THERE WERE more anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 than in any year since the second World War.
The annual report by the Jewish Agency and Israel’s ministry for Diaspora affairs, released yesterday in Jerusalem, concluded that Israel’s 22-day military offensive in Gaza, a year ago, sparked a wave of anti-Jewish attacks worldwide.
As many incidents against Jews were reported in the first three months of 2009 – in the period immediately after the Gaza war – as for the entire previous year.
In France, 631 anti-Semitic acts were committed in the first half of 2009, 113 of them violent, compared with 474 incidents in the same period in 2008.
In Britain, there were 609 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2009, compared with 276 the previous year.
There were two murders linked with anti-Semitism in the US in 2009 – one of a woman university student in Connecticut, and the other of a non-Jewish guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington DC.
The anti-Semitism consisted of acts of violence, the burning of synagogues, defacing of cemeteries and Holocaust memorials, as well as verbal assaults.
The report accused the far- right, the extreme-left and radical Muslims of being behind the attacks, and claimed there was a blurring of the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
According to the report, “Most of the incidents reflected long-standing and known anti-Semitic ideas, but were extreme, intensive and louder than before . . . Many of the expressions of anti-Semitism in 2009 created a total link between Israel and Jews.”
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the current form of anti-Semitism “is mixed with a new intention of trying to deny the Jewish state the right of self-defence”. Almost half of Western Europeans surveyed for the report believed Jews exploited the persecution of their past as a method of extorting money. Seventy-five per cent of Poles and Spaniards agreed with that statement.
The most recent anti-Semitic film, posted on the web, alleged that staff working at the Israeli army field hospital in Haiti, set up after the earthquake, stole victims’ organs.
Noting the increase in incidents against Jews on campuses worldwide, Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky said his organisation would increase the number of emissaries to foreign universities from 19 to over 100.