Defendants face prison and community service, while court acknowledges claim that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were involved in violence but condemns attacks on Israeli soccer fans.
An Amsterdam court on Tuesday sentenced five individuals for their involvement in an attack on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans last month, following the team's Europa League match against Ajax.The sentences ranged from community service to six months in prison, although the prosecution had sought much harsher penalties. For instance, a defendant who received a six-month sentence had initially faced a prosecution request for two years in prison.
The court acknowledged the claim that the Israeli fans were involved in violence and considered the context, but stated it "sees no justification for violence against Maccabi fans." Defense lawyers argued that the evidence used against the defendants was unlawfully obtained, claiming it involved privacy violations through phone hacking. However, the court rejected these arguments, as well as accusations that the events had been exploited for political gain by local politicians. Both sides have 14 days to appeal the sentences.
The defendents are:
Sefa Ö., 32, a Turkish barber, was filmed attacking Israeli fans in Amsterdam's Dam Square and was sentenced to six months in prison for assault.
Umutcan A., 24, a Turkish-born resident of The Hague, was filmed striking a fan and stealing his scarf. He was sentenced to one month in prison.
Rachid A., 26, from Utrecht, was convicted of sharing information and participating in the violence. He received a 10-week prison sentence.
Lucas D., 19, from outside Amsterdam, was accused of throwing stones at police and attempting to breach their defensive line. He was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.
Karavan S., 26, a night-shift hotel worker in Amsterdam, was found guilty of inciting violence and sharing the location of the fans. He was sentenced to one month in prison.
In November, Israeli fans were attacked by locals who waited for them as they returned from the stadium on the outskirts of Amsterdam.
Five fans required hospitalization. Dozens of suspects were arrested in the days following the attack, which was widely documented and triggered a diplomatic dispute.
The five defendants and two others are the only ones to have been charged so far.
Jewish communities worldwide are reeling from a year of hostility from neighbors. But probably nothing matches what the tiny community in Norway has endured.
OSLO – Yael Nilsen has lived in Norway for years, but a year ago, on October 7, she was glued to television broadcasts from her native Israel. So, it was only recently that she discovered how the events of that day were presented to viewers of Norwegian media.
That was when she came across a recording of the main evening news show of NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, from October 7. "I watched it," Nilsen relates. "The top headline [on the NRK website] that evening was: 'Strong reactions to Hamas' attacks on Israel; main goal is liberation of Palestinian prisoners, says Hamas spokesman.'" The Israelis who were abducted and killed by Palestinians were mentioned in passing, she notes.
That was the line followed by many of the country's media outlets, both public and commercial. A week after the massacres of Simhat Torah, the official representative of the Palestinian Authority in Oslo (who became an ambassador when Norway officially recognized a Palestinian state in May), said that she wasn't familiar with videos showing people being murdered in their homes. "That is Israeli propaganda, intended to get [the country] a free pass from the international community to attack as it wants," she told a Christian newspaper in an interview that then widely shared on social media.
The Norwegian government, for its part, saw to it that King Harald V, the country's official head of state, did not express condolences to Israel after October 7, because, according to the foreign ministry, it's a "political conflict." Contrary to the other countries of Europe, Norway does not categorize Hamas as a terrorist organization; many in the country view it as a legitimate political player. In an interview with TheMarker, Haaretz's business newspaper, Norway's foreign minister noted that his country maintains relations with both that group and Hezbollah.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations and rising anti-Israeli sentiment have been widespread during the past year worldwide. But in Norway things appear to have gone somewhat further. Hamas' narrative took hold in broad circles in the country, extending far beyond the radical left and pro-Palestinian activists. What sprang from an anti-Israeli point of departure quickly snowballed in a way that was out of proportion with what other Jewish communities in Europe experienced. Criticism of Israel swiftly took the form of hatred on the street and on social media, and was also directed at Jews in general. Members of the Jewish community say they feel this trend effectively enjoys an institutional tailwind.
Norway's Jews started to report instances of harassment and threats. Graffiti and artworks likening Israel to Nazi Germany cropped up in the public space across the country. A wall drawing in the city of Bergen depicted Anne Frank in a keffiyeh, and openly antisemitic messages soon followed: From the inscription "All Jews out' spray-painted on walls, to an ominous message (in English) in an Oslo Metro station – "Hitler started it. We finis[h]ed it" – accompanied by a swastika.
Graffiti depicting Anne Frank in a Keffiyeh, in Bergen. Töddel / JTA
Norway's tiny Jewish community is badly rattled by what it's experiencing as a lethal blow to its feelings of belonging and security. A visit to Oslo, and conversations with Jews living elsewhere in Norway as well, reveal that the tiny community, which numbers only 1,500, truly feels threatened. Some of those interviewed asked not to have their names published. "The community is isolated because the government is not looking after it and is not condemning the violence it's experiencing," a source who's involved in the Jewish community tells Haaretz, adding, "The government is effectively affirming the discourse of hatred."
The case of A., a Jewish Norwegian woman, illustrates how far things have gone. One of A.'s daughters lives in Israel and serves as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces. At the end of last year, someone found an online video of her daughter, in uniform and speaking Norwegian, and re-posted it on Instagram. Overnight, the life of both daughter and mother became hell.
"Immediately, all [our] social media accounts were flooded with messages, curses, hatred and threats," A. relates. "An influencer and model of Muslim origin posted the video and added the name of my workplace along with pictures of me and my daughter." The threats did not come solely from Palestinians. The account information associated with those who sent the messages, and the messages themselves, suggested that many were not of Muslim or Arab origin.
"Waiting for you to land in Norway, then I'll show you what I and my friends from Hamas will do to you," someone wrote. And there was also: "She's a dirty genocide supporter. I hope she sinks into the sand stained with the blood of Gaza and returns to Norway without arms or legs." As well as a third reading, "Zionist whore, I hope you get a bullet from Hamas."
There was even an initiative to have the authorities place her daughter on trial, like Europeans who fought for ISIS. Separate from that, the Norwegian branch of Save the Children issued a demand that every returning Norwegian who has been in wartime Gaza Strip be questioned by the authorities, in keeping with Norway's "international commitment to prevent genocide."
What did you do?
A.: "I went to the police. In the end, they decided it wasn't criminal and closed the case. I was given an emergency-call button for a certain period, and suggested that I move to different accommodations. To this day I live 'underground.' Still, now everyone knows where I work, and everyone knows my daughter is in the Israeli army. Besides, my daughter lost all her friends in Norway and can't come to visit for fear of her life. I am Norwegian, I love my country, but I am very disappointed. No one can protect me."
A tube station in Oslo
Did you encounter that attitude before October 7, or is it completely new?
"Even if it's worse now, it's not new. My children have had to account for everything Israel has done since they were in first grade." She adds that one of her children was forbidden by a teacher in her school to talk about a family vacation in Israel, so as to avoid "offending other children," and in other instances, teachers told her children that it's alright to be Jewish, but not to talk about Israel.
Others in the Jewish community put forward similar accounts. Rami, for example, has lived in Norway since 2007. Russian-born, he immigrated to Israel in the 1990s and then moved to Norway in the wake of his wife. The couple's daughter and two sons were born in Norway; the family lives not far from Oslo. "Until not long ago, we didn't hide the fact that we are Jews," he says, "but lately we feel the antisemitism, via our children."
The children don't speak Hebrew, he notes, and have never lived in Israel. Nevertheless, his 5-year-old daughter said that children from her kindergarten asked her why she was murdering Palestinian children. "My 13-year-old son is suffering even more," Rami adds. "Children say he's a Jew and harass him. Some of them called out 'Heil Hitler' at him."
A swastika replaces the Star of David on a corrupted Israeli flag flying in Oslo. Credit: Ronen Bahar
History plays an important role here. The Jews, who are today have the status of an official minority in Norway, began to arrive only in the mid-19th century. Until then, Jews were forbidden by law from stepping foot in the country. Immigration, mostly from Eastern Europe, led to the establishment of Jewish communities in Oslo and Trondheim. They suffered a great deal in World War II, when the country was ruled by the fascist Quisling regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. A third of Norway's 2,100 Jews were murdered. They included more than 500 members of the community who were seized by police officers, soldiers and Norwegian volunteers and expelled via ship, then transported by train to Auschwitz. Others perished in camps in Norway and Germany. The survivors were those who fled to Sweden and Britain.
One of the most painful aspects of the situation for the Jewish community is the feeling they have that even the persecution they endured eight decades ago is now being turned against them. Prof. Torkel Brekke, a historian from MF University of Theology, Religion and Society, in Oslo, recalls last year's memorial ceremony for Kristallnacht, held in the capital.
"Norway's Jews felt that the event had been hijacked from them," he relates. "A Norwegian anti-racism organization turned the event into a pro-Palestinian one." Instead of dealing with Nazism, the Holocaust and antisemitism, the event focused on a discussion of the Middle East and political radicalization. The organization of the event was coopted by left-wing groups who were part of the anti-Israeli wave of protests – Israeli flags and Jewish symbols were banned from the ceremony. The Jewish community therefore decided not to participate in the event and held one event of its own, in a synagogue
There's also anger among community members with the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies. Established at the state's initiative with funds belonging to Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, the center's mission is to map and battle antisemitism in the country. However, in a letter sent recently to the institution, Norwegian Holocaust survivors and their descendants accused it of failing in its duty, maintaining that instead of fighting antisemitism it was positioning itself as a "critic of Israel's policies and military tactics." Moreover, the center is manifesting "bias in its choice of experts, supporting a narrative that is negative toward Israel as a Jewish state."
