There would appear to be more than one strand in the current wave of antisemitism sweeping across Europe: the well-worn mindset that Jews like money, Jews are stingy and similarly disgusting concepts on the one hand, and Islamism on the other. With regard to the latter, and the influence its less strident attributes may have on the views of more moderate Muslims and even members of the general public, the prime villain is not so much the cliché of Jewish materialism or even Jewishness itself, but Israel.
Last summer's Gaza war obviously reinforced anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments among many who had no special sympathy for Muslims. The large number of civilian casualties in Gaza bolstered the view of ''disproportionate'' Israeli brutality, while the fact that huge sums of money poured into Gaza to help the civilian population had been spent on underground tunnels to be used to launch attacks on Israeli soil was largely ignored.
Some astute commentators, however, who were not Jewish, pointed out that Hamas had deliberately chosen to fire their rockets into Israel from locations where civilians would be endangered, in order to win the "propaganda war" and even a sketch writer created this imaginary conversation between the foreign secretary and the prime minister: "Anyone ...can see that the civilian casualties were the whole point of the exercise. Hamas can't beat the Israelis in a shooting match, but they can make them pariahs in a PR beauty contest."
A similar view was put forward by Israeli Arab television presenter Lucy Aharish, in a TV interview with a journalist in Gaza: "At the end of the day Hamas and Islamic Jihad are playing a PR game at the expense of the people who are living in Gaza." Aharish, who has also spoken about her experiences of being a victim of racism, has been selected to light one of the torches on Mount Herzl on Israel Independence Day and feels this is a ''slap in the face'' to anti-Arab racists.
There are other remarkable individuals who, without negating their Arab heritage, have shown support for Israel and for Jews.
The best known is the "Green Prince", Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a top Hamas leader, who, out of disgust with Hamas brutality to their own people, became a spy in the Israeli security service Shin Bet. With his life constantly in danger, he eventually sought refuge in America, where he now lives, but visited London in January to speak at an orthodox Jewish synagogue. He has converted to Christianity and, in his talk at the synagogue, denounced Islamic ideology as "the most dangerous thing humanity is facing" and praised the "righteousness of the Jewish nation".
Another prominent convert to Christianity is Tass Saada, best known for his book Once An Arafat Man. A Palestinian refugee who joined the PLO as a teenager and became known as a skilled sniper, Saada was eventually weaned away from Fatah by his father and later also made his way to America. In his forties, his vision of Jesus led to an instantaneous conversion and prompted him to pursue the idea of reconciliation between Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Rather different is Anett Haskia, a Muslim Israeli Arab who grew up in Acre, Israel. She now lives on a kibbutz in northern Israel and all her three children volunteered to join the Israeli armed forces, her daughter being the first Arab Muslim woman to enlist.
Four years ago she founded The True Voice organisation to help Arab Israeli youth integrate into Israeli society. She speaks of herself as "a proud Israeli" and says of Israeli Arabs who favour the Palestinians: "Whoever does not want to accept the state of Israel is welcome to go to an Arab country."
What is particularly striking about Haskia's stance is the fact that she stood for election to the Israeli Knesset in the recent general election as a candidate for the right-wing party Ha Bayit HaYehudi – the Jewish Home.
Also living in northern Israel, in Nazareth, is Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest, who believes Christian Arabs should serve in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
Like Anett Haskia, but as a Christian, Nadaf is active in promoting the integration of Arab Christians, or Arabic-speaking Christian Israelis, as he prefers to call himself and his followers, into Israel's mainstream. This has led to him suffering persecution and even being threatened by the Jerusalem Patriarchate with the loss of his position.
His son, Jubran, who had been hospitalised in December 2013, after being the victim of a violent hate crime, finally enlisted in an elite unit of the IDF a year later. Father Nadaf, who has long spoken of Israel as the only country in the Middle East where Christians are free from religious persecution, said that his son had joined the army "out of a sense of mission and belonging and the aspiration to contribute to his country Israel".
The fact that these stories – and the surprisingly active "Arabs who support Israel" page on Facebook – are not more prominently reported in the western media can be seen as reinforcing the scepticism with which Israelis view the reaction of European leaders to the recent events in Europe.
Indeed, these events featured highly on the agenda of the general election in Israel. The Israeli scepticism could only have been exacerbated by President Obama's apparent denial that the murders in the Paris kosher supermarket were the result of antisemitism.
Whether the same could have been said about the shooting of the volunteer security guard outside the synagogue in Copenhagen on the Sabbath is questionable. At any rate, in what could be seen as a double-edged sword with regard to the situation in Israel – with the population increasingly susceptible to the belief that "the whole world hates Israel and Jews" – it is likely that these feelings contributed to the success of the right-wing parties in the election.
Is it not somewhat ironic to perceive, 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, that the future of the Jews in Europe, despite protestations by national leaders that they are an integral part of their country, might once again be in doubt?
