Many recent mass shootings have largely hit Jewish communities, and now the communities have had to come to grips with tragedy.
It’s been exactly one month since a gunman opened fire at the 4th of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Seven people died in the attack, with dozens more suffering injuries.
The shooting rocked the community, with a diverse set of victims. They included a 78-year-old Latino grandfather, a 63-year-old Jewish synagogue employee and a couple in their 30s who died protecting their two-year-old son.
It’s a story where Highland Park joins the list of communities that are now synonymous with tragedy: Uvalde, Buffalo, El Paso, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Columbine.
These communities found strength in the aftermath of mass shootings. In a lot of those cases, it comes from houses of worship. In recent years, many attacks have hit largely Jewish communities.
Roughly half of Highland Park’s population is Jewish. To be clear, law enforcement officials have not announced a motive for the shooting, but posts connected to the suspect have included hateful comments about multiple minority groups, including Jews.
Regardless of the motive in Highland Park, a rise in the number of anti-Semitic attacks have left American Jews on edge.
A survey released in April by the Jewish civil rights group the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic incidents hit an all-time high in 2021, with the number of incidents nearly tripling since 2015.
Last fall, polling done by SSRS for the American Jewish Committee found that 90% of American Jews felt anti-Semitism was a problem in the U.S., with 82% saying they thought anti-Semitism increased in the previous five years.
These fears translate into tragedy and loss of life. In the last few years, there have been several attacks on synagogues in the U.S.
In January, a gunman took four people hostage during a service at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
In April 2019 on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, an openly anti-Semitic shooter killed a woman and wounded three others, including a rabbi, at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, not far from San Diego.
That attack followed an attack in October 2018, where a shooter with anti-Semitic beliefs killed 11 people and wounded six others in a shooting during a Saturday morning service at the Tree of Life synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.
Three congregations shared the synagogue, all of whom had to come to grips with tragedy.
“We knew that obviously something terrible had happened, and we sort of knew who,” said Stephen Cohen, New Light Congregation co-president. “It was the terrible things that happened, too, but it wasn’t until later in the evening that the coroner’s office actually was willing to release and confirm who survived and who did not that day. The following week was spent attending funerals.”
“One funeral after the other, after the other, if you could even get into the funeral homes,” said Barbara Caplan, New Light Congregation co-president.
New Light Congregation lost three of its members that day – Richard Gottfried, Daniel Stein and Melvin Wax. Each of the congregations that had been using Tree of Life Synagogue moved out.
But in the weeks afterward, members still sought the connection to their faith.
“People were looking for reassurance that we were all still going to be able to be together,” Caplan said. “They wanted the reassurance we could still be there to hug each other, be there for services.”
In Squirrel Hill, healing has become more than just a matter of faith. Government officials, synagogues and nonprofits came together to form a partnership that provides mental health options to the community.
“There’s really no one way to heal,” said Ranisa Davidson, 1027 Healing Partnership program manager. “There’s no one right way to heal, so what works for somebody is not going to work for another. When you have a community trauma like the mass shooting that occurred in Pittsburgh, it’s hard to find ways for an entire community to heal.”
That healing can cut across communities and bring places that suffered tragedy back together. In Squirrel Hill, members who were invited to Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which suffered a mass shooting of its own in 2015, remembered how connected they felt.
“The pastor called us up to the front of the room, and we expected him to say benediction or something nice,” Cohen said. “Instead, he called up the entire congregation to come and hug us. There must have been about about 500 people in the room, and we are probably about 10 to 15 individuals. We were just surrounded by love, by compassion, and it’s events like that that make you feel that you know that we are family, that we are all one. We are all trying to face this together and to try to move on.”
Synagogues have a role to play in healing for the community, even when the attacks aren’t explicitly anti-Semitic.
They can provide help in the weeks, days, sometimes even the immediate moments after a mass shooting.