To which the center's director, Prof. Jan Heiret, stated in response to a query from Haaretz, "Since October 7, we have observed a disturbing increase in antisemitic attitudes and incidents in Norway. This deeply concerns us. The center works daily to fulfill our mandate, which is to conduct research and disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust, antisemitism, genocide and related human-rights violations, as well as the conditions of minorities in Norway."
"We were promised certain things as Jews and as citizens of Norway who have a specific history," says Leif Knutsen, a Jewish-Norwegian activist and professional media monitor. "All of this collapsed within hours on October 7." Knutsen talks about the disparity between the expectations from Norwegian society – with its democratic and liberal values – and the situation as it is being experienced by the country's Jews in practice.
There were in fact portents, he notes, including threats, disturbances and antisemitic remarks in periods of earlier Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. "Despite these events, there was still a sense of safety," Knutsen points out. "But on October 7 we realized that the social contract we had as a minority in Norway would not be honored. This is a harsh reality because we are barely holding on as it is. The community's institutions are run by volunteers, it's hard to fill all the roles, the pressure is immense, and the task of maintaining all the institutions is really hard," even in normal times.
There are indications of a community in trauma, Knutsen believes, as Jews cope with extremely hostile media, intolerable remarks, provocations and harassment. "After October 7," he continues, "I conducted a survey among Norwegian Jews and received responses from about 150 people. Half the respondents said they were considering leaving the country, and more than 90 percent said the Norwegian authorities don't understand what antisemitism is. "If the Jewish community disappears from Norway, it would be a tragedy," says Knutsen. "It would be just one sad episode among many in Jewish history, but it would be a catastrophe for Norway. This is why I am mostly concerned – not necessarily as a Jew, but as a Norwegian patriot," he concludes.
Prof. Brekke concurs. "Something broke on October 7. Norwegian Jews today feel vulnerable and betrayed by society. They are constantly told what they should think about the [Palestinian] conflict. If they do not condemn Israel, they are told they are 'Jews in the wrong way.' There are public figures and politicians who support Hamas, and far-right extremists and neo-Nazis who supported the October 7 massacre. It's not surprising, then, that the country's Jews are questioning their place in Norwegian society."
The sources of Norwegian hostility toward Israel go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brekke explains. "After World War II and Israel's establishment, Norway's clear stance was opposition to antisemitism and support for the young Jewish state," he says. "However, pro-Palestinian attitudes began to gain momentum after the Six-Day War, and pro-Palestinian leftist movements, including Marxist and Maoist groups, tried to push the more moderate social-democratic left in that direction. Although similar trends occurred in other countries, there are unique elements in Norway that led to the entire Norwegian left adopting this stance.
"From the late 1970s, for 20 years, Norway sent over 20,000 soldiers to serve in UNIFIL (United Nations peacekeeping forces), in Lebanon. As a result, that generation had a feeling that Norway possessed special knowledge of the region. I see this as Norwegian arrogance. You can also add Norway's involvement in the Oslo Accords. When the accords collapsed, the anti-Zionist movement simply spiraled out of control."
The most distinctive factor in Norway, says Brekke, is the impact of trade unions on the shaping of the country's foreign policy. "More than one million Norwegians, about a fifth of the population, are members of unions. In recent decades, these unions have cultivated a grassroots culture that is strongly anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. This movement is deeply tied to the [ruling] Norwegian Labor Party, both organizationally and ideologically, which gives the unions considerable influence over Norway's foreign policy." This anti-Zionism, Brekke argues, has turned into a type of antisemitism.
According to Dr. Cathrine Thorleifsson, from the social anthropology department of the University of Oslo, a genuine problem exists in Norway when it comes to understanding the new antisemitism, which is Israel-related. Norway's Jews, explains Thorleifsson – who has lived in Israel and speaks Hebrew – are in a vulnerable position and encounter antisemitism in various milieus: conventional media, social media and the public space. In the course of her research into the life of Norway's Jews in the 21st century, Thorleifsson has uncovered much prejudicial thinking about the community and about Israel. In one survey she conducted, half the respondents expressed the belief that Israel's attitude toward treatment of the Palestinians is no better than the way the Jews were treated in the Holocaust.
In Thorleifsson's view, the country's political discourse plays a crucial role in this regard. "Norway is a small country," she observes, "and its political discourse is still evolving. There is conformity, a lack of diverse voices expressing different experiences, and insufficient democratic tools to protect minorities." Norwegian politics espouses "a very pro-Palestinian attitude," she adds. "In certain activist circles, Hamas' attack is considered legitimate resistance, and the word 'terrorism' is not used where it should be. Norwegian conformity hides the antisemitism linked to Israel, as well as the misinformation and political violence that fuel it."
Cathrine Thorleifsson, Photo: University of Oslo
Israeli-born Ilan Sharoni, who lives in Stavanger, a city in the country's southwest, has been in the country since 1988. "I live here, my children and grandchildren live here, and I am very worried," he says. The chief culprit is the media, he avers. "Day after day on television, for decades now. Whoever doesn't condemn Israel is condemned as a supporter of genocide. Everything just blew up after October 7. The anti-Israeli approach, which was always part of domestic politics, has now become fatal."
To which Yaniv, a resident of Oslo who works and teaches in the field of art, adds, "When I speak to people who discover that I am from Israel, they stop talking or even choke. Afterward, they sometimes return to apologize." Yet, he says he has heard on more than one occasion the view that Israel is a criminal country that should not exist.
Ahead of the events marking the first anniversary of October 7, security around Jewish institutions in the country was beefed up by authorities. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations were held opposite the community memorial assemblies in Oslo and Bergen. In Oslo, models of Hamas' Qassam rockets, painted green, white and red, were raised. In a demonstration held in Bergen under the slogan "A Year since the Al-Aqsa Flood" (as Hamas called the attack on Israel), demonstrators burned Israeli flags. The police asked participants in rallies of support for Israel not to go home in groups because it would be "difficult to protect them."
Many in the Jewish community understand where the criticism of Israel is coming from. But even so, on March 8 this year, International Women's Day, a group of Jews, women and men, hoped they would be able to demonstrate in solidarity with women around the world in a large event that was set to take place in Oslo.
Yael Nilsen, the longtime Norway resident who has taken part in the international effort for the return of the Gaza hostages, contacted the organizers and asked to join the event. Together with her friends, she requested that the acts of rape that were perpetrated on October 7 and the condition of the abducted Israelis be brought to public awareness.
International Women's Day event in Oslo during which Jewish activists were met with hostility.Credit: Pål Holden
"Those issues are barely discussed in the Norwegian media," says Nilsen. "We thought that by joining the large-scale event of International Women's Day, we would be able to introduce the subject of the sexual violence and the awful condition of the abducted Israelis into the Norwegian discourse."
Initially, it didn't look like there would be a problem. One of the slogans that had been decided on for the demonstration dealt with the weaponizing of rape, so there was compatibility between the content of the demonstration and the goals of Nilsen's group. "And the fact is that when I contacted the organizers, they said that the program was already set, but that we would be able to join the group that would march under the slogan 'Fighting rape as a weapon.' To be certain, I made sure that the organizers knew that we would be carrying photographs of the abducted women, and I also asked them to confirm that the security arrangements would ensure that we would be safe with our Jewish symbols. Everything looked to be in order."
The group consisted of 40 to 50 people, most of them local Jews, Israelis and a few supporters. Nilsen made sure that no one would be carrying an Israeli flag and that everyone was clear about the message. "It was important for us to focus on the sexual violence, so we dispensed with Israeli flags. But to identify the women as Israelis, we had a blue-and-white banner with the inscription '#MeToo Unless you're a Jew,' together with graphics of a Star of David made out of women's undergarments and a triangle of blood, which was also used internationally in similar demonstrations."
The group knew they might encounter hostility. "Our symbols often generate hatred and aggression in Norway," Nilsen notes. "There is a large Muslim community here, and during that period there were demonstrations against Israel every day. Some of them crossed the thin line between anti-Israel views and antisemitism. So we were worried, but we got confirmation from the organizers, and because we didn't represent Israel, and the demonstration was supposed to deal with something that all of Norway could agree on – opposition to the use of violence against women as a weapon – we hoped for the best."
The hostile reaction manifested almost immediately. Initially, the group was refused entry to the event and had to prove that they had the organizers' authorization to participate. "One of the organizers went on shouting and cursing, and then took one of our signs and threw it on the ground," Nilsen recalls. "After the police made sure he couldn't get close to us, more and more organizers told us that our message conflicted with the messages of the event.
"They looked at us with hatred and disgust, and started to shout that we were Zionists and fascists. Then the crowd joined in with slogans and rhythmic chanting that we were already used to, like 'Murderers,' 'No to Zionists in our streets' and 'From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.'"
They avoided getting into a direct confrontation, Nilsen relates, "and we instructed our group not to scatter and not to respond. But when the atmosphere heated up, some of the other demonstrators – Norwegian men and women of my age – approached the members of the group very closely, and whispered into their ear things like 'child murderer' and skadedyr' ['parasites' in Norwegian]. "I've had anti-Israeli calls shouted at me in the past," Nilsen continues. "But this time it was very different. The hatred came from people I thought we shared basic values with. The feeling was that we were being canceled as human beings. We weren't women and men – we were the embodiment of evil."
The question of whether the attack on Israelis in Amsterdam last month was an isolated incident or the beginning of a trend is critical to Israel's relationship with the rest of the world and the future of Europe's Jews. And according to several Israeli media outlets, two days after the incident in Amsterdam, a similar incident occurred in another European capital.
