Surging antisemitism across Europe and the United States since Oct. 7 is a modern manifestation of millennia-old, virulent Jew-hatred, according to Amichai Chikli, the Israeli diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism minister.
“In the past, religious blood libels led to torture, burnings at the stake and pogroms,” Chikli told JNS. “In the 20th century, horrific racist theories spawned the Holocaust.”
The same libels “are directed not at individual Jews, but at the Jewish state” today, he said. “Israel is accused of deliberate starvation, genocide against Palestinians, apartheid, colonialism and more.”
Jews are again being attacked on European soil 80 years after the Holocaust. Last week, an antisemitic mob assaulted a visibly Jewish father and his six-year-old son, who were visiting from France, near Milan in northern Italy.
Israeli teens have been attacked recently in Rhodes, an Israeli musician and his colleagues were expelled from a Vienna restaurant for speaking Hebrew and more than 50 young French Jews were removed from a Valencia flight for singing in Hebrew.
An Israeli DJ’s performance was canceled in Belgium, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival dropped the shows of two British Jewish comedians.
After France announced that it intends to recognize a Palestinian state in September, leading up to the United Nations General Assembly, the United Kingdom said on Tuesday that it would do the same if Israel didn’t meet certain conditions.
“In France and Britain, left-wing governments succumb to pressure from Muslim public opinion and navigate accordingly,” Chikli told JNS. “Not out of concern for Palestinians, but pure politics.”
“In Britain, they even lowered the voting age to 16,” he said. “Let’s hope they don’t adopt the Islamist tradition of marriages with 12-year-old girls.”
Starmer’s Britain lowers voting age to 16 to pander to Muslim voters. What’s next, adopting Islamist child marriages at 12? pic.twitter.com/2UfckzEXAA
— עמיחי שיקלי - Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) July 30, 2025
Chikli also warned of an aggressive campaign to drive a wedge between Jews and political conservatives in the United States, fueled by false accusations of intentional Israeli attacks on churches and Christians.
Allegations of an arson attack on a church in Taybeh proved unfounded. A nearby field had burned, with no damage to the holy site and no indication of deliberate Jewish involvement.
Chikli also said that there has been disproportionate attention to an accidental strike on a church in Gaza but, he said, relative silence about a brutal massacre of Druze in Syria that day.
The antisemitic podcaster Candace Owens has also been spreading Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, including inventing alleged Jewish-led genocide of Soviet Christians and imagining links between Jews and the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
These ideas are beginning to penetrate mainstream discourse, according to Chikli, who noted that Tucker Carlson, whom he described as a central figure in efforts to drive a wedge between American conservatives and Israel, alleged connections between the Jewish state and Epstein during a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference.
The level of hypocrisy, double standards, and outright lies directed at Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, is unprecedented, according to Chikli.
“This tsunami of hatred will eventually crash ashore, leaving destruction in its wake,” he told JNS.
The minister said that there are three ways that Jews can confront the complicated, new wave of antisemitism.
Jews ought to “stand tall” and “fight for the factual truth and for our moral and historical right to a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland,” he told JNS. “Don’t bow your head. Don’t apologize. There’s nothing to apologize for.”
There also must be a “swift and decisive military resolution in Gaza” and a “resounding defeat for Hamas’s murder and rape gangs, and the return of the hostages by any means necessary,” he said. And the third need is to expose the ways that Qatar, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan are funding antisemitic influencers, he said.
“This phenomenon isn’t spontaneous,” Chikli told JNS. “It’s a state-sponsored effort. Bringing these connections to light will severely undermine their credibility.”
Shlomo Karhi, the Israeli communications minister, told JNS that Europe’s dark history of Jew-hatred is rearing its head, now cloaked in the language of political correctness and moral hypocrisy.
“When democratic nations ban Israeli ministers simply for standing up to Islamist terror, they are not making a statement about us. They are making a statement about themselves,” Karhi said.
Several countries have barred Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli finance and national security ministers respectively, from their territories.
Israel stands on the front lines in the global fight against radical extremism, according to Karhi. The minister told JNS that when European nations distance themselves from the Jewish state, they abandon the principles they claim to uphold—freedom, democracy and sanctity of human life.
“Let me be clear: Jew-hatred never ends with the Jews,” said Karhi, who is a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party.
“Those who target Israelis today will face the same ideology on their own streets tomorrow,” he said. “What needs to be done is simple. European leaders must abandon their appeasement, reject this new-old antisemitism and stand resolutely with Israel before it’s too late.”
“Not for our sake,” he said. “But for their own.”
