Joël Rubinfeld is a founding member and president of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism and president of the Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan. He was president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium, vice-president of the European Jewish Congress, and co-chairman of the European Jewish Parliament.

Canlorbe:You have described Israel as the "Dreyfus of nations." What does that mean?

Rubinfeld:Since October 7, 2023, we have been living through a kind of endless "Dreyfus trial," but with one major difference: the state has replaced the person. In the past, Dreyfus stood on trial; today, the Jewish state has taken his place.

The "prosecutors" in this permanent trial are UN agencies, "rapporteurs," Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Human Rights League — which, ironically, was founded in 1901 in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. There is also a whole ecosystem of organizations claiming to speak in the name of human rights, along with their relays in the newsrooms, in academia, in activist and cultural circles, and on the street.

When I see these so-called "pro-Palestinian" demonstrators, it seems as if many of them could not care less about the Palestinians. If they were truly pro-Palestinian, they would first call for the eradication of Hamas, which is the poison and the nightmare first of all of the Palestinian people. The poison, unfortunately, was widely embraced by Hamas's absolute majority (56%) in the last Palestinian legislative elections in 2006.

These demonstrations in Europe — 300,000 people in London, 100,000 in Brussels, and hundreds of thousands in France—remind me, of the marches in the early 1930s in Germany. Of course, it is not an exact historical equivalence, but there seems a resemblance in the occupation of public space, crowd dynamics, and the pressure exerted on political life. There are also the hateful slogans, yesterday targeting Jews; today the Jewish state and its supporters: "Death to the Jews" becomes "Death to Israel," "Boycott the Jews" becomes "Boycott the Zionists," the new polite, "politically correct" word for hating Jews.

This fever in the streets weighs on political leaders. The great problem is that many of them think in purely arithmetical terms. They tend to hold a simplistic, and therefore racist, view of communities: "Jews" equals "Israel," and "Muslims" equals "Palestine." Once they do the math, conclusions follow.

In Belgium, there are about 30,000 Jews and 900,000 Muslims—a ratio of one to thirty. Cynics conclude: "I have everything to lose by defending Jews or Israel, and everything to gain by supporting 'Palestine'—by riding the wave of what Hamas has become in the activist imagination—because it wins me votes."

In Brussels, given its specific demographics, antisemitism has become an electoral asset. Not the "old" antisemitism of those nostalgic for Auschwitz, but a revised, contemporary form—one that equates Gaza with Auschwitz.

The votes are what make the situation almost irreversible. It has been called "Islam's Rule of Numbers": When one is in the minority, one keeps relatively inconspicuous, but the larger one's percentage of the population becomes, the more assertive one gets. The expert on Islam, Raymond Ibrahim,notesthat in Europe, where Muslim minorities are larger than in the United States, open violence has become common – but always framed as a grievance because that word pacifies the West. He cites London, where Muslims currently make up about15% of the population,the murderer of Fusilier Lee Rigby, with his hands still covered in blooddeclared, "We swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.... You will never be safe," and then blamed the murder on avenging the deaths of Muslims at the hands of British troops.

Source: Gatestone Institute :: Articles