Rabbi Bradd Boxman of Congregation Kol Tikvah in Parkland, Florida saw that firsthand when his synagogue became an emergency place of refuge during the 2018 mass shooting, less than a mile away from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“When it all began, because we’re only a half a mile from the synagogue and the synagogue being a vibrant center for our youth in the first place, they thought to run to the synagogue, even though the non-Jewish kids went to Dunkin Donuts and 7-Eleven and other places,” Rabbi Boxman said. “Our kids came here. They knew that this would be their they’re their their home where they could be taken care of.”
Rabbi Boxman said that a rabbi has a major role to play in guiding communities through the immediate aftermath. Parkland, similar to Highland Park, has a large Jewish population. Five of the 17 victims in the Parkland shooting were Jewish, and four of them had connections to the synagogue.
“I think in any trauma, you run on adrenaline,” Rabbi Boxman said. “I learned as a rabbi that the most important thing I can do is to try to be the calm in the midst of the storm, and you deal with your pain and sorrow afterwards. But a leader, I think, has to kind of absorb a lot of that, and so just trying to get the families through the first days and weeks of mourning.”
He’s quick to point out that it’s about more than just healing and care in the moment; congregations can also help push for change.
He and several young members who later helped organize the March for Our Lives movement against gun violence spoke with Florida officials and protested at the state legislature.
“I understand that they say that religion is there to to comfort the afflicted but also to afflict the comfortable,” Rabbi Boxman said. “Coming out of the reform Jewish tradition, that’s the prophetic tradition. I believe strongly that… we live by standing up for the values that we cherish, and if we just speak them idly in the synagogue, that they don’t manifest themselves in real action outside the synagogue, then we are false to ourselves. So, we’ve had to walk a line.”
Sometimes, that advocacy does lead to change. Florida passed a “red-flag law” to tighten gun purchases.
After Highland Park, the House of Representatives passed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, but that bill may not make it through the Senate.
The recent string of high-profile mass shootings in the U.S. is prompting some faith leaders to ramp up security.
The Rev. Steven Marsh never thought he would see the day his church in Laguna Woods, California — a town of 16,500 populated largely by retirees — would be spending $20,000 a month for security.
Then a gunman opened fire on May 15 during a luncheon at Geneva Presbyterian Church, where Marsh is senior pastor, killing one and injuring five other members of a Taiwanese congregation that met there. Officials said the man, who was motivated by political hatred against Taiwan, chained the church’s doors shut and hid firebombs inside before shooting at the gathering of elderly church members.
Houses of worship are meant to be places of shelter, reflection and peace, where strangers are welcome. But the recent string of high-profile mass shootings in the U.S. is a reminder violence can happen anywhere, prompting some faith leaders to ramp up security.
At Geneva Presbyterian, armed security guards now stand watch every weekday and during Sunday services. The church also is adding more security cameras, developing an active shooter plan and applying for Department of Homeland Security funding.
“We’re not trying to militarize the church,” Marsh said. “We prayed about it and made a decision to have armed security as an act of faith.”
Without the new security measures, Marsh predicted that a mass exodus by the congregation and the schools on the church’s campus would have followed the shooting.
Creating a space that is both safe and welcoming is possible, said Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the former spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.
In January, he and three others were taken hostage by a pistol-wielding man during a Shabbat service. Cytron-Walker threw a chair at the gunman — a courageous act that helped them safely escape — after a nearly 11-hour standoff. He credits the several rounds of active shooter training he has taken.
“When you are unable to run away or find a hiding place, you need to find a way to act and to fight back,” Cytron-Walker said. “When we were most afraid he was going to kill us, I saw a moment I had been looking for all day long.”
Cytron-Walker now leads Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As he works on a security plan with his new congregation, he is being mindful of how a welcoming synagogue can enhance safety “because someone who wants to do harm can see that they are not going to be able to walk in anonymous.”
Historically, sanctuaries have been vulnerable to violent attacks — from bombings at Black churches during the Civil Rights era to more recent shootings in the U.S. at mosques and Sikh gurdwaras. In the U.S., FBI hate crime statistics show that incidents in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques increased 34.8% between 2014 and 2018.