The online news site Mako reported that Jews were attacked "in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during a ceremony commemorating the Kristallnacht pogrom." It said anti-Israel demonstrators yelled derogatory names at the ceremony's participants, snatched their Israeli flags, tore them up and threw them into the river.
The report was accompanied by a video titled "the difficult footage from Sweden." It shows police officers chasing a woman and arresting her. Channel 14 News added analysis and superlatives. "Antisemitism is having a feast day," it reported. "Pro-Palestinians brutally attacked Jews who gathered to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht in Stockholm." The same news item, with some variations, appeared in other media outlets and was widely circulated on social media.
Meanwhile, in the real world, what happened in Stockholm is indeed troubling, but for different reasons. First, no ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht took place there. Second, no Jews were attacked. Third, this false information was disseminated by people who counted on the media to spread the lie, thereby providing them with free political propaganda. And they were right. The Swedish media refused to buy the goods, but the Israeli media sure did (I might add, for the benefit of Mako's investigative reporters, that Stockholm doesn't have a river).
What actually happened in Stockholm that night was revealed by Swedish investigative reporter Jonathan Leman in Expo magazine (which defines itself as fighting "racist ideas, myths and conspiracy theories"). On the evening of November 9, a pro-Palestinian march took place in central Stockholm. Such demonstrations have been happening in Sweden for more than a year now. The marchers chant slogans that some people (myself included) see as antisemitic, and they are filled with hatred for Israel. But usually, they are completely nonviolent.
This demonstration was the same, aside from one difference – the protest march was joined by a guest riding a bike, who was widely filmed by videographers broadcasting from the scene. One of them is known to work with media outlets identified with the Sweden Democrats, a populist right-wing party that has a neo-Nazi past.
The demonstrators immediately realized that the bike rider wasn't one of theirs. She was an older woman who spoke with the videographers and attracted attention because she had an Israeli flag attached to her bike (as well as the Finnish flag and Iran's flag from before the Islamic Revolution). She also had a loudspeaker through which she played Hebrew songs like "Am Yisrael Chai" and a megaphone via which she proclaimed that "Hamas murdered all the homosexuals in Gaza" and "Hamas planned to annihilate all the Jews."
At first glance, she appeared to be a courageous warrior who supports Israel. And that is indeed how she was depicted in reports from the videographers who were there. But this isn't true. As Expo discovered, the woman is actually a far-right activist. On social media, she spreads a mixture of antisemitism, Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, an Islamic takeover of Europe and the destructive power of Sweden's Jews, who "want to destroy the Nordic peoples" and constitute "a metastasizing cancer."
So why was she demonstrating against the Palestinians and seemingly supporting Israel? Anyone who tries to impose order on this eccentric activist's political theories will discover that her support for Israel stems from her hatred of Jews and Muslims in Europe. Despite her ideological hatred of Zionism, she wants the Nordic states to be free of Muslims and Jews, so she supports their expulsion. This isn't love of Zion, but radical racism and antisemitism.
The bike rider's appearance at the demonstration had the potential to cause an outbreak of rioting. But that didn't happen. Granted, there was some anger, but the organizers worked to calm it. At the end of the demonstration, one demonstrator grabbed the woman's Israeli flag, threw it off a bridge and was arrested on the spot. The headline the right-wing media gave this incident was "On the day we remember Kristallnacht, a Palestinian activist stole an Israeli flag and threw it into the water." What happened next is fascinating. People posting on numerous X, Instagram and Facebook accounts in several countries began adding details, limited only by their imaginations.
A ceremony that never took place was invented, groups of Jews who were attacked were created ex nihilo, one flag became many flags, and on some accounts, it was no longer flags that thrown into the freezing water of the Baltic Sea, but Jews. Anger boiled over, and there were thousands of shares and comments in groups with hundreds of thousands of members. When all this reached the Israeli media, the makeover was complete – the inventions became news. Even their rejection of the original videographer's false information didn't change anything.
Two conclusions can be drawn from the incident in Stockholm. First, the support Israel's government has found in Europe's far right is a broken reed. Beneath the hatred of Arabs and the nationalist fervor that the government likes so much lies a thick layer of antisemitism that cannot be mistaken. Second, the battle that honest politicians on all sides must join is the battle against the agents of chaos who create a world in which instead of truth and lies, there are only narratives.
The worship of likes and internet traffic, media outlets that dispense with checking facts and operators of trolls and bots aren't a threat to the opposition or the governing coalition. Rather, they are threat to the very existence of a free society.
The question of whether last month's attack on Israelis in Amsterdam was an isolated incident or the beginning of a trend remains critical. Yet anyone who reports on imaginary pogroms is not only undermining the media's credibility, but also creating a situation in which nobody will believe in or deal with the real ones.
More than physical violence, antisemitism against European Jews now reveals itself through incidents such as school bullying and ostracism at the workplace. Israeli expat communities on the continent could become a bridge between Israeli and European societies.
STOCKHOLM – The rioting that followed the soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax in Amsterdam at the beginning of the month engendered mixed reactions in Israel. Initially, there was shock over its blatant antisemitic character and lamentations over "the Islamization of Europe." That was followed by claims that the violence was prompted by the conduct of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and that comparisons to Kristallnacht trivialized the Holocaust.
Such arguments merit discussion, but, to delve more deeply, it's worth considering the European perspective in addition to the Israeli one. First of all, when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans faced physical violence, they were facing a very extreme expression of anti-Israelism and antisemitism. However, for Jews who live in Europe, it's just one manifestation of antisemitism, albeit perhaps the most frightening one, but certainly not the most common.
Other manifestations are less photogenic, but they impose a heavy burden on the lives of European Jews: pestering at school, aggressive campaigns on social media, cultural and academic boycotts, hurtful comments, and tension and ostracism in the workplace. Physical violence is rather rare.
Secondly, antisemitism is much more than an individual case of racism. In European public discourse, there is a nascent recognition that it's a kind of conspiracy theory. Those falling into its net and spreading it might be people who have never met a Jew, and perceive themselves as liberals who "have nothing against the Jewish people." They don't even need to use the word "Jewish." The conflict in the Middle East and the so-called gray area between what is antisemitic and what is anti-Israel has made it possible to use code words such as "globalists", references to George Soros – and, of course, Zionists.
It's not a new phenomenon, but it involves a world of new concepts. Instead of old-style antisemitism in which the Jews were considered Christ's killers, or more modern antisemitism accusing the Jews of controlling the world through the banking system, revolutionary movements and secret societies, there are contemporary allegations that prove confusing even to those who don't hold clearly racist views. The most popular ones claim Jews spread COVID-19 to profit from vaccines, are behind the war in Ukraine, and are breaking up nation-states. In addition, the well-known conspiracies about Jewish control of the media and the financial markets are still going around.
The Israeli left has also sometimes fallen into the trap. Since it rightly opposes continued Israeli control of the West Bank and the war crimes in Gaza, it finds European partners for its worldview. Sometimes they're serious and honest partners, however, other times, they're actors spreading allegations of genocide who support Islamist terrorist groups and propaganda advocating Israel's destruction.
Just as the Israeli far-right finds neo-Nazi partners as a result of their campaign against Muslims, some on the left find antisemitic partners because they oppose the occupation – even if its opposition is to Israel's 1949 armistice borders rather than to those post-1967.
Third, real-life antisemites, unlike those portrayed in the media, aren't two-dimensional figures. The coverage of what happened in Amsterdam focused on scenes of masked men of Middle Eastern origin looking for blood. In the real world, antisemitism has been hiding behind more familiar faces with other characteristics, other backgrounds and motives: young Europeans who read Trotskyite literature, high school students using antisemitism as a means of abusing classmates, and university lecturers attempting to attract attention to themselves.
Not all immigrants are antisemitic. Not all antisemites are immigrants, and the antisemitic incidents in Europe aren't necessarily spontaneous outbursts of hate or protest. They're also a product of campaigns financed by actors such as Qatar, Turkey and Russia. Just as most rapists don't look like monsters and don't lurk behind bushes in dark parks, the antisemitic monster sometimes lives within ordinary and seemingly unthreatening figures.
When soccer fans come to Europe and witness demonstrators spreading hate against Israel under the banner of the Palestinian flag, they experience it as a physical threat. When European Jews witness the same demonstration, more than violence, they fear that the hostile crowd includes their children's kindergarten teacher, their bank clerk or their nurse at the local clinic.
And one last point. We're used to identifying the victims of antisemitism in Europe with members of local Jewish communities. In Amsterdam, the victims were Israeli tourists who experienced it for the moment and then returned home. But among those two distinct groups, there's another. In recent years, groups of Israeli expats in Europe have established communities engaged in education, culture and social initiatives; the Hebrew language and secular Israeli identity are flourishing there.
These communities experience and deal with antisemitism differently, constituting both an opportunity and a risk in that regard. On the one hand, they're liable to constitute an attractive target for violent attacks and antisemites. On the other hand, their members might build a bridge for dialogue between Israeli and European societies that could help to deal with the sickness of antisemitism that the continent has been suffering from for centuries.
