In contrast to Christianity, where the distinction between the authority of God and that of Caesar was laid down by Jesus himself, for Muslims and for Jews before the dispersion, the religious community and the polity were one and the same. Polls show that Arabs often place their identity as Muslims ahead of any national identity. By the same token, in the Arab world, the distinction between Israel and Jews is rarely recognized. Saudi Arabia, for example, once practiced a policy of barring all Jews from the country. (Visa applications there require specifying one’s religion.)
Similarly, the Charter of the Palestinian movement, Hamas, says: “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people,” adding a purported quote from Prophet Mohammed: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, [and] the stones and trees will say O Moslems, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”6 The other main Palestinian organization, the Palestinian Authority dominated by Fatah, is not so sanguinary but often also conflates Jews and Israel, such as when a PA ambassador told an international conference in 2015 that the “Elders of Zion” have a master plan for “dominating life in the entire planet.”7 As these examples suggest, antipathy to Israel melds readily with traditional religious prejudices.
Jews bulk large in the Scripture of Islam, and figured prominently in the life of its prophet as adversaries. Against this background, the success of Israel in its struggle with the Arabs is especially infuriating and has imbued Jews in the popular imagination with something like demonic powers.
A hilarious account of this mystique in Egyptian politics was given by the brilliant young Egyptian intellectual, Samuel Tadros. After the ouster in 2013 of the Muslim Brotherhood–led government of Mohamed Morsi and the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Brotherhood-sponsored news outlets put out the story that al-Sisi was in fact a Jew, alleging that his mother was a Moroccan Jew. Although meaningful evidence of this does not exist, the story has been repeated so frequently that Tadros reported that “if you Google Sisi’s name in Arabic, the first search option comes up as ‘Sisi Jewish.’”8 Sisi’s supporters struck back in kind, producing revelations that it is not Sisi but the Muslim Brotherhood itself that is a stalking horse for the Jews. Tadros paraphrases mirthfully:
The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna, is a Jew. Both his parents are Moroccan Jews, and he was implanted by Zionists in Egypt in order to form the Muslim Brotherhood, as another government newspaper claims. . . . Nine months earlier, a former military general explained to Al Ahram that Banna is indeed Jewish and that establishing the Brotherhood was part of a Jewish conspiracy to create disorder among Muslims and divide Egypt so that Jews can occupy it.
For the most part, however, the demonization of Jews is far from a laughing matter; indeed it has often been deadly. Just to take incidents purportedly related to the existence of Israel but aimed at non-Israeli Jews: in 1980, a synagogue bombing in Paris killed four and injured forty; in 1981, terrorists attacked a worship service in Vienna, killing two; in 1982, a two-year-old was killed and dozens wounded in another such attack in Rome. In 1986, gunmen attacked a synagogue in Istanbul, massacring twenty-two worshippers and wounding others. Most of these attacks were perpetrated by Palestinians. After the rise of the Khomeini regime, Iran became active in targeting Jews. Soon after it midwifed the birth of Hizbullah in the mid-1980s, that group carried out a wave of murders of Lebanon’s few remaining Jews. Then, in 1994, Iran masterminded the bombing of the Jewish community center of Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five and wounding hundreds.
In more recent years, Sunni jihadists have emerged as leading Jew killers. In 2003, truck bombs were driven into two Istanbul synagogues, killing more than twenty and injuring some three hundred more. In 2008, a team of Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai, slaying hundreds and making a special point of including among their targets the small Jewish community center where they murdered the rabbi, his wife who was in an advanced state of pregnancy, and four other Jewish hostages. According to Indian police, the attackers had been told that “the lives of Jews were worth fifty times more than the lives of non-Jews.”9 In 2012, a French-born jihadist of Algerian parents attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse, murdering the rabbi and three young children. In May 2014, another jihadist of French Algerian background shot dead two men and two women at the Belgian Jewish Museum in Brussels. Then, in January 2015, the jihadist attacks in Paris included the special targeting of Jews. The target of the second attack linked to the more sensational one on the magazine Charlie Hebdo was a kosher supermarket, where the terrorist singled out four Jews to murder in cold blood. Less noticed was the fact that in the initial attack, at the magazine offices, the women present were spared except for one whom the killers apparently knew to be a Jew.
In a 2014 global survey, the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa hold anti-Semitic views, while in Western Europe 29 percent do.10 The latter, far smaller, number is reassuring about the power of the surrounding culture to transform received attitudes. Nonetheless, 29 percent amounts to a proportion hostile to Jews that is higher than among non-Muslim Europeans, constituting a pool of animosity that in some of its depths is highly toxic.
More than one of the continent’s political leaders has warned against the importation of the Middle East conflict to Europe. This formulation, however, is facile. In the Middle East, the “conflict” exists because the Jews of Israel are able to fight back. In Europe, Jews are assaulted by Arabs but virtually never the reverse. Yes, self-defense organizations have been formed to try to provide some security at synagogues and the like. But the ability of Jews to live in safety in that part of the world depends on the willingness of governments to take measures sufficiently energetic to protect them.
The flight from assault has been a perpetual part of Jewish history and was a major factor in the creation of Israel, which has indeed provided a shelter to Jews from many corners. At the same time, the birth of the Jewish state also opened a new chapter in persecutions in the diaspora.
Jews were driven from the Arab countries. Ancient communities, descendants of those who fled the Romans two thousand years ago and of those who were expelled from Spain in 1492, together numbering nearly a million individuals, were reduced by 99 percent. Remaining Jewish pockets in other Muslim countries have largely collapsed since then. After the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini is reported to have told Jewish leaders there: “We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless, bloodsucking Zionists.” If these words were intended to reassure despite intensifying persecutions, they seem not to have done the trick, for that community has since shrunk from around 100,000 to at most one-quarter, and by some counts less than one-tenth, that number. The rise of Turkey’s Islamist movement over the past decade, on top of mass murders at synagogues in 1986 and 2003, have prompted a flight of Jews from that country, accelerating the last few years in the face of open Jew baiting in the media and boycotts of Jewish businesses.
Non-Muslim countries whose governments are allied with anti-Israel forces—for example, Venezuela, whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, embraced Iran, or South Africa, where the dominant African National Congress has long maintained close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization—have also witnessed waves of abusive words and violent deeds aimed at indigenous Jews and thus a radical reduction of their Jewish populations. In short, the number of places on Earth where Jews can reside in peace and security has been shrinking, and the question of the day is whether the countries of Europe will continue to be among them.
The events of the summer of 2014 convinced some serious observers that the answer is no. “We are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe,” said Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency. In his widely noted article in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reviewed these Gaza War–related events as well as murderous attacks on Jews in Toulouse in 2012, in Belgium in May 2014, and in Paris in January 2015 and posed the question: Is it time for the Jews of Europe to leave? Goldberg’s own answer was saved for the final sentence, after noting that his forebears had once lived in Romania