“All faiths are under attack in America by radicals and extremists,” said Alon Stivi, a security consultant for synagogues, Jewish community centers and day schools. Some congregants are reticent to show up.
“They’re asking a lot more questions: ‘Should I come to the weekly services or just come for the holidays? And if I come, should I bring my kids?'”
Religious leaders who once preferred to leave security in the hands of the divine are taking precautions that seemed unthinkable years prior, Stivi said. More congregants are carrying concealed handguns to services, too, he said.
From $25 million in 2016 to $180 million last year, the federal government has steadily increased the amount of funding it sets aside to help the faith community with security costs, Stivi said. But not all faith leaders are aware they can apply for it, he said.
Past attacks on houses of worship and other public spaces have prompted faith leaders to evaluate — sometimes for the first time — if there is more that can be done to keep their flocks safe.
Today an armed police officer watches over Sunday services at Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, said the Rev. Kylon Middleton, who leads the congregation. When an officer is unable to be on campus for church events, members carrying concealed weapons keep watch.
“It is sad, but we are in such times where we must have armed security to protect our people,” he said.
The church is two blocks away from Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 2015, a self-proclaimed white supremacist opened fire during Bible study and killed nine worshippers, including the senior pastor. Middleton said the late pastor was like a brother to him.
In the wake of the massacre, security discussions at Mt. Zion factor worship style into the equation, including the need for some to always keep their eyes open, especially when most have theirs closed in prayer, Middleton said.
“No one ever thought mass shootings would happen in churches, which are sacred sanctuaries where you can escape the world and seek spiritual refuge,” he said. “When that space has been violated, it creates a restlessness of spirit.”
After the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Rabbi Jon Leener met with local New York police to discuss safety for Base BKLYN, his home-based ministry that has welcomed thousands.
For years, he and his wife, Faith, would unlock their front door right before Shabbat dinners, believing in a Judaism where no door is shut or locked. That changed after Tree of Life — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Leener also installed a security camera and a buzz-in system for visitors. He hired an armed guard after this year’s hostage situation in Texas.
“It’s terribly unfortunate that we live in an age when we need to compromise our value of openness for the threat of violence, but that is just the reality at the moment,” Leener said.
It is a balancing act for many. Marsh said the shooting in his church happened because members of the Taiwanese congregation were welcoming to the shooter — a person they didn’t know.
“The church needs to be welcoming to all people, and we cannot lose that,” he said.
“Are there ways an active shooter could get on our campus again? Yes. But we have to be willing to have this happen again. Otherwise, we would all have to go through metal detectors. It would no longer be a church.”
JERUSALEM — More than 1,550 people have been arrested over the past two weeks, the Israeli police said on Monday, on suspicion of involvement in the recent outbreak of mob violence between Arabs and Jews that convulsed cities across Israel.
Announcing the start of an even more concerted arrest campaign, the police said in a statement that thousands of police and border police officers had spread out across the country “to bring the rioters, criminals and all those involved in the disturbances to justice.”
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the police, said that 70 percent of those arrested were Arab citizens of Israel while 30 percent were Jewish. About 150 suspects have already been charged, the police said.
“The majority of incidents that took place were carried out by Arab Israelis who took to the streets and attacked Jewish civilians and police officers,” he said.
the worst intercommunal violence Israel has seen in decades, the outburst of assaults, arson and vandalism spread to other mixed cities in northern Israel and the Arab towns of the Galilee, while Bedouin Arabs torched and ambushed Jews’ cars with stones on the roads in the southern Negev desert.
Over several nights, Arab and Jewish gangs sought out targets. Several victims on both sides were beaten unconscious; one Jewish man was badly burned; and at times the unrest turned lethal.
looming eviction of six Palestinian families from homes claimed by Jewish landlords has contributed to the unrest, and where the police continue to disperse sporadic protests.
The police have come in for harsh criticism from both Jewish and Arab witnesses and victims of the mob violence. Many said they had tried to call the police as their properties came under attack during the disturbances but got no response.