Since my article about Amnesty and Swedish schools was written and published in Swedish and since the debate with Amnesty Sweden's Secretery Genral in Svenska Dagbladet was also in Swedish, I finally got round to translating the original texts into English so that non-Swedish speakers can see what the all the fuss was about…
When a Jewish woman from Umeå was featured on DN's first page after she decided to leave town, at least one writer, Göran Rosenberg, was critical. The article explained that the woman was leaving because of decades of antisemitic harassment. Still, Rosenberg wasn't impressed. "Today, DN publishes on its entire front page that a woman in Umeå (of Israeli origin) intends to leave the city because of her experiences of antisemitism ", he wrote and added that DN failed to explain the background: "consequently, we are not told that the same woman was very active in supporting Israel in the Gaza war". A couple of days later he explained in Expressen that antisemitism is being used as a political weapon. The woman from Umeå, it seems, had it coming. After all, she's not a "Swedish Jew", rather she's "a woman in Umeå (of Israeli origin)". Rosenberg's message is clear: while Antisemitism against regular Jews like himself, is despicable, Zionists and Israelis just "experience" antisemitism which is actually just good old criticism of Israel, or as Swedes elegantly call it – Israelkritik.
I thought of this when I talked to an organization called "Zikaron" last week. This small but extremely important organization offers lectures on the fates of Holocaust survivors to Swedish schools. The lectures are carried out by young people, grandchildren or great grandchildren of survivors who are taking over the historic burden of remembrance. Naturally, this has nothing to do with Israel. The Holocaust took place before there was an Israel and the victims were not "settler colonialist" or responsible for the "blockade of Gaza". And yet, it turns out that sometimes even the Holocaust is too problematic for some schools. When I talked to one of Zikaron's organizers, she told me that after the massacre of October 7th last year there were about ten schools that cancelled their lectures due to reasons like "wrong timing" or "sensitive timing" and since then, there has been less demand for their lectures. Could this also be "Israelkritik" or is it just that Swedish schools are too scared of upsetting the sensitive souls who find Holocaust education provocative. Or perhaps they don’t want to get in trouble with activist bullies who didn't get the memo saying that it's ok to talk about dead Jews from the 40s and the problem is only with the other kind of Jews, the ones with guns from the Middle-East. Whatever it is, anyone who's worried about Swedish schools being cowards can rest assured. They found their courage elsewhere.
While Holocaust education may be too sensitive, foreign policy political activism seems to be no problem at all. Otherwise, how could 39 Swedish schools be "partner schools (samarbetsskolor)" of Amnesty, a political organization which is as far from mainstream as it gets. These schools use Amnesty's "Schools for Human Rights" model (skola för mänskliga rättigheter) for teacher's education, planning "theme days" (temadagar) and providing material and lectures. They even take part in global campaigns. This model may be great for highlighting human rights and democracy, but there's a serious problem when it comes to the conflict in the Middle-East, since Amnesty is anything but impartial.
In recent years Amnesty International positioned itself clearly as opposed to everything Israeli. It has disproportionately targeted Israel for years, it has supported boycott campaigns and some of its campaigners and partners have supported or even been linked to terror organization and Islamist movements (to name some: Yasmin Hussein, Saleh Hijazi and Moazzam Begg). It almost entirely ignores attacks against Israel and atrocities committed against its civilians, it bases its information about Gaza casualties on Hamas' propaganda and it makes claims which are obviously false like "Israel's military operations in Gaza continue to kill people on a scale that has never been seen before".
But it's not only talk. Amnesty Sweden actively campaigned against policies of the Swedish government, like the decision to pause funding for UNRWA (based on information that some of its employees took part in the October 7th massacre) and the decision to stop funding Swedish Ibn Rushd study circle (after accusations that the organization has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and spreads antisemitism). In fact, whoever wants an idea of what Amnesty really supports can take a look at the kind of people it awards its prizes to. Elin Forghani, a Vänsterpartiet activist from Östersund just won Amnesty's new "Noismaker" prize after publicly claiming that: "Israel is a colonial project and an outpost of the West in the Middle East and always has been". And just to make clear what should be done with the colonizers she wrote: "we can make Israel and their sponsors sweat, tremble and fall. Liberation is in sight".
Naturally, in a democracy political activism is more than legitimate. However, it's also clear that Amnesty is in no way neutral or objective. It's a political player in global geo-politics, but it's still marching into Swedish schools, presenting itself as a non-biased public informer and bearer of a universal truth. Although political parties and organizations are allowed in Swedish schools and naturally Democracy and human rights should be part of their education, this isn't a case of mainstream education. Amnesty is getting a special "partner" status as a long-term official partner while other political actors are just guests, implying that Amnesty represents facts while the others represent opinions.
It's unclear why Swedish schools should be discussing the war in Gaza in the first place, but if they must, the material should be written and supervised carefully by serious state actors. This isn’t the place to start outsourcing. I spoke to a few parents and students in a Stockholm high school. They told me about their complaints to the school management regarding Amnesty's Gaza war education material and about lessons using material from Globalis, an organization run by "Svenska FN-förbundet" an organization which claims to "work for a better and stronger UN ". The UN in the title shouldn't be confused with impartiality. When I spoke to one student, he told me that since the lessons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started "it feels like I have to go to school to defend Israel twice a week. It's not that the teacher lies but it's so one-sided. For example, there were two lessons about the Palestinian Nakba and only half a slide about the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran and even that, according to the teacher, could be understood as a result of "Mossad activity". When the students were given texts on the subject, they were given guiding questions like: "what support is there for the claim that Israel is an apartheid state?". Student I spoke to talked about feeling very uncomfortable and worried about their classmates. "I feel I have to give the other side", one of them said, "because the other students in the class don't know the whole picture".
In an incident in another school, UN day was celebrated in the schoolyard by waving flags of different countries. According to one of the teachers, when some angry spectators who were passing by threatened to enter the school and remove the Israeli flag, the reaction wasn’t standing up to the threatening bullies and informing the police. Instead, the flag was removed and the person waving it was asked not to wave it again.
It seems that our schools are becoming a ridiculous case of Dr. Jackyle and Mr. Hyde. On one hand, they're wannabe rebels, dealing with the world's most complicated conflicts by employing radical political activists, while on the other hand, they're so afraid of controversy and conflict that they can't even wave a flag of a UN member country or talk about the Holocaust.
It's true, only a few schools cancelled Holocaust lectures and only some are Amnesty partners. But it's also true that only some pro-Palestinian demonstrators support violence (which is what shouting "Intifada!" means), only part of vänsterpartiet supports the PFLP and only a handful burned an Israeli flag outside a synagogue. Not to mention that just several thousand attended a Hamas conference in Malmö, and only a few hundred contribute to Islamist, antisemitic movements, and only one Imam praised Hezbollah's leader and only one or two artist spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, and only a small minority screamed at Holocaust survivors entering a memorial ceremony. How many minorities will it take to get the message? and when will our schools become part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Amnesty Sweden's comment (originally in Swedish):
Our schoolwork is based on international conventions and Swedish school's governing documents.
On December 10th, 1948, the newly formed UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For the first time, the world had an agreement that viewed all people as free and equal, regardless of gender, skin color, religion or other beliefs or characteristics.
In 2011, knowledge of human rights was incorporated into the Swedish curriculum. Since 2012, Amnesty has been supporting upper secondary schools with teaching materials, lectures, and a model for working with human rights, based on both international conventions and Sweden's school governing documents.
David Stavrou, guest columnist for Svenska Dagbladet, criticizes Amnesty for supporting upper secondary schools in their work on human rights education, by making directly false accusations about Amnesty as an organization and our work. But these claims are easy to refute: No, Amnesty does not support the call for a boycott of Israel. Yes, Amnesty has condemned attacks on civilian Israelis and called for those responsible for these war crimes to be held accountable. No, our teaching materials and lectures are not about Israel and Palestine.
David Stavrou claims that we are a biased organization and that our criticism of Israel is disproportionate. This is a direct false statement that is often made by representatives of the Israeli government. Amnesty is an impartial, politically independent organization. We do not accept government funds because we want to be free to investigate human rights violations without being dependent on anyone. Our demands and criticisms are based on international law and respect for human rights. And we assess all states by the same standards.
Even though our lectures in high schools this fall did not address the war in Gaza, high school students have asked many questions about the situation in Gaza. Human rights, contrary to what David Stavrou suggests, apply both in times of peace and in conflicts. Amnesty's focus in all conflicts is the protection of civilians and their human rights.
Amnesty is not alone in criticizing Israel's indiscriminate attacks on civilians, the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians, and the denial of humanitarian aid into Gaza, three clear examples of violations of the laws of war. Knowledge of human rights is necessary. We are happy to contribute to helping upper secondary schools fulfill the curriculum, providing students with more knowledge and the conditions to protect their own rights and work to ensure that others' rights are respected, both now and in the future.
Anna Johansson, Secretary General, Amnesty International Sweden.
David Stavrou's reply:
It’s great that Amnesty Sweden takes texts which are published in Svenska Dagbladet seriously. However, it’s a bit surprising because, during the process of writing the article, I contacted their press service to ask questions that had arisen after conversations with students at their partner schools. No one responded. To avoid mistakes, I wrote again, but I was ignored once more. On the other hand, Amnesty’s response suggests it might not matter – it’s filled with answers to questions no one asked and avoids addressing the questions that were actually raised.
No one suggested that schools shouldn’t teach human rights and democracy. No one asked whether human rights are important during wartime. Even if one appreciates the Secretary General of Amnesty’s inspiring words, that wasn’t at all what the article was about. Everyone knows human rights are important. The question is whether her organization is qualified to be the one teaching our children about them.
