Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called for an emergency meeting to prepare for an expected spike in immigration as antisemitism rises globally in the wake of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday evening, Sa’ar said that a wave of worldwide antisemitism has eroded Jews’ sense of security in the Diaspora and has already generated a greater demand for immigration to Israel.
“A broad national plan is required that will also include optimal absorption of the expected immigration,” he wrote.
The top diplomat noted a rise in immigration from France and Britain was already evident. That phenomenon is expected to extend to other countries as well, Sa’ar said.
In the United Kingdom, 1,978 instances of Jew-hatred were recorded in the first six months of 2024. That is the highest January-to-June total ever reported by the Community Security Trust (CST), a Jewish group collecting data on antisemitism. The previous record of 1,371 incidents was in 2021.
On Nov. 24, about 60,000 demonstrators marched through the British capital to protest rising Jew-hatred. It was the largest demonstration against antisemitism in London since the 1936 anti-fascist “Battle of Cable Street.”
On Nov. 19, French officials urged a collective European Union response to what they described as “one of the worst explosions of antisemitism” in recent history. French European Affairs Minister Benjamin Haddad convened an emergency meeting in Brussels with his E.U. counterparts to discuss the issue.
A report published in November by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ National Task Force for Countering De-legitimization found that since the Oct. 7 massacre, more than 96% of Jews in Europe have encountered antisemitism in their daily lives.