Mr. Rosenfeld said that at that time too many incidents were occurring simultaneously and that it was impossible to place an officer by every door.
The government called in hundreds of border police officers from the occupied West Bank to restore order in Lod.
When crime involved only Arab citizens, as both perpetrators and victims, the police showed little interest, said Ms. Touma-Sliman, the lawmaker, adding, “we’ve been pleading for years for them to take action.”
Only now, she said, when the violence affected the Jewish population, were the police talking about gathering video footage from security cameras and using other technological means to locate and identify suspects.
“I have lost confidence in the police,” she said. “They will have to earn it.”
On Monday alone, the police said, they had arrested 74 suspects, including dozens who had thrown stones, fireworks and firebombs and assaulted officers in Jerusalem and Arab-populated areas of central Israel. They said they had also seized illegal weapons, including an M16 assault rifle, and ammunition.
Three Israeli Jews, including a minor, 16, were charged on Monday for what the prosecution called the “attempted terrorist murder” of an Arab Israeli driver in Bat Yam, a Tel Aviv suburb. He was dragged from his car and beaten almost to death at the height of the intercommunal violence.
LOD, Israel — Years before the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod erupted in mob violence, a demographic shift had begun to take root: Hundreds of young Jews who support a religious, nationalist movement started to move into a mostly Arab neighborhood with the express aim of strengthening the Israeli city’s Jewish identity.
A similar change was playing out in other mixed Arab-Jewish cities inside Israel, such as nearby Ramla and Acre in the north — part of a loosely organized nationwide project known as Torah Nucleus. They say that their intention is to uplift poor and neglected areas on the margins of society, particularly in mixed cities, and to enrich Jewish life there. Its supporters have moved into dozens of Israeli cities and towns.
“Perhaps ours is a complex message,” said Avi Rokach, 43, chairman of the Torah Nucleus association in Lod. “Lod is a Jewish city. It is our agenda and our religious duty to look out for whoever lives here, be they Jewish, Muslim or Hindu.”
abruptly exposed.
In Lod, hundreds of the city’s Arab citizens took to the streets, throwing stones, burning cars and setting fire to properties, venting their rage against one primary target: The mostly young, Orthodox Jewish families who had arrived in recent years, saying they wanted to lift up the working-class city and make it more Jewish.
organized on social networks and sought out Arab victims in Lod and other cities, beating an Arab man almost to death in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam.
Lod, which traces its history to the days of Canaan and is known as Lydda in Arabic, has a particularly fraught history centered around the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Most of the original Palestinian residents of the city were expelled and never allowed to return.
Bedouins — the seminomadic Arabs from Israel’s Negev desert — arrived in the following decades as did families of Palestinians from the West Bank who had collaborated with Israel, seeking refuge.
to tone down the volume on the Muslim call to prayer from minarets in the city and his right-hand man is a founder of Lod’s Torah Nucleus.
Arab resentment is compounded by a lingering fear of displacement, house by house.
About eight years ago, Torah Nucleus built a pre-army academy and a religious boys’ elementary school next to the long-established school for Arab pupils on Exodus Street in the heart of Ramat Eshkol.
These Jewish institutions were the first to be set on fire on May 10. The trouble started after evening prayers, witnesses said. Arab youths raised a Palestinian flag in the square and demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. The police dispersed them with tear gas and stun grenades.
Angry Arab mobs then went on a rampage, burning synagogues, Jewish apartments and cars in Ramat Eshkol. One group approached another Torah Nucleus neighborhood, where a Jewish crowd had gathered.
There, the four Jewish suspects in the shooting claimed, they fired in the air in self-defense as Arab rioters began to rush at them, throwing stones and firebombs, according to court documents.
The funeral for the victim, Mr. Hassouna, the next day devolved into new clashes as the mourners, the building contractor Mr. Salama among them, insisted on passing through Exodus Street with the body in defiance of police instructions.
