What starts online doesn’t stay there. The alarming rise in violent antisemitic attacks has profound consequences for the future of all civilized societies – and it’s not just a Jewish problem.
In the past few weeks, we have seen an alarming trend around the world of physical assaults against Israeli citizens and Jews, as well as incidents of discrimination, threats and harassment targeting Jews and Israelis on the basis of their national origin. This is a direct byproduct of Islamization and demonization of the Jewish people. When random individuals feel emboldened to engage in violence with complete strangers, especially those uninvolved with the conflict in the Middle East, there is a major problem.
Koh Samui, Thailand
Three Israeli tourists, friends on vacation, were sitting at a bar on the Thai island of Koh Samui when a group of French nationals of North African descent heard them speaking Hebrew. “You are Israelis,” they said, and it was not a question. The Israelis fled toward a back door, found it blocked, and locked themselves in a bathroom. Their attackers broke the door down anyway. Witnesses say the mob screamed “kill all the Jews” in Arabic while beating them and demanding they empty their pockets. One young man had his ribs, teeth, and vertebrae broken. Two were hospitalized. Weeks later, on the neighboring island of Koh Phangan, a 62 year old mother and her 23 year old daughter were assaulted so badly on a hike that both needed surgery. The man who attacked them started, as they always do now, by asking where they were from.
Belfast, Ireland
Yonatan Raveh and Nadav Abbas are journalists who were in Belfast filming a documentary for i24NEWS about rising antisemitism in Europe, doing nothing more provocative than interviewing people on the street. Meanwhile, a local man realized who they were and that they were from an Israeli network. His response? He tried to rip the camera out of their hands. When that failed, he hurled a glass beer mug at Abbas’s head, opening a wound that sent him to the hospital. A crew documenting the growth of Jew hatred in Europe became a case study in real time.
Las Vegas, USA
My partner, Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Israeli and a veteran of the IDF’s Golani Brigade, sat down to debate ten anti Israel activists on a podcast in Las Vegas. One of them, a failed congressional candidate named Dennis Feitosa, spent the taping calling him a “genocidal freak” and a “baby killer” for the crime of having served his country. Words are words. But Feitosa also threatened him with violence repeatedly and assaulted him twice, during the debate. He then waited in the parking lot afterward and came up behind Yoseph, trying to choke him. This was not rhetoric anymore. Ironically, it was almost exactly twenty years to the day since he was hit by a Hezbollah missile in Lebanon as a soldier. Two decades apart, and the lesson is the same: those who cannot beat him with facts will try to beat him with fists.
Virginia, USA
An Israeli-American woman walked into a brow salon in Old Town Alexandria for a routine appointment. She and her esthetician were having a warm conversation about a novel the client had written, one that happened to touch on Jewish and Muslim characters finding friendship. But once the salon owner learned the client was Israeli American, the warmth vanished. She ordered the woman out, informed her that serving an Israeli violated her politics, and declared, on camera, that Israel does not exist. The most obscene part, she refused to give the woman back her deposit and then filmed her without her consent…uploading to her own social media to attack the woman. Not only did the business owner commit a crime, discriminating against someone on the basis of their ethnicity, but she filmed herself doing it and uploaded it to social media, all while claiming that she “doesn’t want to talk about politics.” This happened in Virginia, in the United States of America. That is how normalized this has become.
Manhattan, USA
As always it doesn’t stop with Israelis. On Friday night, while Central Synagogue in Manhattan was mid Shabbat service, a 46 year old man named Larry Montes forced his way in. As security walked him out, he struck a 63 year old congregant in the face, cutting her lip and bruising her arm. Then he turned on the security guard and spat in his face and headbutted him. Congregants heard a loud pop and thought it was a gun. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch called it a hate crime, and Montes now faces charges for it. Nobody in that sanctuary was Israeli. Nobody was debating the IDF or waving a flag or speaking Hebrew in a bar. They were doing nothing more than what Jews have done every Friday night for thousands of years, welcoming in Shabbat.
This is what every reader, Jewish or not, should comprehend. It never stays confined to Israelis. It was never going to. The pattern is as old as the hatred itself. First it is the state of Israel that is illegitimate. Then it is Israelis who deserve what they get. Then it is anyone who speaks Hebrew, anyone who looks the part, anyone with a Jewish sounding name booking an eyebrow appointment. And then, inevitably, it walks into a sanctuary on a Friday night and hits a grandmother in the face, because by then the target was never really Israel. It was us. It was always going to end here, and it did, in Manhattan, in a synagogue, during prayer.
The Common Thread
None of these people were soldiers on a battlefield. They were tourists at a bar, journalists on a sidewalk, a debate guest in a parking lot, a client in a salon chair, a grandmother at Shabbat services. What connects Koh Samui to Belfast to Las Vegas to Alexandria to Manhattan is not politics. It is permission. Somewhere online, someone decided that Israelis, and now Jews more broadly, forfeit their right to safety the moment they are identified, and millions of people absorbed that idea.
There is no argument, however righteous you believe it to be, that entitles you to put your hands on another human being. Even if you believe someone is a war criminal, you do not get to become judge, jury, and fist. The moment we accept violence against a person because of who they are rather than what they have done, we have already abandoned the social contract that lets free societies function at all. It starts with the group everyone feels safest hating out loud, and it spreads from there, eating through free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to simply exist in public, until the values that built the free world are gone.
Whether you love Israel or despise it does not matter here. What matters is whether a mother and daughter can hike to a waterfall, whether a journalist can ask a stranger a question, whether a man can debate his critics and walk to his car afterward, whether a woman can get her eyebrows done, without being hunted for it. Right now, in bars and salons and parking lots and quiet streets from Thailand to Virginia, the answer is increasingly no. That is not a Jewish problem. That is everyone’s emergency, and the clock is already running.
Thank you Emily.
My synagogue has the armed guard stand outside the at Synagogue with the doors locked. You get vetted and then the guard can let you in.
Horrible that we have to do this.
I met you a few years when Josef spoke at the JCC on the Palisades in New Jersey. I am thrilled that you are on Substack and doing great work.
Israelis doing similar in Iceland. Hunting Palestinians.