Joël Rubinfeld is the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism. He is concerned about the fate of Belgium’s small Jewish community (barely 30,000 people) at a time when anti-Semitism has become commonplace and even routine. The son of Holocaust survivors, he wanted to publish this op-ed in the Belgian press to pay tribute to the “Righteous Among the Nations” of our time, but it was rejected by all newspapers except for Marianne magazine, which published it, as did our news site.
In turbulent times, the isolation of Jews is a constant in history—a history in which October 7 opens a new chapter. But to believe that they have been abandoned by everyone would be inaccurate. During the Dreyfus affair, a handful of Dreyfusards mobilized to defend the Jewish captain, who had been unjustly convicted of treason.
During World War II, the Righteous Among the Nations saved Jews at the risk of their own lives. With its 1,834 Righteous, Belgium ranks second per capita in the pantheon of humanity, behind the Netherlands. However, few of these women and men of honor, whom history would only salute once the embers had died down, stepped forward. Yet if we were to conduct a street interview today, most people would probably say, with sincerity: “I would have been a Dreyfusard at the end of the 19th century, a member of the Resistance in 1940, and I would have hidden Jews in 1942.”
But do they really understand what such a commitment entails, when put to the test? When put to the test, it means a trial against Émile Zola, prosecuted by the French government for publishing his “J’accuse!” on January 13, 1898. A trial in a climate of great violence, which resonates singularly with current events: thousands of anti-Dreyfusards took to the streets of the capital, shouting “Death to the Jews!” and “Death to Zola! , ” smashed the windows of Jewish shops, and booed, boycotted, and threatened the journalist and writer—the police had to escort him out of the courtroom after each hearing to ensure his safety. At the end of the trial, Zola was sentenced to one year in prison—the maximum penalty. The most famous of the Dreyfusards ultimately escaped the Republic’s jails by going into exile in London.
BEING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY CANNOT BE DECREED
Put to the test, this meant the sacrifice of 4,000 Belgian resistance fighters—executed or killed in action during World War II—and the arrest of more than 30,000 of them by the German occupiers. The Yad Vashem archives, for their part, bear witness to hundreds of cases in Europe of righteous people tortured, shot, hanged, or who died in deportation to Nazi camps.
Being on the right side of history cannot be decreed: it must be earned in the crucible of reality. And the distressing spectacle we have been witnessing since October 7, 2023, forces us to conclude that history is repeating itself.
Mutatis mutandis, it is now the Jewish state that has replaced the Jewish captain in the dock. Transferred from Paris to The Hague, the court is now global. The countless fake news stories from the “Gaza Ministry of Health”—i.e., Hamas—are the indictments of the moment, forged by news fabricators and obediently relayed by international news agencies and most of the media. These are all pieces of evidence brandished as ammunition by UN prosecutors and human rights activists who, swapping their robes for keffiyehs, line up on the prosecution bench to judge the man they have already condemned.
NORMALIZATION OF ANTISEMITIC ACTS
Brussels proclaims itself an “anti-fascist city” while tolerating anti-Zionist fascists who, every day since October 11, 2023, have been demonstrating furiously in the capital of Europe. The first anniversary of the October 7 pogroms is celebrated in public, with calls to “burn the Jews.” The Monument to the Righteous and the Pavés de mémoire (Paving Stones of Memory) are desecrated in the name of Gaza. A building at the Free University of Brussels, renamed after a Palestinian terrorist, is occupied, vandalized, and the co-president of the Union of Jewish Students of Belgium is beaten up on the university campus.
The Israeli soccer team is banned from coming to play a match against the Red Devils. Under pressure from parents, some schools refuse to participate in Holocaust remembrance ceremonies. The Palestinian flag is displayed on the balconies of city halls in the capital and hoisted on the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters. At a school fair, nine-year-old schoolchildren dressed in black and wearing keffiyehs were made to dance to the martial rhythm of the Arabic song My Blood is Palestinian—a chilling scene reminiscent of images of Hamas “scout camps” in Gaza.
In Antwerp, religious Jews are being insulted, pelted with stones, and assaulted in the streets. A Jewish school has been refused the use of a hall for its graduation ceremony, on the grounds of “the genocide currently taking place in Gaza.” The words “5 JEWS” are displayed on the home screen of a bowling alley where five young Jews have come to enjoy themselves. The homes of rabbis who perform circumcisions are raided, the instruments they use to practice this three-thousand-year-old Jewish tradition are seized, and they are required to hand over to the judicial authorities a list of children circumcised in recent years. A meeting is planned for November 9—the anniversary of Kristallnacht—in a park known to be frequented by Jewish families, with the aim of “mutilating every Zionist.”
In Ghent, people are voting to boycott companies from the Jewish state and urging federal authorities to do the same. Israeli athletes are being banned from the European Ultimate Frisbee Championship for under-17s. The official ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht is being canceled for fear of incidents. The campus of the University of Ghent is occupied, staff members are assaulted, and the severing of ties with Israeli universities is celebrated—a severing that marks the capitulation of the academic authorities. A columnist who confessed in one of the country’s leading weekly newspapers his “desire to stick a sharp knife in the throat of every Jew [he] meets” is acquitted.
In the kingdom, Jewish cemeteries are desecrated, graves covered with swastikas and Stars of David torn from their graves, while hordes of contemporary anti-Semites take to the streets of major cities, shouting the slogan 2.0 of the Final Solution and glorifying the protagonists of the October 7 pogroms. Since then, there have been hundreds of anti-Semitic acts.
BELGIAN JEWS HIDE THEIR STAR SO AS NOT TO BE RECOGNIZED
As a result, Belgian Jews must hide once again. They change their names on their Uber accounts, remove the mezuzah from their doorposts, cover their kippahs with caps, and button up their shirts modestly to hide the Star of David they wear around their necks. In the last century, a yellow star was affixed to the chests of Jews so they could be recognized. Today, Jews hide their star so they won’t be recognized.
What is happening in Belgium speaks for most Western nations where, today as in the past, resistance fighters are few and far between, while the collaborators of our time proliferate in the political sphere, newsrooms, judicial bodies, academia, artistic circles, associations, and even in our streets, where so-called “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations “— ”pro-Hamas“ would be more accurate—increasingly resemble the marches of the SA in Nuremberg. ”Where danger grows, so too does that which saves,” said the philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin.
Joël Rubinfeld has been president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism since 2014. He was previously president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium, vice president of the European Jewish Congress, and co-president of the European Jewish Parliament.
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