That night, gangs of Jewish extremists, some of them armed, came from out of town to attack Arabs and their property, according to witnesses. Mr. Salama said he was hit by a stone while sitting in his garden. Gunshots were heard on both sides.
One Jewish apartment in Ramat Eshkol was burned to cinders after Arab intruders broke open a hole in the wall. The family had already left. A neighbor, Nadav Klinger, said the charred flat would be preserved as a museum.
Elsewhere in Lod, some veteran Jewish and Arab neighbors said their good relations remained intact and agreed that the influx of religious Jewish professionals had lifted the city up.
Ayelet-Chen Wadler, 44, a physicist who grew up in a West Bank settlement, came to Lod with her family 15 years ago to join the Torah Nucleus community.
“I was raised to try to make an impact,” she said. “Just by living here, you make a difference.”
A week after the peak in the violence, about 30 of the 40 Jewish families who had evacuated their homes in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood had returned.
“I believe we can get back to where we were before, but it might take some time,” said Mr. Rokach, the chairman of the Torah nucleus in Lod, condemning the revenge attacks by Jews from outside.
“Nobody’s leaving. Quite the opposite. As we speak, I just got a WhatsApp message from a family looking for a home here. Nor are the Arabs leaving.”
BRUSSELS — A diplomatic flurry from the White House and Europe added pressure on Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday to halt their 10-day-old conflict before it turned into a war entangling more of the Middle East.
President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — their second phone call in three days — telling the Israeli leader he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire,” administration officials said. Although they portrayed the call as consistent with what Mr. Biden had been saying, his decision to set a deadline was an escalation.
And in Europe, France and Germany, both strong allies of Israel that had initially held back from pressuring Mr. Netanyahu in the early days of the conflict, intensified their push for a cease-fire.
French diplomats sought to advance their proposed United Nations Security Council resolution that would call on the antagonists to stop fighting and to allow unfettered humanitarian access to Gaza. It remained unclear on Wednesday if the United States, which has blocked all Security Council attempts to even issue a statement condemning the violence, would go along with the French resolution.
Twitter post afterward, he said, “I especially appreciate the support of our friend @POTUS Joe Biden, for the State of Israel’s right to self-defense.”
confronted Mr. Biden during his trip to a Ford plant, and pleaded with him to address the growing violence in the region and protect Palestinian lives.
Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, who witnessed that interaction, said in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s reluctance to negotiate a cease-fire had made it harder for Democrats across the political spectrum to defend Israel’s actions.
Some saw the second phone call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu as messaging to placate domestic constituents.
Democrats have been pushing Mr. Biden “to take a tougher line and this was his opportunity to demonstrate that he is doing so,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington group that supports Mr. Netanyahu’s policies. He also said Mr. Netanyahu “does not want to give the impression that he’s been told to end this conflict before it’s the right time to do so.”
For European nations, the intensified push for a cease-fire also is based partly on political calculations.
pro-Palestinian demonstrations have sometimes turned into anti-Israeli protests and anti-Semitic attacks, including assaults on synagogues. Governments fear such protests and internal violence will worsen the longer the conflict lasts.
France is on alert for acts of Islamist terrorism, often from French-born Muslims outraged by events in the Middle East. Germany, which welcomed a million mostly Muslim migrants in 2015, is struggling to contain their anger about Israel.
At the same time, the election of Mr. Trump in 2016 also encouraged a right-wing European populism that is anti-immigration and often anti-Islamic, with a clear political identification with “Judeo-Christian values” and strong support for Israel. That is clear in France, with the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, as well as in Germany, with the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Hugh Lovatt, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Up until now at least, there also had been a gradual de-emphasis of the Palestinian issue by governments, said Kristina Kausch, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
She attributed that de-emphasis partly to Israel’s shelved plans to annex the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians want as part of their own ambitions for an independent state, and to the 2020 Abraham Accords, Israel’s normalization of ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, all big defenders of Palestinian rights. Ms. Kausch said there had been a sense that “the Palestinian cause can be put on the back burner, that Arab countries and people don’t care anymore.”
