No holiday from antisemitism

The antisemitism that has engulfed the world has become entrenched. Since October 2023, it has aimed concretely at the disappearance of Israel and the erasure of the Jews, first and foremost through their social and cultural exclusion.

We have seen Jews excluded from festivals, universities, cinema and publishing. Now, during the summer vacation season, we are seeing another face of this erasure.

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The globe is a crowded web of routes for encounters, visits and connections, coming especially alive during the season when, freed from work, people travel, look around, discover and appreciate.

But if you are Jewish, you can no longer look forward to a vacation with that same sense of freedom. If you happen to be a Jew wearing a kippah, you are advised to put it in your pocket. A woman must hide the Star of David she wears around her neck because a growing number of tourist destinations have become dangerous.

There are now guides ranking destinations according to greater or lesser levels of danger. The antisemitic pro-Palestinian movement prepares for your arrival precisely in order to target you.

The list of recent incidents is painful, varied and laden with significance—material for scholars.

In Rome, a young Frenchman was targeted in a series of attacks over two days in the heart of the city, with pepper spray sprayed into his eyes and beatings accompanied by cries of “Free Palestine.”

It recalls the assault on young Roman Jews in Bulgaria: local antisemites, imported Islamists and, here in Rome, also an Algerian man with a criminal record.

In the Italian capital—the scene in 1943 of the deportation to Auschwitz of 689 women, 363 men and 207 children—I have heard of no reaction from passersby to the attack in Piazza Cairoli and Largo di Torre Argentina, at the edge of the neighborhood from which the deportations took place.

It does not take Sherlock Holmes to identify the milieu from which this comes. It is the familiar picture of the red-green alliance: The relentless criminalization of Israel feeds antisemitic hatred, and its popularity becomes fertilizer for its further spread among the public, through the media and in politics in the pursuit of consensus.

The expulsion of Israeli tourists from a Naples pizzeria becomes part of the local behavior of the dregs of society—and those dregs represent votes.

Islamist hatred of Jews, very similar to its hatred of Christians, has spread through immigration and woke theories until it has captured the international stage. Mamdani is its foremost example. At a lower level, it operates everywhere, feeding on theories born in the communist camp immediately after World War II.

In other words, the anti-colonialist and Third World struggle, presented as the supreme moral undertaking, is deployed against Israel by falsifying history and deceiving public opinion, portraying Israel as a colonialist and racist state—the exact opposite of what it is.

But Hitler, too, imagined—with enormous success—that the Jews sought to dominate and take possession of Germany and the Western world, that they were hateful and aggressive parasites.

Five days ago, Israel’s Foreign Ministry advised Israeli tourists to stay far away from no fewer than 110 anti-Israel demonstrations planned across Greece—and Greece is the most popular destination for Israelis, sometimes served by 50 flights a day.

In the Netherlands, at an Amsterdam supermarket, a young man wearing a red shirt emblazoned proudly with the words “October 7” flaunted his joy over the massacre.

In Vienna, a 50-year-old Israeli mother and her 20-year-old daughter, who were there on vacation, have been missing since Friday; there are fears that they were abducted by terrorists.

At Cagliari airport in Italy, pro-Palestinian activists have repeatedly targeted tourists arriving on flights from Tel Aviv.

The list is endless. It stretches to cities across the United States and Latin America, Canada and the Far East.

Violence becomes another element in this story; death waits around the corner, because antisemitism that seeks to destroy the Jews demands gratification, victories and signs of expansion—in universities, schools and political parties.

It also demands signs of ideological expansion, and the American message of Islamist victory is being heard loud and clear. When Giuseppe Conte announces that his first act upon coming to power will be to recognize a Palestinian state; when the Catholic daily Avvenire announces that it wants the Nobel Prize awarded to Palestinian children, followed by Elly Shlaim, these are invitations to step forward and take sides.

Antisemitism spreads like an oil slick with this echo.

Unconscious noises? Not in the slightest.

They reverberate on the left, in jihadist movements and in neo-Nazi and neo-fascist movements. And they win support for an emboldened and self-satisfied antisemitism that, since Oct. 7, has been drawing up new plans and forging new alliances to erase the Jews.

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