simple \u201cleft-wing good, right-wing bad\u201d equation so prevalent among American Jews today. And recognizing that complexity might help liberal Jews be more understanding of their conservative brethren, both at home and in Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Evelyn Gordon<\/strong>, –  who writes for Commentary\u2019s blog, is a journalist and commentator living in Israel.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Jews Feel Safer in Europe\u2019s Conservative East Than Its Liberal West A pervasive false impression. Evelyn Gordon This might be a contributing factor to the higher antisemitism in the West.\u201d The Joint Distribution Committee\u2019s International Center for Community Development surveyed 893 Jewish leaders and professionals from throughout Europe and found that in general, Jews felt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65552"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87136,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552\/revisions\/87136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}