But this new outbreak, Ms. Kausch said, hadshown “that the Palestinian cause is alive and kicking.” And no longer ignorable, at least for a while.
Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
At the beginning of this conflict, he said, the United States and Europe had been“largely sympathetic to the Israeli narrative, willing to give them some space to accomplish their military ambitions.”
similar two-page resolution passed by the Security Council during another fierce Gaza war in January 2009, and on which the United States abstained.
The draft resolution seeks a cessation of hostilities, humanitarian access to Gaza, the condemnation of the rocket barrages and any incitement to violence, the official said.
In Germany, traditional support for Israel and patience with its military campaign appears to be waning.
After speaking with Mr. Netanyahu on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel “sharply condemned the continued rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel and assured the prime minister of the German government’s solidarity,” said her spokesman, Steffen Seibert.
But given the many civilian lives lost “on both sides,” Mr. Seibert said, “the chancellor expressed her hope that the fighting will end as soon as possible.”
Mr. Maas, the German foreign minister, said on Tuesday that “ending the violence in the Middle East is the first priority,” followed by political negotiations. But he also blamed Hamas for the escalation.
He appeared to be responding to domestic criticism that the government has been too lenient in the face of pro-Palestinian and sometimes anti-Semitic protests.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented that Germany should “concentrate on internal affairs and reflect that the ‘welcome culture’ extended to refugees was astoundingly naïve when it came to anti-Semitism.”
The question for Germany now, the paper said, “is how do we teach those for whom a hatred of Israel is in their DNA that Israel’s security is part of their adopted homeland’s raison d’être?”
Steven Erlanger reported from Brussels, and Jim Tankersley and Katie Rogers from Washington. Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington.
BRUSSELS — A diplomatic flurry from the White House and Europe added pressure on Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday to halt their 10-day-old conflict before it turned into a war entangling more of the Middle East.
President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — their second phone call in three days — telling the Israeli leader he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire,” administration officials said. Although they portrayed the call as consistent with what Mr. Biden had been saying, his decision to set a deadline was an escalation. .
And in Europe, France and Germany, both strong allies of Israel that had initially held back from pressuring Mr. Netanyahu in the early days of the conflict, intensified their push for a cease-fire.
French diplomats sought to advance their proposed United Nations Security Council resolution that would call on the antagonists to stop fighting and to allow unfettered humanitarian access to Gaza. It remained unclear on Wednesday if the United States, which has blocked all Security Council attempts to even issue a statement condemning the violence, would go along with the French resolution.
Twitter post afterward, he said “I especially appreciate the support of our friend @POTUS Joe Biden, for the State of Israel’s right to self-defense.”
confronted Mr. Biden during his trip to a Ford plant, and pleaded with him to address the growing violence in the region and protect Palestinian lives.
Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, who witnessed that interaction, said in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s reluctance to negotiate a cease-fire had made it harder for Democrats across the political spectrum to defend Israel’s actions.
Some saw the second phone call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu as messaging to placate domestic constituents.
Democrats have been pushing Mr. Biden “to take a tougher line and this was his opportunity to demonstrate that he is doing so,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington group that supports Mr. Netanyahu’s policies. He also said Mr. Netanyahu “does not want to give the impression that he’s been told to end this conflict before it’s the right time to do so.”
For European nations, the intensified push for a cease-fire also is based partly on political calculations.
pro-Palestinian demonstrations have sometimes turned into anti-Israeli protests, including attacks on synagogues. Governments fear such protests and internal violence will worsen the longer the conflict lasts.
France is on alert for acts of Islamist terrorism, often from French-born Muslims outraged by events in the Middle East. Germany, which welcomed a million mostly Muslim migrants in 2005, is struggling to contain their anger about Israel.
