Even peace will not cure European antisemitism
Even if Hamas and Israel reach an agreement, even if all the hostages are released and the Israeli army withdraws from Gaza, I would remain convinced that antisemitism will continue to plague Europe. This feeling is not a pessimistic intuition: it is a realistic one of a long history, a deep culture, and an ideological mutation that goes beyond the simple framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
An old European evil
European antisemitism was not born in Gaza but at the very heart of the continent’s history. He was first religious, fed by centuries of theology, and then became economic and social, and then became racial and political, culminating in the systematic extermination of human beings during the Second World War.
This impulse was at one point restrained after 1945 by regret, guilt, and the remembrance of the Shoah. However, the moral superego of Europe vanishes along with the memories and witnesses.
The contemporary mutation: from religious to political.
The Jew of yesterday becomes today ‘the Zionist’, enemy of justice and oppressed peoples. This shift in vocabulary changed nothing in the mechanics of hatred. On the contrary: it made it socially acceptable. By affirming that one is only aiming at a state, and not a people, many think they are “morally exonerated.” But in reality, the border is BLURRED: the Jews of Europe are often taken to task for Israel’s actions. Synagogues are attacked when the IDF bombards Gaza; Jewish children are insulted at school in the name of the Palestinian cause. Thus, even if tomorrow Israel and Hamas signed peace, and the Gaza Strip became a pacified entity, hatred would not evaporate. Because it is not only political: it is identitarian, cultural and instrumentalized.
Social networks have turned each clash into a global battle of narratives. Israel is often described as a colonial power, even ‘white,’ and Hamas, though Islamist and authoritarian, as a liberation movement. This reversal of reality is part of a global system of thought known as victimhood morality, in which the designated oppressor embodies all the world’s faults.
The internal fractures in Europe.
-The extreme right resuscitates the ancient myths of the globalist plot or the “great cultural replacement” in which the Jew is by turns cosmopolitan, financial, or a corruptor of values. -Radical Islamism, present in certain European suburbs, reactivates a religious and militant antisemitism, legitimized by the jihadist interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The extreme left, for its part, sometimes transforms the Palestinian cause into an almost theological fight against the “colonial state,” at the risk of espousing rhetoric directly derived from antisemitic hatred. And in the middle, European moral relativism, quick to put everything on the same level, tolerates hatred under the guise of freedom of expression. This triple front—right-wing identity, radical left, and political Islamism—today forms an objective alliance of detestation. That is why an agreement between Israel and Hamas—even historic, even supported by Washington—would not be enough to disarm antisemitic reflexes.
The European paradox
It is striking to note that contemporary Europe, although saturated with memory, tolerates once again slogans, caricatures, and violence that were thought impossible. The same societies that claim to be post-national, tolerant, and pacifist reproduce age-old reflexes: to seek in the “other Jew” the cause of their divisions. With every crisis—whether it be economic, migratory, or identity-related—antisemitism rises like an underground tide. It is a symptom of collective anxiety more than an opinion. It reveals a moral flaw: the inability of Europe to take responsibility for its history without projecting it onto others.
The responsibility of the European elites .
The silence or caution of the leaders does not help. Many, for fear of appearing partisan, send back-to-back victims and executioners. Others take refuge in diplomatic neutrality, as if denouncing anti-Jewish hatred was tantamount to ‘taking sides.’ But neutrality in the face of hatred is not a virtue: it is a moral weakness. On antisemitism, Europe lacks precisely this lucidity. She wants to believe that peace in the Middle East will be enough to save her from her demons. It’s a dangerous illusion.
Peace, if it comes, will obviously be a political and humanitarian victory. But it will not be the moral cure that many hope for. European antisemitism does not depend on the situation in Gaza but on how Europe thinks of itself: of its relationship to memory, to responsibility, and to truth. As long as Europe does not treat this internal pathology, it will remain prisoner of a paradox: defending human rights while tolerating the hatred of a people who were its first victim. Peace will not cure antisemitism. It will only reveal, once again, the depth of European evil: an ancient hatred, camouflaged under the new clothes of political morality.