One question that goes unanswered, however, in the one addressing Amnesty’s partners abroad that have had connections to terrorist organizations and Islamist movements. Perhaps it’s because she is aware of the collaboration with Moazzam Begg, for example. Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee, was invited to Sweden by Amnesty despite having supported the Taliban. This isn’t something I’m claiming – it’s what a senior official within Amnesty in London, Gita Sahgal, said. She argued that collaboration with "Britain’s most famous Taliban supporter" and links to groups promoting Islamic right-wing ideas damage Amnesty’s integrity and pose a threat to human rights. Amnesty’s reaction – she was dismissed.
Then there’s the claim that Amnesty doesn’t support a boycott of Israel. If that’s the case, why did Amnesty’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa write the following: "We urge the international community to cease all forms of support – whether direct or indirect, through actions or omissions – for Israel’s apartheid system"? (Direct quote from Amnesty’s website).
As for Amnesty having condemned attacks on Israeli civilians, it is true that they’ve done so on certain occasions. After October 7th, it would have been absurd if they hadn’t. But anyone familiar with Amnesty’s publications knows that the Secretary General’s statement is misleading. During September and October, Amnesty International published 14 texts on their website criticizing Israel. That’s as many as the texts about Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq – combined. Iran received seven texts during the same period, Sudan and South Sudan six in total, and Belarus only four. During these two months, 7,517 rockets were fired at Israel. Amnesty published nothing about these attacks, which kill and injure and have forced over 140,000 Israeli citizens to live as internally displaced persons for more than a year.
"We assess all states by the same standards," writes Amnesty’s Secretary General. That’s hard to believe when reading about their "regional activist seminars" in Stockholm and Malmö in November. The program begins with "Palestine then and now" and continues with "a deeper understanding of the Palestine issue through a Palestinian perspective." Then there’s a lecture on the Palestine groups in Malmö, followed by "panel discussion: Academics for Palestine." Later in the day, there’s "panel discussion: on Palestine, struggle, and conflict." It seems like the Rohingyas, Uighurs, the Belarusian opposition, and Tigrayans from Ethiopia will have to wait for the next seminar because the next workshop is "What can I do? A guide to action for Palestinian liberation." This is organized by, drumroll, BDS Sweden. Yes, BDS – Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (remember the Secretary General’s statement: "But these claims are easy to refute: No, Amnesty does not support the call for a boycott of Israel." Does she think we can’t read?).
None of the speakers at the seminar are pro-Israel; instead, it’s full of well-known pro-Palestinian activists. And that’s entirely okay. The Svenska Dagbladet article wasn’t about whether Amnesty is right or wrong or about their right to be pro-Palestinian. It was about impartiality. I wonder if any of the young people who participated in the activist seminar are students from one of Amnesty’s 39 partner schools. I suggest that Sweden’s school principals take what the Secretary General wrote seriously. When she writes that she’s glad to "give students more knowledge," it becomes clear that their schools are her recruitment ground.
The son of Itzhak El Al, one of 28 Jewish Tunisian children who were on the plane that crashed in Norway in 1949, reflects back on his father's good fortune. 'The Norwegians even built my family's home on the moshav,' he says.
STOCKHOLM – Seventy-five years ago, on November 20, 1949, a Dutch Douglas DC-3 aircraft was approaching Oslo on its way to Fornebu, Norway's main international airport at the time.
Confronting bad weather conditions, the pilot lowered the plane, apparently not aware of the exact height of the mountainous terrain. Its wing hit a tree not far from Hurum, a small community southwest of Oslo, and disaster followed: The plane crashed into a mountain, igniting the fuel tank. Except for one 12-year-old child, Itzhak Allal, all other 30 passengers on board – 27 of them children – and four crew members were killed.
Although the tragedy happened in Norway, it was very Jewish. The plane had been chartered by the Youth Aliyah organization (Aliyat Hano'ar) to transport Jewish children from Tunisia to a recovery center in Norway, before their planned immigration to Israel.
They were heading to a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients made available by the Norwegian government for Jewish children from North Africa. In April 1949, 200 Jewish children from Morocco were hosted there for the first time, and the Jewish children from Tunisia were the next group in line.
Haim El Al and his son Itzhak, named after his grandfather, visit the 1949 Hurum air disaster site in Norway. Credit: Rami Kafarov.
It took two days until the wreckage was discovered by two hunters, who also found the dead bodies of the passengers and crew as well as the only survivor. Allal was handed over to the Norwegian authorities and aroused so much sympathy in the country that King Haakon VII offered to adopt him.
The bodies of the other children were flown back to Tunisia where they were buried.
Allal was taken to Israel where he was eventually united with his family who immigrated to Israel and settled in Yanuv, a moshav near Netanya. This agricultural community had been partly built with Norwegian funds, following the air disaster. Allal changed his last name to El Al, and he and his wife Lilian would eventually have six children. He died of cancer when he was 48.
One of the couple's children, Haim, now 51, visited Norway for the first time last week. He came with his 15-year-old son Itzhak, named after his grandfather and born, coincidentally, on the 60th anniversary of the tragedy.
The two family members of the sole survivor of the accident were invited to attend a series of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the crash, organized by the Israeli embassy in Norway and the Friends of Israel in the Norwegian Labor Movement association (Venner av Israel i Norsk Arbeiderbevegelse).
"I've felt a strong connection to Norway my whole life," Haim El Al said in an interview after visiting the site of the disaster, "so it's really emotional for me to be here for the first time."
When you were a child, did your father tell you about the accident and the tragedy he was part of as a 12-year-old boy?
"My dad died young, when I was only 13. But we heard plenty of stories at home. My father talked about the two planes which took him and the other Jewish children from Tunisia to Norway. He remembered the story well – one aircraft arrived safely and the other, the one he was on, made a stop in Belgium because of a faulty radio. As we know, that was the plane that crashed in the Norwegian forest outside Hurum.
"He talked about being discovered two days later by the two Norwegian hunters and about how he survived in the cold and the darkness – drinking water from a nearby stream, eating apples from the bags and boxes that the children had on the plane and warming himself by the warm parts of the engine and the motor oil that kept on burning. He said that one of the people who found him gave him his coat. I was at the site just now with my son and we were freezing after just 30 minutes. He was there for two whole days."
Do you think your father was traumatized? As a boy, did you feel he was still under the influence of this tragic event?
"No, the Norwegians took care of his rehabilitation very well. They treated him in a wonderful way. They gave him presents and even the king of Norway, who was very touched by his story, gave him a bicycle. When dad came to Israel, he became famous, everybody knew him and his story. When his parents, my grandparents, immigrated to Israel, the Norwegians even built them a home, which is where I grew up."
From Annie Leibovitz to Amy Winehouse and Ofra Haza: New book on Jewish heroines, created by three feminist Swedish Jewish women, offers an answer to antisemitism
What do Amy Winehouse, Anne Frank, Estée Lauder, Rosa Luxemburg, Ofra Haza and Marilyn Monroe have in common? They were all Jewish (Marilyn converted), they were all heroines, and now, all six are among the 120 Jewish women in the new Swedish-language book "Jewish Heroines." The book, which targets both young readers and adults, not only tells the heroines' stories but also uses them to pose questions that have become more urgent in the post-October 7 world.
"Jewish Heroines" is the work of three Jewish Swedish women. The text was written by Anneli Rådestad, the editor of the Jewish-Swedish culture magazine Judisk Krönika, and Karin Brygger, a poet and author who also writes for the Swedish media. The heroines were illustrated by Joanna Rubin Dranger, a graphic artist and also an illustration professor at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She's also a winner of the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for her latest graphic novel.
Anneli Rådestad.Credit: Hugh Gordon
"The three of us come from very strong feminist backgrounds," says Rådestad, who's also a former journalist for Swedish public radio. She notes that Rubin Dranger has been working with feminist issues since the '90s, while Brygger has being studying women's history and literature for around 25 years. Rådestad is the editor of Judisk Krönika, which launched a series of articles about Jewish women, "partly because the magazine has been male dominated since its founding in 1932. Through these articles, we tried to contribute to a correction of Jewish-Swedish history by bringing women out of the shadows."
The idea to turn the project into a book came during the pandemic, while Rådestad was reading to her daughter, who was 5 at the time. "The book I was reading was the Swedish version of 'Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls' [by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo], and I thought it would be great if there was a book dedicated to Jewish heroines. Jews are a small minority in Sweden, and the stories of Jewish women … have left very little mark." Rådestad says that when she told Rubin Dranger about the idea, "she was enthusiastic and very surprised that a book like this didn't already exist."
The book cover.Credit: Joanna Rubin Dranger / Natur & Kultur
I spoke with the three authors in Stockholm's Old Town after the book's launch party at a local bookstore. They say that when they checked if there was already a book on Jewish heroines, they found a few in English, but on a smaller scale. And they discovered the Jewish Women's Archive in the United States – a great source, but it's not a book. Rubin Dranger notes that they aimed to rise above the local context. "I wanted to make a book that would not only be for the Jewish community in Sweden but would suit everyone, including people in other countries," she says.
Brygger adds that "Jewish Heroines" could also play a role in academic debates. "It can be part of women's history and women's literary history studies. I've been involved in women's studies for a long time and I've been writing life stories and texts that give women a voice," she says. "These stories are missing in the academic world. In fact, a large part of the ability to do this now exists thanks to women like those we wrote about in the book, such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Susan Faludi."
These last three are among a long line of American women in "Jewish Heroines," including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thinkers such as Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and Masha Gessen, and artists of various stripes such as Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler and Annie Leibovitz. The book also portrays women from totally different backgrounds – Nobel-winning scientists such as Israeli Ada Yonath and Italian Rita Levi-Montalcini – as well as actresses, dancers, heroines from Middle Eastern history and even biblical figures such as Esther, Ruth and the Four Matriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. "Jewish Heroines" weaves them into a tapestry of inspiring women from different eras all over the world.
