A group tracking antisemitism in Germany said Tuesday that it documented a drastic increase of antisemitic incidents in the country in the month after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
The RIAS group said it recorded 994 incidents, which is an average of 29 incidents per day and an increase of 320% compared to the same time period in 2022. The group looked at the time period from Oct. 7 to Nov. 9.
Among the 994 antisemitic incidents, there were three cases of extreme violence, 29 attacks, targeted damage to 72 properties, 32 threats, four mass mailings and 854 cases of offensive behavior.
Many Jews in Germany experienced antisemitic incidents in their everyday lives and even those who weren’t exposed to any antisemitic incidents reported feelings of insecurity and fear, said RIAS, which is an abbreviation in German for the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism.
Really good write up! I appreciate the effort put into it.
It is really sad the persecution of Jewish people, and I definitely sympathize. But the only part I want to clarify is that you kind of glossed over the nakba in that part where the British stopped holding the peace. If it was just a small continuous trickle of Jewish refugees into Palestine, no one would have a problem with it, except for the normal anti-immigration folks. But it’s that part where you decide to give part of the country away and then the violent disposession of people from their homes to enforce it that seems wrong, and should ring familiar with those who know about the genocide of the Indians in the US.
But I blame the British and UN, too. They’re the ones who offered to cut pieces away from a country to offer to the immigrants. It’s like if your landlord came in and said you’re going to have to rent one of your bedrooms to his nephew, and even though you’re the one who lives there and pays rent, you can’t argue because he’s the landlord.
And I even understand the desire to secure a homeland at all costs after such a huge, terrible event of the holocaust. But that doesn’t mean I agree with it, and the consequences continue to reverberate to this day show partly why. Working for peace and seeing the signs of fascism to prevent it from happening again is the answer, not a might makes right apartheid ethnostate. There’s some lesson here about violence leading to violence.
Black people have gone through their own shit here in the United States, and while some people have suggested just leaving the country and making their own place in Africa, I think Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream was a much better idea (seriously, read the history of Liberia, it’s filled with violence and oppression towards the natives followed by them rising up, and then civil wars even into the 2000’s). Just make the place here the kind of place that’s better. And while it’s not perfect, it’s way better than it used to be, and I think he was proven right.
Yes - in fact, I didn’t write about it at all. The history of the jewish people is but one part of the context to the conflict, which is more complex than most people realize. I intentionally limited myself to the situation outside Israel, given that there are very heated opinions on what happened within.
Some further reading on the situation in Mandatory Palestine is linked below. Of note is that the british often attempted to include Arabs in their decisionmaking processes, but were met with refusal and violence. Even so, the British would implement the White Paper of 1939, significantly restricting jewish migration to mandatory Palestine and effectively forbidding jewish purchases of land in 95% of the area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Kingdom
Ah I see. Thanks again!