From Amsterdam to Detroit, attacks on synagogues show how Israel’s wars and rhetoric are spilling over onto Diaspora communities
Israel is dangerous for Jews, precisely because it presents itself as the representative of the Jewish people across generations. When, together with the United States, it bombs Iran and crushes Lebanon, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, Israel does so in the name of the Jewish people, not just in the name of its Jewish citizens.
As it continues a war of annihilation and revenge – now in its low intensity stage – against the Palestinian population, confined to 48 percent of the Gaza Strip, and after portraying Palestinians as a link in a historical chain of archenemies, it acts as an ambassador for Jews everywhere.
When it gives free rein to its settlers and its mista’arvim (undercover units whose members disguise themselves as Palestinians) to slay Palestinians, it envisions Diaspora Jews who will settle or, at the very least, invest their wealth in its territory. When Israel accelerates the expulsion of Palestinians from most of the West Bank into enclaves it has long planned, it does so with the thought of millions of Jews who may still be forced to flee and immigrate to it, God willing, when antisemitism increases.
From March 3 to 14 at least seven incidents of violence were reported against synagogues and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Canada, Europe and the United States; these did not result in fatalities. The choice of religious institutions as targets for explosives, even with a homemade device, reeks of antisemitism. These institutions are identified with a distinct group and therefore serve as clear and convenient targets for acts of violence. Most likely, if there had been casualties, they would have been Jews and clearly uninvolved.
An attack on a synagogue, even if initially intended to be symbolic, signals a desire to instill fear and harm Jews elsewhere. An attack on a synagogue in the Diaspora, in particular, is the mirror image of Israel’s claim to represent every Jew and is therefore extremely foolish. It could encourage people to immigrate to the land between the sea and the river, the opposite of what serves the Palestinian interest.
But the reported attacks are also an expression of a desire for revenge. For a family wiped out, for a residential neighborhood that vanished, for children pulled trembling from the rubble. Who better than Israel and its Jewish citizens can understand the desire for revenge? Since October 7, 2023, sadistic revenge has been the guiding principle for too many prison guards, soldiers, settlers, informants combing through Facebook posts, and police officers.
It is not the same thing at all, our politicians and diplomats will say. And they would be right. Because the Israeli revenge, serves an ancient geopolitical purpose of cleansing the land of all its Arabs. Revenge against us is revenge for its own sake, lacking strategic planning or logic.
Between Friday and Saturday, March 13-14, an explosive device was detonated near an external wall of a Jewish school in Amsterdam; the photograph shows soot marks on a pipe and some bricks. Approximately 24 hours earlier, on March 12, a similar device was detonated near a synagogue in Rotterdam; the entrance door was damaged. Another explosive device was detonated at dawn on March 9 on the doorstep of a synagogue in Liège, Belgium; its windows and those of a nearby building were shattered. Earlier, on March 6, shots were fired at a synagogue in North York, Canada. Shell casings and bullet holes were found in the windows.
And last Thursday, on March 12, an armed man rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel, a large Reform synagogue in a Detroit suburb. Police officers shot and killed the driver, who was identified as a Lebanese man whose family had been killed in Israeli bombings. In all cases, police responded quickly. In some cases, a Shi’ite organization claimed responsibility.
On X, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted: “In Rotterdam, a synagogue was attacked yesterday. But the Netherlands found it more important to intervene in South Africa’s fabricated case against the State of Israel. Shameful!.”
His deputy, Sharren Haskel, also took to X to lecture the Netherlands, albeit more leniently: “European leaders are facing a historic moment of decision: between radical Islamism and the values of Western democratic civilization… Europe’s leaders must decide which side they stand on in this chapter of human history. I will never apologize for defending the Jewish people – in Israel and across the diaspora. For me, this is a moral duty.”
According to Israeli president Isaac Herzog, he expressed Israel’s solidarity with the Jews in the Netherlands in a conversation with Jewish community leaders in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Have the three of them ever called on the Israel Police to act against “radical Judaism” that ignites daily, non-symbolic pogroms in the West Bank? Of course not. They and other Israeli representatives who rush to scold Europeans and cry “antisemitism” over every piece of graffiti in a cemetery break records for hypocrisy and double standards. So too do tooofficial Jewish leaderships in the Diaspora, who continue to support Israel no matter what and do not even publicly disavow the deadly violence of the settlers, which rages in the name of their God and history.
This makes it easy to attribute to every Jew in the Diaspora complicity in, and support for, every atrocity committed by Israel and the soldiers and settlers it recruits for this.
Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist, columnist, activist, and author, mostly known for her columns in the daily newspaperHaaretz covering Palestinian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank. Frustrated by the events of the First Intifada and by what she considered their inadequate coverage in the Israeli media, she started to report from the Palestinian territories in 1991. As of 2003, she was the only Jewish Israeli journalist who has lived full-time among the Palestinians. She lived in Gaza from 1993 to 1997. In 1999, Amira Hass published her memorable book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, an account of life in Gaza during a time of conflict and hardship
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