Your book features a wide variety of countries of origin, eras and ethnic groups, but some are more widely represented than others. For example, there are many women from Sweden and the United States and only a few from Israel including Golda Meir, Ofra Haza, Ada Yonath, Ester Rada and Robi Damelin of the Parents Circle – Families Forum. How did you make your choices?
Joanna Rubin Dranger.Credit: Hugh Gordon
Brygger: "When we found women we wanted to have in the book, we made presentations for the others … and the others took some time to think and learn, and we made a decision. The three of us had an equal part in 'finding' the women." Then came the greater work of research, writing and illustrating. "This ongoing conversation was the most fabulous part of working on the book," Brygger says. "We were in constant contact, sending messages, photos and articles to each other in a flow of creative desire to write and portray as many great women as we could."
Rubin Dranger adds about the women they chose: "For Israelis, it's quite clear that Jews can be anything – religious or secular, Asian, white or Black – but for Swedes it's not so clear. Many people have never met a Jew but they have an image of Jews. Often, they think of a Jew as a religious man with a hat and payes [sidelocks]. They don't always realize that this is a flexible identity."
According to Rubin Dranger, this is why the book also features a Black American rabbi, writers, journalists and spiritual women from Algeria, New Zealand, Egypt and Cuba, not to mention a Mexican poet and actresses from India. Rådestad adds: "In a way, this book is a response to things like the report published in 2021 about antisemitism in schools in Malmö, a city that has become notorious in this context. The report showed the way students and teachers understand the word 'Jew': an Orthodox religious white man or a figure in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Karin Brygger.Credit: Hugh Gordon
Brygger notes that the world of the past – and unfortunately still the present – is filled with prejudices. So the book "not only offers a wonderful possibility of finding a character who is similar to you, who can give you strength or inspire you. It's also a tool for breaking down stereotypes and fighting antisemitism."
Brygger, who lives in Gothenburg, adds that she received warm responses when she presented the book at cultural institutions in the city. "They said, 'We don't need more reports, we already know that there is antisemitism here. We need tools to deal with the problem.' They were enthusiastic about the book and wanted to use it as an educational tool."
And the issue of Jewish diversity isn't taken for granted in the Jewish community.
"Today, when you look, for example, at the school photo of the Jewish school in Stockholm, you can find the whole world in them," Rådestad says. "People get married in all kinds of ways, and it's important to represent everyone."
In Brygger's opinion, the book's diversity of Jewish identities includes "a way to deal with prejudices and racism that exist even in the Jewish community." Rubin Dranger adds: "But it's not just the representation. It's not just pointing out the fact that there is someone in the book who is adopted or someone who is Ethiopian. It's a presence that's truly broad, not an example or two who are chosen just to serve as an alibi."
Beyond the choice of specific characters, the creators stress the significance of the content being available in a physical book, sold nationwide, rather than just being information in an internet archive or a Jewish publication. "In a country where the Jewish minority is tiny, we shouldn't underestimate the fact that a large non-Jewish publisher released the book in Swedish," Rådestad says. "This makes a statement that this book is for everyone – Jews and non-Jews, young and old, library visitors and school students."
She and her two co-authors are aware that the book is being published in stormy times globally for both women and Jews. The book links these two identities. Many of the profiles are of women who stood – or are still standing – at the forefront of such troubles, from Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman, through Hannah Szenes and women fighters in WWII ghettos, to young Ethiopian-American activist Naomi Wadler. The impression is that, beyond its heroines' scientific and artistic achievements, the book celebrates the struggle against tyranny, racism and the patriarchy.
Illustrations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Ofra Haza, from the book.Credit: Joanna Rubin Dranger
"We have seen and continue to see a retreat in women's rights in the world," Brygger says. "It keeps returning. In the book, we connect Jewish history with women's history." Rådestad continues: "We are connecting in many ways with other struggles, like that of the LGBTQ community. The Jewish feminist movement and the Jewish LGBTQ movement walked hand in hand. "Take Steven Greenberg, for example, the first openly homosexual Orthodox rabbi. His interpretation of the Biblical verse forbidding male intercourse is that it is a prohibition against degrading another man. Doing so lowers him to the status of a woman, which in biblical times was seen as inferior. Greenberg's interpretation connects the two struggles – striving for equality in both male-male relationships and male-female relationships. It's a common struggle."
The authors acknowledge that the book's significance has changed somewhat since October 7. Work on the book was finished before the Hamas attack. However, says Rådestad, quite a few more Jewish female heroines have emerged since then. "Take, for example, Rachel Edri from Ofakim, who saved her own life and that of her husband," she says. "She became famous for giving cookies and coffee to the terrorists, thus preventing them from murdering more people. Another example came after the terrible Eurovision week in Malmö. I think that Eden Golan not only carried Israel on her shoulders but also Sweden's Jewish minority. A young woman stood high when so many older people around her went so low. She really showed great strength, while many Jews around the world felt pressure and fear. Her character gave me strength, too."
"We couldn't have imagined these circumstances when we wrote the book. We presented it, on the eve of its publication, at the Gothenburg International Book Fair the week before October 7," Rådestad recalls, referring to the largest cultural event in Scandinavia and one of Europe's largest book fairs. "The transition from being on an important international cultural stage to October 7 was very stark. It was a terrible fall. It shook the ground beneath the feet of Israelis and Palestinians – and Jews worldwide.
"I realized a few months later that the meaning of some of the book's heroines had changed for me. For example, Dona Gracia. When I wrote about her, I saw her as a powerful historical figure who faced the Inquisition 500 years ago. Today, I understand that there are still many who live as crypto-Jews – I have friends worried because they gave their children Jewish names. Now, they don't know what effect this will have.
Illustrations of Golda Meir and Esther Rada from the book.Illustration: Joanna Rubin Dranger/Natur & Kultur
In the reality of cultural and educational boycotts, a Jewish name can lead to serious consequences. At the same time, I feel that the resistance, the strength and the resilience of Jews are an important part of this book. As a people, we've been through this many times for hundreds of years. Some of the heroines here withstood the test. They gave what they created to themselves, to their families, to their people and to the world."
Rådestad mentions a common sentiment among Jews around the world today: "Israelis have become more Jewish and Jews have become more Israeli since Since October 7. The pogromist terror of October 7 evoked something that previously only happened in the Diaspora and that Israel was supposed to prevent. The security of independence and having agency was shaken. Israelis got a taste of what it was like to be a minority in Russia a couple of hundred years ago in the most terrible and terrifying way."
She observes that many Jews worldwide are suffering for the same reason Israelis are suffering. She says they see erstwhile friends and partners, such as the international cultural communities and feminist movement, being silent and turning their backs. "It's become very important for some Jews to stand up for Israel and Israelis in a world where haters are targeting Jews and Israelis alike," she says. "So when Israel is framed as a pariah state and a controversial country, the women we profiled provide strength that children and teenagers need."
"It's not just children," Brygger adds. "When I look through the book, I'm inspired and feel strength and joy. Already when we were writing it, when we discovered women we didn't know about, it made us happy. But now the joy is different. In the past, it was the euphoria of discovering something new – like the Jewish actresses who starred in Bollywood. But today, under the shadow of October 7, the book also gives us the strength we need."
Another layer to the book is the flexible definition of Jewish identity. Some figures were not born Jewish and converted (like Marilyn Monroe, who underwent a Reform conversion to Judaism ahead of her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, and called herself "a Jewish atheist"). Some had a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Some weren't born Jewish but were adopted by Jews. Some of the heroines didn't identify as Jewish growing up, but as adults were foced by others to grapple with their Jewish identity.
By way of example, Brygger points out Marianne Cohn, a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She saved many Jewish children by smuggling them over the Swiss border. She had no active Jewish identity whatsoever during her childhood in Germany. It only developed upon emigrating to France with her parents. Rubin Dranger talks about Lotte Laserstein, a German painter whose family had converted to Christianity. But the Nazis considered her Jewish and forbade her to work as an artist. She found refuge in Sweden. "In a way, her story connects to my own experience," she says. "I grew up assimilated and only embraced my Jewish identity after a priest in my Christian confirmation process made me feel singled out and attacked me because of my Jewish heritage. I know that many today share this experience. After October 7, many people are rediscovering their Jewish identity and they start searching for a community they may have already forgotten."
"In the current global climate, words like "minyan" and "shtetel" may take on a new meaning," Rådestad observes. "In progressive Judaism, at least, you can find a women's minyan. The term shtetel may represent a safe place." This is needed because there are already American publishing houses who say "No to sexism, no to racism and no to Zionism." Says Rådestad, "Jews may once again be forced to publish their books alone, until the world rediscovers them."
What sets a Jewish heroine apart from general heroism, and what is the uniqueness of women's heroism?
Brygger: "It's about persecution. The heroism in our book is related to the strength of coping with and resisting persecution, antisemitism and exclusion. In general society, there is a struggle against patriarchy and glass ceilings of all kinds. Here we need to add another struggle – the struggle that Jewish women have had to wage throughout history."
Rubin Dranger: "Part of it is that many Jewish women fought for the rights of other minorities, like African Americans or indigenous peoples in the United States. They weren't content with fighting for their own interests."
Rådestad: "It's part of Jewish values and Jewish tradition. Telling truth to power is part of what Jews do. So is the attempt to make the world a better place, tikkun olam. Although this characterizes American Judaism, it's not only in the United States. We wrote, for example, about the Iraqi-born philanthropist Flora Sassoon. She funded and promoted the use of vaccines against terrible diseases in India and fought against deprivation and discrimination."
