President Donald Trump is working to secure the release of 48 Israeli hostages, including the return of the dead and the barely living. We pray during this season of Jewish High Holy Days and the festival of Sukkot that his efforts will soon succeed.
The US president has backing for a 21-point plan to address the “day after” in Gaza and across the region, with key Arab and Muslim leaders supporting a framework that seeks to reconstitute Gaza without Hamas terrorists.
While we welcome any plan that prioritizes reconstruction over war, it is brutally clear that the war against the Jews will not end soon.
Demonization of Israel, Jews, and core Jewish values—including Zionism—continues to spread across nations, international justice venues, university campuses, airports and ports, cultural institutions, and sports arenas. Every insult, every call for a boycott, and every violent act against Jews at prayer is legitimized and amplified across social media.
How bad could it get? Just days before the murderous Yom Kippur attack on a Manchester synagogue, CRIF—the official body of French Jewry—released a poll whose ominous findings reveal a growing black hole of Jew-hatred. Nearly one in three young French citizens (18–24) considers it legitimate to target Jews because of Gaza. Almost one in five French people overall share this view.
In apparent anticipation of charges of antisemitism, 68% of respondents recognized that antisemitism is a threat to society as a whole. Words condemning antisemitism in theory do nothing to protect Jews in practice. Jews across the UK and around the world were angered by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s hollow condemnation of the Yom Kippur attack, even as he and the mayors of London and Manchester did nothing to block pro-Hamas demonstrations held less than two hours after the synagogue attack. Taking their cues from political leaders, police in many European capitals stand idly by as genocidal chants echo on their streets.
Nor is it lost on Jewish residents of Amsterdam—still reeling from the violent, coordinated attack against Israeli sports fans who traveled to the city where Anne Frank hid to enjoy a “friendly” football match—that the mayor was a no-show at an event marking two years since Israeli hostages were beaten and dragged into underground Gaza dungeons.
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Even as Hamas is defeated militarily, other fronts it launched continue the assault against the lone Jewish state and the Jewish people across Western Europe, North America, and Australia.
The goal of these well-funded, organized campaigns? To delegitimize, demoralize, demonize, and ultimately ghettoize.
Here are a few examples of attacks against the Jewish nation in the cultural arena:
- Within the Union of European Football Associations, activists have demanded that Israel be banned from European competitions.
- At the Eurovision Song Contest, countries have threatened to withdraw unless Israel is booted out.
- A respected composer leading an orchestra in Munich, Germany, was recently disinvited from the festival in Ghent, Belgium, not because of his artistic abilities, but solely because he was an Israeli.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the result of the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) antisemitic campaign against Israel, which seeks to push the Jewish state and its institutions out of international spaces in culture, sports, academia, and commerce.
This is not protest. It is persecution masquerading as principle. It is the ghetto reborn—not with barbed wire, but with hashtags, petitions, and selective moral outrage. This campaign is not spontaneous; it is financed and amplified by powerful actors like Qatar, whose vast resources are deployed against Israel.
No other nation at war for its survival is treated this way. Iran can hang women in public for showing their hair and still send filmmakers to Cannes. China can imprison over a million Muslims and still host the Olympics. Russia can invade Ukraine and retain its cultural footprint in Europe. Yet Israel—the one democracy in the Middle East, home to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike—is uniquely quarantined from global cultural life.
This campaign of exclusion does not advance peace. It is moral theater.
One does not have to look far back to recognize the historical parallel: In the 1930s, Jews in Germany were gradually stripped of access to culture, sports, and public life. Then as now, this exclusion was justified under the pretense of “moral purity,” the claim that the Jew was “dirty” and “disgusting.” Today, this smear targets not only individual Jews but the Zionist entity that stands charged and found guilty in the court of public opinion, at the United Nations, in legacy media, and by social-media “influencers” who accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid, and “weaponizing starvation.” In short, facts be damned—using Hamas’ talking points—Israel and the Jewish people are condemned as vile latter-day Nazi criminals.
The Jewish people remember what much of Europe has chosen to forget: the road to Auschwitz began with Jews being denied the stage, the playing field, the university, and the cultural forum.
Today we are witnessing Israel being driven out of these very spaces. Anyone who thinks this concerns “only” a state in the Middle East is gravely mistaken. The message to Jewish communities worldwide is unmistakable: You do not belong.
What makes this moment so dangerous is not just the hypocrisy, but the normalization. International leaders, cultural elites, and media outlets increasingly treat anti-Israel bigotry as a form of moral courage. Every boycott, every disinvitation, every “refusal to platform” reinforces the idea that Israelis are second-class participants in the world community, a people whose belonging is conditional.
This trend mirrors the digital hatred we at the Simon Wiesenthal Center documented in our Digital Terror and Hate Report Card [3], where antisemitic conspiracies and anti-Israel lies flourish unchecked on social platforms, radicalizing millions. Today’s cultural boycotts are the offline manifestation of that same disease. What begins as rhetoric soon metastasizes into violence.
The CRIF survey shows where this logic leads: young people increasingly consider violence against Jews anywhere to be legitimate. Europe stands at a crossroads. Antisemitism revealed in surveys—and expressed through growing cultural exclusion and the tacit acceptance of Jew-hatred—is not “just” a Jewish problem. It is a test for democracy itself.
Europe failed to protect its Jews and democratic principles in the 1930s; the results were catastrophic. In 2025, unbridled hate against the Jewish state—and the failure of the political elite to act to protect their Jewish citizens—could see historic Jewish communities wither, and mob rule increasingly debase the foundations of Western democracies. When Israel and Jews are banned from the stage, Europe loses more than a performance. It loses its moral compass.