At the same time, the election of Mr. Trump in 2016 also encouraged a right-wing European populism that is anti-immigration and often anti-Islamic, with a clear political identification with “Judeo-Christian values’’ and strong support for Israel. That is clear in France, with the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, as well as in Germany, with the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Hugh Lovatt, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Up until now at least, there also had been a gradual de-emphasis of the Palestinian issue by governments, said Kristina Kausch, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
She attributed that de-emphasis partly to Israel’s shelved plans to annex the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians want as part of their own ambitions for an independent state, and to the 2020 Abraham Accords, Israel’s normalization of ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, all big defenders of Palestinian rights. Ms. Kausch said there had been a sense that “the Palestinian cause can be put on the back burner, that Arab countries and people don’t care anymore.”
But this new outbreak, Ms. Kausch said, hadshown “that the Palestinian cause is alive and kicking.’’ And no longer ignorable, at least for a while.
Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
At the beginning of this conflict, he said, the United States and Europe had been“largely sympathetic to the Israeli narrative, willing to give them some space to accomplish their military ambitions.’’
similar two-page resolution passed by the Security Council during another fierce Gaza war in January 2009, and on which the United States abstained.
The draft resolution seeks a cessation of hostilities, humanitarian access to Gaza, the condemnation of the rocket barrages and any incitement to violence, the official said.
In Germany, traditional support for Israel and patience with its military campaign appears to be waning.
After speaking with Mr. Netanyahu on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel “sharply condemned the continued rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel and assured the prime minister of the German government’s solidarity,” said her spokesman, Steffen Seibert.
But given the many civilian lives lost “on both sides,” Mr. Seibert said, “the chancellor expressed her hope that the fighting will end as soon as possible.”
Mr. Maas, the German foreign minister, said on Tuesday that “ending the violence in the Middle East is the first priority,’’ followed by political negotiations. But he also blamed Hamas for the escalation.
He appeared to be responding to domestic criticism that the government has been too lenient in the face of pro-Palestinian and sometimes anti-Semitic protests.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented that Germany should “concentrate on internal affairs and reflect that the ‘welcome culture’ extended to refugees was astoundingly naïve when it came to anti-Semitism.’’
The question for Germany now, the paper said, “is how do we teach those for whom a hatred of Israel is in their DNA that Israel’s security is part of their adopted homeland’s raison d’être?”
Steven Erlanger reported from Brussels, and Jim Tankersley and Katie Rogers from Washington. Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington.
Rocks thrown at doors of a synagogue in Bonn, Germany. Israeli flags burned outside a synagogue in Münster. A convoy of cars in North London from which a man chanted anti-Jewish slurs.
As the conflict in Israel and Gaza extended into a 10th day on Wednesday, recent episodes like these are fanning concerns among Jewish groups and European leaders that the latest strife in the Middle East is spilling over into anti-Semitic words and actions in Europe.
Thousands of demonstrators have gathered on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other European cities in mostly peaceful protests over the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which has killed at least 212 Palestinians, including 61 children.
Pro-Palestinian activists and organizers say that solidarity with Palestinians should not be confused with anti-Semitism, and they denounce what they say are attempts to use accusations of anti-Semitism to try to shield Israel from criticism. They say they aim to hold Israel accountable for what they characterize as atrocities against Palestinians.
tweeted a video last Thursday showing protesters in Gelsenkirchen, in western Germany, waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and shouting anti-Jewish slurs. “The times in which Jews were cursed in the middle of the street should have long been over,” the group wrote. “This is pure anti-Semitism, nothing else!”
The United States on Tuesday criticized President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who said at a news conference this week that Jews were “murderers, to the point that they kill children who are 5 or 6 years old.” He also said they were “only are satisfied by sucking blood.”
said in a statement that four men had been arrested.
Owen Jones, a prominent British columnist who has been a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, warned against conflating Israel’s actions with Jews as a whole.
“If you’re holding British Jews responsible for the crimes committed by the Israeli state, and trying to terrorize Jews because of what is happening in Palestine,” he wrote on Twitter, “you’re not a Palestinian solidarity activist, you’re a nauseating anti-Semite who needs to be comprehensively defeated.”