Given the chance, who'd you like to meet from among the heroines you profiled?
Rubin Dranger: "The American cryptanalyst Elizebeth Smith Friedman, who cracked the Nazi codes. Code cracking and intelligence defense fascinates me, and the fact that Friedman's work wasn't known until quite recently. For many decades, her files were kept confidential and were lost to history. Elizebeth wasn't Jewish by birth but married a Jewish man, a U.S. Army cryptographer." It is important to talk about this type of Jewishness, exactly because not everybody considers them Jewish, she says.
Rådestad has a hard time choosing. She starts with Shifra and Puah, the biblical midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh's order to kill Hebrew children. Then she moves on to the young Jewish women who were part of the anti-Nazi resistance movements and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fighters. She finally chooses Asenath Barzani, a rabbinical scholar who was active in 17th century Kurdistan. Barzani's father was a yeshiva head in Mosul. She became a yeshiva head herself. "Barzani's story changed my view about how progress happens," she explains. "It gives perspective on what the West used to be and what Iraq used to be."
Brygger also mentions several women. She says her encounter with Susan Sontag "not only shaped my academic life, but also my personal life since I was a teenager." She also recalls the story of Charlotte Salomon, the Jewish-German artist who was murdered in Auschwitz. "It's a story with a lot of pain," she says. "Salomon sent her works to a friend with instructions to 'keep this safe, it's my whole life.' Salomon reminds us how important it is to write and document our lives even today, how important it is to leave traces and testimonies."
"I hope that if a young person feels alone or lost, they'll be able to find what I found in these women that changed my life so radically," she adds. "I hope our book will give them role models in these turbulent and terrible times. Perhaps they'll even find a soulmate, even if it's someone who's no longer alive or someone who's far away. It's so hard to find and mold your identity. I'd never have made it through my teenage years without these women who made me a reading and writing person, with a life goal. As usual, I went all in and really tried to learn everything about many of them. Some of them are much closer to me than 'real people.' The world opens up to you when you relate to texts and books. These writers and artists also give you a hand to hold throughout life."
The Kaleidoscope project revives an initiative that was interrupted by the Holocaust: an autobiographical writing competition for Jewish youth from all over Europe
"My father spoke with me as a friend. He touched offhandedly on the question of whether I was in love with a boy. The question has opened a new page for me … I've always tried to banish the subject from my heart," wrote a 17-year-old Jewish girl calling herself Hansi in Vilna in 1934. Later, she wrote that the boys in her class ignored her, that she saw herself as "unattractive to the eye" and that the indifference of the boys made her sit on the sidelines and sink into thought while the other girls sat together and shared anecdotes.
"That specific situation made it so I didn't love a single boy," she wrote. "At a time when I couldn't stop my feelings, I felt love for boys in general, as the opposite sex, as a group and not as individuals."
Hansi's text is only one testament out of hundreds that unfurl over thousands of pages written by young Jews who lived in Poland and several of its neighbors in the 1930s. They were collected by the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which worked in Eastern Europe in the lead-up to World War II with the mission of researching and preserving the region's Jewish life and Yiddish culture.
The organization was established in 1925 in Vilna (then in Poland, now the capital of Lithuania and known as Vilnius) and had branches in Warsaw, Berlin and New York. World War II forced the organization to move its operations to New York, which is the home to its modern incarnation's headquarters to this day.
The collection of these autobiographical accounts is fascinating in the personal glimpse it gives into prewar Jewish life. Many of the teenagers who wrote them died in the Holocaust, their words now serving as a memorial to the complex, diverse lives that were lost. They wrote about music, literature, ice skating and a myriad of other subjects. Some were politically aware and were Zionists, socialists or members of the Bund movement. There were the religious and the secular, the poor and the rich, the city folk and the rural folk. There were young people in love, the newly married and the divorced. Some dreamed of emigrating to the New World; some were excited about the future, and others were afraid of it.
The beginning of the Hebrew-language entry for the competition written by Hansi, a girl from Vilna, in 1934.Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
"In the 1930s, the YIVO institute in Vilna wanted to know what was going on in the minds of young people in Yiddish-speaking countries," says Daniela Greiber, the Jewish Communal Life grants program manager at Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. "They organized a competition for autobiographical writing, and over the course of several rounds, between 1934 and 1939, they received 627 manuscripts. Most were handwritten and dozens of pages long. Most of the writers were boys, but there were girls too, and although the prevalent language was Yiddish, there were also some – including Hansi – who wrote in both Hebrew and Polish.
"The idea wasn't to publish the manuscripts, but to preserve them so they would serve as raw material for social research," continues Greiber. "The background for the project was the "Yiddishist" worldview, which believed in the need to develop a sense of belonging and meaning in Jewish life in countries where Yiddish was spoken.
There was also a belief among many that there was a future for Jews in Europe that would involve a socialist revolution. This was a time when people studied ethnography and were involved in the discipline of autobiographical writing. Someone had the ingenious idea of asking young people to write their biographies, and to make the manuscripts truthful, it was proposed to do it with anonymity."
The request was publicized in the press; to increase motivation, a competition with prizes was announced. Each year, several writers won 150 zlotys each. However, the winners in the final round never found out about their accomplishment. The date set for announcing the winner was September 1, 1939, the very day World War II broke out. It's likely that many of the participants didn't survive the following years.
The Jewish autobiographical competition was abruptly forced to end because of the war, but 85 years later, the Rothschild Foundation has begun to revive the project. It named the new project Kaleidoscope, and it seems almost like the twin of the original one. Once more, young Jews from all over Europe are writing about their lives. This time, the works aren't only being preserved and collected, but are also being published (in their original language and the English translation) on the project's website.
Dennis Grossman, one of the first participants in the project, is a young Jewish man from Budapest who grew up participating in Hungarian Jewish schools and summer camps. "I'm 21 years old and I still go to summer camps – now as a counselor," he wrote. "It is very hard to stay involved in the Jewish community after somebody reaches adulthood. Before that, you can go to camps, Jewish school and youth movements. But you grow out of these when you become 18 years old.
"That is why – if you want to stay involved – people usually go work at [camps] as a counselor or get jobs in Jewish organizations," he continued. "My girlfriend and I started hosting Shabbat dinners for our Jewish friends every other Friday as a way to keep our little community together. We usually say blessings for the wine and challah, sometimes we say kiddush. After that we eat, drink, have conversations and play board games.
"Most of the people who come are our friends from […] camp, but we also try to invite anybody who has somewhat of a connection to Judaism and is looking for a way into the community," he added. "There are lots of young Jews in Hungary who either find out about their being Jewish too late or have some other reason for not getting involved in the community early on. These people get locked out because most of the programs and communities for young adults are just like our Shabbat dinners. Small, because my home can only fit so many, and somewhat closed because we only know the people in our social bubble.
Denis Grossman
"I am truly frustrated by this dynamic and I'm always looking for ways to get more people involved," he wrote. "My philosophy is that people should relate to their Jewish identities through experiences they have. These experiences can be anywhere from going to the synagogue to attending a Shabbat dinner or a bar mitzvah. These can overwrite the fact that a lot of people relate to Judaism through the Holocaust or through our history."
Dennis is the son of an American father and a Hungarian mother who divorced when he was a baby. Most of his mother's family died in Auschwitz, and those who survived avoided their Jewish identity after the war. His mother started to show renewed interest in her 20s. "My mother always put more emphasis on making these experiences fun and digestible for us rather than following the strict rules," he wrote. "Because of this, for example, my concept of Shabbat is about having everyone around the table and my mom kissing my head, blessing me, and having peace around us. It is very far from the concept that we aren't allowed to do certain things…"
Dennis understands the significance of the manuscripts that were written so many decades ago and of the renewal of the project. "It's trying to understand the period we live in and the significance of being a Hungarian Jew in this time period," he says. "In my text, I tried to explain the situation so that people understand it. But besides the historical aspect, I also like to express myself in writing, and it feels good to be a part of something like this and to share my Jewish identity with the world. "
In addition to the positive aspects of Jewish identity, are there also more challenging aspects?
"For me, it's not a big challenge to be Jewish. If I wasn't an active Jew, that would be a greater concession. There's a fear of antisemitism, of estrangement, of discrimination, of the fact that people don't understand us or think we're strange, but if we don't expose ourselves and aren't active, people will understand us even less. I believe in being a full part of society in general, and I feel that through me, people will understand what Judaism is.
October 7th becomes a new Memorial Day in the Jewish calendar as we are reminded where we come from, where we're headed and to whom we're destines to give account.
Last week, Jews all over the world welcomed a new Jewish year. According to Jewish tradition, the Jewish New Year isn't just a celebration. It's a memorial day – the day when God remembers his creations and grants them new life for the coming year. Or perhaps the day when we remind ourselves where we come from, where we are going, and to whom we are destined to give account.
This isn't unique. The Jewish calendar is all about memory – on Pesach, we remember the exodus from slavery in Egypt. On Tisha Be'Av, we remember the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. These are events that happened thousands of years ago, and yet they are recounted in detail, with almost holy precision, so that the lessons are never forgotten. "In every generation, one must see oneself as if one had personally experienced the exodus from Egypt," says the text Jews have read on the same date for over a thousand years. And that's exactly what we do.
But this year, Israeli Jews faced different challenges on the New Year. Just after 7 p.m., two Hamas terrorists began shooting and stabbing civilians on a light rail train in Jaffa. After killing four people, they got off the train and killed three more. One of the victims was Inbar Segev Vigder, who was carrying her 9-month-old baby. Inbar is dead. The baby survived. Half an hour later, the Islamic Republic of Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. This was followed by missiles and rockets launched by Lebanese Hezbollah. All of this happened within 24 hours.
