Deep stain that is spreading
OF THE 15 million Jews in the world in 2018, the majority make a conscious decision to live outside of Israel. They do so in a world marked by a steep rise in hatred: antisemitism soared and antisemites were more confident in expressing themselves. Nowhere was this trend clearer than in the United States, home to the vast majority of non-Israeli Jews.
And 2018 was the year after Charlottesville, the notorious rally in which Donald Trump refused to dissociate himself from the marching neo-Nazis.
And we have seen the consequences of that presidential decision: the Anti-Defamation League reported the highest number of antisemitic incidents on record, from swastikas on synagogues to verbal and physical abuse on the streets.
Far too often the consequences were fatal. At the turn of the year, the body of Blaze Bernstein, 19, was found in a California woodland. His alleged murderer — a member of the neo-Nazi “Atomwaffen Division” — killed him because he was “Jewish and gay”, prosecutors said.
In February, four Jewish students and a teacher were among the 17 victims of a school shooting committed in Florida by a man, again, with links to the far right.
Then, in October, the worst antisemitic attack in US history: 11 members of a Pittsburgh synagogue perished in a 79-minute rampage on Shabbat morning. The alleged gunman convinced himself that “all these Jews need to die”. Trump’s leadership is “giving licence” to such attacks, former vice-president Joe Biden said.
The year has witnessed similar trends in Europe, where extremist parties made strong electoral gains in Germany, Hungary, Italy and Sweden.
In Austria, where the far-right Freedom Party joined the coalition in December 2017, the government endures, despite a boycott of its ministers by Israel and a report revealing 38 incidents of “extremeright activity” among party members, who flirt with neo-Nazism and incitement against minorities.
France was rocked by the tenth antisemitic killing in the country since 2006 when Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, 85, was stabbed in her Paris apartment. Amid reports of more assaults on the streets and swastikas daubed on cemeteries, President Emmanuel Macron provoked fury when he announced Marshal Pétain, the wartime leader of Vichy France, would be honoured in November’s Armistice Day commemorations. The plans were swiftly dropped.
The billionaire financier George Soros served as a political punchbag for leaders across the Continent, many barely concealing references to his Jewish heritage.
There is a growing fear that, as the Holocaust fades from living memory, more nations will seek to revise history in a manner kinder to them. That was certainly the reason for so much anger in 2018 over Poland’s Holocaust law, which criminalised the term “Polish death camps” and introduced harsh penalties for suggesting Poles were acting under anything other than the duress of their German occupiers. An international outcry helped force the Polish government into a partial U-turn: it is now a civil offence, not a criminal one, but an offence nonetheless.
But there were positive developments, too: new Holocaust museums and exhibitions were announced across Europe, from Lithuania and the Netherlands to Italy and Macedonia, while Spain extended its deadline for citizenship applications from the descendants of Sephardim who fled the Inquisition.
In Germany itself, trials continued against former concentration camp guards, all of them nonagenarians. They included 95-year-old Jakiw Palij, who was born in a prewar Polish town that is in Ukraine today. He was deported from the US but no country wanted him until German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said it was his country’s “moral obligation” to put him on trial.