To say that it hasn't always been easy to be a Jew in Europe is the greatest understatement since at least 1945, when Japanese Emperor Hirohito noted that "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage." But now, today, once again, Jews in Europe are feeling very uncomfortable about all of the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas protests (riots) that seem to be sweeping the continent. That's understandable; they've seen this film before, and they know how it ends.

As a rabbi who divides his time between Berlin and Vienna, Lior Bar-Ami is keenly aware of the risks facing people who are recognizably Jewish on the streets of those cities and elsewhere in Western Europe.

Bar-Ami, 37, had felt uncomfortable wearing his kippah publicly in some parts of Berlin even before the October 7 outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, which started after terrorists from Gaza broke through the border fence in a shock onslaught, rampaged through southern Israel, and killed, tortured and mutilated some 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

Aren't the nations of Europe supposed to be modern and tolerant? Multi-cultural? Accepting of other people's differences? That was the common thought, but while history may not always repeat itself, it often rhymes.

In Berlin, hundreds of people chanted in Arabic, “Our lives, our blood we’ll sacrifice for you, Al Aqsa” in a series of rallies, most of them occurring despite police and municipal bans on such events due to authorities’ concern over incitement and disorder. RIAS, a German antisemitism watchdog, has documented 202 incidents this month alone, a 240% increase over that tally from October 2022.

In London, police documented a tenfold increase in antisemitic hate crimes in October over last year. In Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, protesters burned an Israeli flag outside a synagogue.

Any invasion of Gaza by Israel will almost certainly throw fuel on this fire.

What happened to Europe?

It's important to note that Europeans are making their own bed by not having kids. Most of the various European nations are falling off the same demographic cliff that affects China and Japan; they aren't having babies. Unlike China and Japan, they are making up the loss with immigrants. Decades of unchecked immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is one of the primary drivers of this issue. A number of European cities have gotten to the point of having immigrant enclaves that are effectively no-go zones for the local authorities. These immigrants, as the recent rounds of protest have shown us very eloquently, are not interested in assimilating, but they are, by intent or by accident, on their way into turning Europe into a caliphate.

Then there are young, stupid European kids — as many as there are, which isn't as many as there should be — who support Hamas. It's difficult to understand the motivations of these young skulls full of mush, but if the Islamists among the immigrant community succeed in the transformation of Europe, it's not hard to imagine what will happen to these useful idiots.

This is the Europe where, today, it's becoming increasingly uncomfortable to be a Jew. It's only a matter of time before Europe may be a place where it's uncomfortable to be European.

Since 2012, many Europeans have learned that they are the targets of the same terrorists who also target Jews. The killer of three Jewish children and a rabbi in Toulouse in 2012 also killed three soldiers. The killers of four Jews at a kosher supermarket near Paris in 2015 had coordinated their attack with the murderer of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper two days earlier.

A year earlier, Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik and one-time chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, asked Alain Finkielkraut, a prominent French-Jewish philosopher, whether “European Judaism has a future in Europe.”

Finkielkraut replied with a question of his own: “Does Europe have a future in Europe?”

It can happen here, too. Hamas has, effectively, representation within the U.S. Congress. American reporters all too often seem more concerned with what the Biden administration is doing to protect the terrorists than how the administration is supporting Israel, the only representative democracy in the region, the country that suffered a vicious attack. 

Meanwhile, the American president is only marginally aware of what is going on.

This will all come to a head soon. The inescapable conclusion is that the current tensions will, one way or another, find an outlet, and that outlet is very likely to be violent. The current situation is like a volcano, slowly building pressure, slowly increasing the force it exerts, building up a high-pressure store of red-hot fury, and in the end, it explodes. It happened in 1939, and it will probably happen again in 2023 or 2024. And, once again, European Jews — and this time, American Jews — may be once again feeling the heat.

I might be wrong. I'm afraid I'm not.

Editor's Note: This article was edited post-publication for clarity.