And now, just a few days later, the Jewish calendar has a new catastrophe commemorate. The brutality, horror, and despair that were supposed to be over after the Holocaust, the pogroms, and exiles due to the birth of the Jewish state have returned. Now, after the terrorists from Gaza succeeded in dragging the whole region into a new spiral of violence, we have a new memorial day – October 7th, a day that has become almost biblical in nature sue to the existential drama and the enormous human cost. It has already become a cliché – the day when the most Jews were murdered since the Holocaust.
At this point, some may bring up the issue of context. These are only Israel’s victims. Where are the stories of the Palestinians and the Lebanese who are dying in their thousands?
Yes, everything has context. Even Hitler. And Christian the II. And Genghis Khan. And everyone has their own context. For the Palestinians, October 7th is seen within the context of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 occupation of the West Bank. For the Israelis, it’s about the Holocaust and violent attacks throughout history – the exploding buses, the hijacked planes, the massacres, the wars and the bombings. But human beings are not neutral creatures. They see their story before others and mourn their own first. The loss of life is not abstract. I am a Jew and I am a Zionist – I’m not a representative of Sweden’s Jews, but I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing Israel as an important part of my identity and its story, its people, and its safety come first for me.
But October 7th is not about context. It’s not about revenge, and it’s not about a future peace either. Like other days in the Jewish calendar, it’s about remembering. It’s about remembering those who were on the front line – the young, beautiful people who were slaughtered at a rave in the desert, the women who were raped and mutilated, the elderly who were brutally dragged from their homes to suffocate in underground tunnels in Gaza, the civilians who were shot to death while embracing each other, and the children who were murdered alongside their siblings and parents before they even had a chance to live.
October 7th is about remembering them, but it’s also about remembering ourselves – where we were, how we were affected, and what we learned about our place in the world, in an ever-widening circle that even reached Sweden. It’s about the Jewish children who were blamed for genocide and were too scared to go to school, the demonstrations filled with antisemitic slogans, the endless boycotts, walkouts, open letters, and slander on social media, explaining that Hamas has the right to resist. It’s about remembering the mass psychosis that made grown men and women boo a 20-year-old girl who came to sing in Sweden, shout at Holocaust survivors attending a ceremony in a synagogue, burn the Israeli flag in Malmö, and shoot at the Israeli embassy in Stockholm.
We have to remember all of this to recall where we came from, where we are headed, and before whom we are destined to give account. Whoever that may be, it is certainly not those who explain to us that we are allowed to be Jews but not Zionists, or that we can be Swedish Jews only if we denounce Israel. This is our first October 7th memorial day, and we’re not really ready for it to become one of our regular memorial days yet. Today, while 101 Israelis are still held hostage in Gaza, while the violence continues, and while we are still counting our dead, for many Jews, this is just another day in the longest month in history – today is the 365th of October.
However, it can improve life for Jews, Israelis, Palestinians and Palestinian activists here in Sweden.
For almost a year, so-called pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Sweden have raised opposing reactions. According to some, they're a powerful sign of international solidarity. Others criticized them saying that they support terrorism and spread antisemitic propaganda. The common reply to this claim uses the term "smutskasta"(literally – throw dirt), meaning that calling the demonstrators antisemitic is a smear campaign design to de-legitimize them.
This started early on. A popular slogan of the global pro-Palestinien demonstrations is "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free". Despite it's appealing and harmless sound, some claim that it's antisemitic since it implies that the Jewish state of Israel, which is currently between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea, will be violently annihilated. The answer was made by, amongst others, Shora Esmailian in Aftonbladet (November 2023) who said that this accusation is either ignorant or "a smear campaign against people and their quest for freedom and now also survival ".
Those who were persuaded that "From the River to the Sea" is a call for peace and harmony, may have been surprised when Sydsvenskan's Inas Hamdan and Jonas Nyren revealed what some of the demonstrators were shouting in Arabic. It turned out that it wasn't exactly calls for a cease fire and human rights. Instead, it was support for recognized terrorists and commitment to a violent struggle against any kind of compromise.
This time too, the comeback was accusing the accusers. " Sydsvenskan is now trying to discredit the organizers by insinuating their support for terrorism and speaking with double messages", Salahuddin Barakat, a famous Malmö immam, wrote claiming this is a result of islamofobia. Other Swedish pro-Palestinians went even further. In April Samidoun, an international "Palestinian prisoner solidarity network" which is active in Sweden and supports Hamas, claimed that authorities are aiming to " silence the movement promoting the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance, especially the armed resistance". According to Samidoun, supporting armed resistance, which is a synonym for the massacre of Jews, is a natural right and preventing it is, once again, a silencing technique.
A pro-Palestinian demonstration in Malmö, May 2024
There are many more examples. A group of over 70 Swedish writers accused Swedish media of portraying Israel as a democracy fighting terrorist, while portraying Swedish protesters as "troublemakers or, in the worst case, anti-Semites" (Journalisten, August 2024). Another group, this time of 50 Lund academics, pointed the blame at Swedish politicians who instead of praising pro-Palestinian demonstrators as champions of democracy, call them "undemocratic, uncivilized and destructive", which is a "step in the development towards fascism" (Sydsvenskan, April 2024).
It's important to point out that this Swedish debate doesn’t really matter when it comes to the actual war in Gaza. The days when Swedish politicians, NGOs and diplomats could affect Middle-East affairs are over. In fact, they never really existed. Swedish demonstrators won't stop the war, bring Israeli leaders to the ICC or open the gates for humanitarian help in Rafah. But that doesn't mean they don't have an effect. They do. But it's not on foreign affairs – it's domestic.
This debate is a manifestation of everything wrong with Swedish discourse today – it's polarizing, it's full of fake news and conspiracy theories and lacks depth and complexity. and it's clear who the victims are. Demonstrations, boycotts, walk-outs, open letters and manifestations are affecting the sense of belonging and security of Jewish students and teachers in Swedish schools, they're effecting the debate climate on social media and work relations in the Swedish culture world, public sector and academia. This isn't a made-up problem; many Swedish Jews and Israelis are experiencing alienation from large parts of Swedish society.
But does the entire Swedish pro-Palestinian movement agree to dismiss criticism as "smutskastning", or will at least some of the thousands of demonstrators agree to enter a serious dialogue on this? Now, almost a year after the war started, it's time to reach some sort of understanding about what's considered antisemitic, undemocratic, uncivilized, and destructive. This will do absolutely nothing for the people of Israel and Gaza, but it may contribute a lot to Jews, Israelis, Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists here in Sweden.
Just to get the debate started, here are three initial thoughts to be considered.
First, the idea that Israel is a colonizer state which shouldn't really exist and should be wiped of the map is antisemitic. One can quote Edward Said and Franz Fanon and make comparisons to Algeria or South-Africa, but it won't change the fact that Jews are natives to the land between the river and the sea and have been so since biblical times, many centuries before the Palestinians even existed. Despite post-colonial theories, the land of Israel is part of Jewish identity, history and culture and therefore the idea that "I don't have a problem with Jews, I only have a problem with Israel" is a fantasy based on a false idea about Jews (just like most other forms of antisemitism).
Second, the fact that there are some ultra-orthodox and some Marxist anti-Zionist Jews, doesn't mean that Zionism is an extremist or unauthentic manifestation of Judaism. In other words, Noam Chomsky represents Jews today in the same way that NMR represents Sweden. It's true that 150 years ago, the Zionist movement was a minority within European Jewry since most Jews though they could continue living in Europe. But then came Auschwitz. After that, Zionism became more or less a consensus. There are many kinds of Zionism – religious, secular, socialist, revisionist and populist, but the base is clear – Jews, like any other people, have a right to self-definition in a state of their own. Claiming you "don't have a problem with Jews, but you won't allow Zionist on your streets" is claiming that every people in the world have rights that jews don't have. If that's not antisemitism, what is?
And finally, Hamas is the new version of the genocidal wing of the Palestinian national movement which historically had a close ties with Nazi Germany. These days it's a modern movement, combining a conservative, fascist, chauvinist, fundamentalist, anti-democratic, homophobic and xenophobic ideology with Jihadism, high-tech disinformation campaigns, a financial empire of global investments, modern weapon systems and powerful alliances with the world's most tyrannical regimes. Many parts of the pro-Palestinian movements in Sweden support Hamas actively and spread its propaganda, while for Jews in this country, Hamas are today's Nazis. This would be a good thing to remember next time people with megaphones in a "peaceful demonstration" shout "Hela världen står med Hamas. Allahu Akbar".
Pro-Palestinian protesters, Stockholm, December, 2023
If there are people who march in "solidarity with Palestine" who don't support these ideas and are willing to make themselves heard and renounce their extremist partners, they may find surprising allies. These may include Jews and Israelis who are willing to denounce Netanyahu's government, to oppose the occupation of the West-Bank, investigate allegations of war crimes and support a peaceful two-state solution. All that is needed is a show of good will: oppose Israel's policy but not it's right to exist, oppose Israel's violent racist nationalist parties, but not the entire national movement of the Jewish people, keep Swedish tax-financed public sector out of the conflict and, for god's sake, don't impose the conflict on Jewish school children, university students and work colleagues. Sadly, the war in the Middle-East will continue whatever we do here, but if we can agree on this, at least we can end its Swedish extension.
דיויד סטברו 