I am sick to my stomach at the rise of antisemitism. Last December, gunmen killed fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. In America, antisemitic assaults with deadly weapons rose by 39 per cent in 2025, and such attacks took Jewish lives for the first time since 2019.I write this in Lebanon, under a sky crowded with Israeli drones. The two facts are one story, seen from its two ends. Nothing in the modern history of my country and its neighbours has produced as much killing, as many wars waged by outsiders, and as much authoritarianism as European antisemitism. Europe hated its Jews. Then it murdered them. Then, out of guilt, it armed the state they built to escape, and sent the bill to us. Europe’s unanswered questionThe hatred is old, and it is European: the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the expulsions from England in 1290, France in 1306 and Spain in 1492, Kishinev in 1903, and finally the Holocaust. For nine centuries Europe asked its “Jewish question” and refused to answer it at home.As prime minister, Arthur Balfour oversaw the Aliens Act of 1905, aimed largely at keeping East European Jews out of Britain. Twelve years later, as foreign secretary, he promised them a national home in Palestine. The same hand shut Britain’s door and opened ours.Political Zionism was a European answer to a European crime, built on Europe’s favourite idea, the ethnic nation-state. Its wisest Jewish critic, Ahad Ha’am, warned in 1897 that such a state would be small, exposed and forever steered by great powers, and pleaded for “a Jewish State, and not merely a State of Jews”. Ze’ev Jabotinsky was blunter. In ‘The Iron Wall’ (1923) he admitted that no native people consents to being colonised, so Zionism must “proceed regardless of the native population”, behind a wall that only an outside power could build. Guilt converted into ordnanceHe was right about the builders. Britain laid the first course when it crushed the Palestinian revolt of 1936–39; Britain and France laid the next, at Suez in 1956. Then Germany took up the trowel: reparations in 1952, a secret arms deal in 1957, and in 2008 Angela Merkel’s pledge to the Knesset that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson, its reason of state. Between 2021 and 2025 the United States supplied 68% of Israel’s major arms imports and Germany 31%, according to SIPRI. That ordnance was delivered to my neighbourhood: to Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 2006, 2024 and again this year, and to Iran in 2025 and 2026. Diplomacy followed the same script. For half a century Kissinger, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and their successors ran a “peace process” that filled archives and changed no maps. Their colleague Aaron David Miller later admitted that American officials had acted as Israel’s attorney. Our own shareWe Arabs are not innocent. From the late 1940s, Arab governments, first monarchies and then nationalist regimes armed by Moscow, turned on their own Jews. Iraq stripped emigrating Jews of citizenship in 1950; Egypt treated its Jews as suspects after Suez. Between 850,000 and 900,000 Jews left Arab lands and Iran. The old Ottoman millet, with its dhimmi inequalities, certainly needed modernising. What replaced it was not equal citizenship but rival ethnic nationalisms. The newcomers met an Ashkenazi establishment that looked down on them and sent them to transit camps and border towns. When their children formed the Israeli Black Panthers in 1971, Golda Meir called them “not nice”. In 1977 they carried Menachem Begin’s Likud to power. Their ticket into the nation was hostility to the Arab world they had come from. Israel’s hard right still lives on that bargain.Self-defence as costume At the UN on 24 September, as delegates walked out, Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the charge of genocide and accused New York’s mayor of antisemitism. He calls Gaza self-defence. Gaza’s health ministry counts 74,016 dead, in records UN agencies consider generally reliable, and Israeli forces still hold more than half the Strip nearly a year after the ceasefire. Foreign reporters have been barred throughout; the Committee to Protect Journalists counts 191 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed by Israeli forces. Soldiers filmed themselves demolishing neighbourhoods and posted the clips online. That is not self-defence. It is a pogrom staged for the camera. It is this, not some ancient virus that woke by itself, that fills the streets with protesters, many of them Jews. By branding every critic an antisemite, Netanyahu hands real antisemites a disguise, and makes every Jew in Sydney or Manchester answerable for a government he never elected. Hatred of Jews is chosen by those who hate; no victim causes it. But Israel’s government has become its best recruiting sergeant. Nor is exclusion his alone: even Israel’s opposition leaders refuse to govern with an Arab party, though Arabs are a fifth of its citizens. A closure a century overdueThe West will not cure antisemitism by sending more weapons to Israel. It will cure it as it should have 900 years ago: by protecting Jews at home as equal citizens, and by refusing to settle its conscience with our children’s lives. That pays only half the debt. More than a century after Balfour’s letter, the question Europe exported to Palestine still explodes, in Gaza, the West Bank, south Lebanon and now across the region. Closing it is this century’s overdue task, and only the West, which built the iron wall, has the leverage. The tools exist. At least 151 of the UN’s 193 members recognise Palestine. In 2025, 142 countries endorsed the New York Declaration: a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital, security guarantees for both sides, and Hamas disarmed and out of power. Since 2002 the Arab Peace Initiative has offered Israel normal relations with the whole Arab world. What is missing is Western will: the will to correct history and to restrain the voracious militarism of Israel’s right. That means a fixed timetable, conditions on arms and trade that hardliners cannot outlast, and international guarantees that make each step irreversible. Doable, not dreamy: the only safe way to end the eruptions for good. Until then, the bill for Europe’s hatred will keep arriving in Beirut and in Gaza, and, as the mourners of Bondi know, in Jewish neighbourhoods far from here. (Jamil K Mroue is a Lebanese writer and former editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.)
