By Rabbi Menachem Margolin
I woke up on Friday morning to news that my face, along with that of some of my colleagues, was plastered around the European quarter in Brussels. We are – say the posters – ‘lobbying for genocide’.
The posters include our names, and the addresses of our work place. All that was missing was ‘wanted dead or alive’ and the amount of reward involved.
In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell writes: “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
The Holocaust, until recently, was most closely associated with the word genocide. The word genocide was itself created by a Jewish Refugee from Poland during world war two, Raphael Lemkin.
“The proto-typical Auschwitz-centered way of defining genocide as intentional large scale mass-murder must be overturned. We must treat genocidal recognition as a rhetorical achievement.” These sinister words, by a prominent pro-Palestinian ‘critical thinker’ have become an overarching goal for the opponents of the world’s only Jewish state.
To recast Jews as the agents of genocide, is to utterly turn the tables. If Gaza is a genocide, then Israel is as bad as the Nazis, and the Jews, who overwhelmingly support the world’s only Jewish state, are Nazi sympathisers. And no Nazi can have any moral claim over anything. That is much more than a ‘rhetorical achievement’. It is victory for the total perversion of language.
I want to be clear. This isn’t some academic argument, or a battle of ideas. The consequences of this ‘work’ represent a death threat against every Jew in Europe. After all who wants a genocidal Nazi Jew living in their neighbourhood? Or in Europe?
We received some personal messages of support, but unfortunately, no political leader has publicly condemned it. It would have been appropriate to immediately provide protection for prominent Jewish figures who have become targets and whose lives are in danger. That hasn’t happened either
As I write, the European Parliament is preparing to hold a debate entitled the ‘genocide in Gaza’, and last Sunday, as my colleagues and I were dealing with the police, thousands were allowed to march through the Belgian Capital espousing the language of genocide. Walking past the posters, seeing our faces. Making a mental note. We can only hope that is as far as it goes.
But hope is in desperately short supply for Jews in Belgium, and across the continent.
For my colleagues and I, the life-threatening language means that we have been advised to work from home. We have been told to wear baseball caps, and to try different routes as we go about our daily lives. We – who are accused of lobbying for genocide – now have a target on our backs. The term, for a people who just want to live in peace, is deeply offensive given that most our families lost loved ones during the Holocaust.
While the posters represent a new low in the Mariana trench that is European antisemitism, in the overall experience for Jews across Europe today, it is simply a case of business as usual.
And this sad, scary and Orwellian world that Jews live in today will continue to endure and worsen, unless governments, including the European Union, are prepared to stand up and wrestle the word genocide from those who find the destruction of European Jewry, and the world’s only Jewish state, to be “a beautiful thing’. If they do not Europe will be plumbing new and dangerous depths of hate, last seen on this Continent 80 short years ago.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin is Chairman of the European Jewish Association (EJA), an organization based in Brussels which represents dozens of Jewish communities across Europe.