Belgium is at the centre of the global Dreyfus trial

In Belgium, as in other European democracies, the resurgence of antisemitism dates back to late 2000, following the Second Intifada. However, after October 7, this antisemitism took on a different nature, evolving into state-sanctioned antisemitism and sparking an alarming surge: in the three months following October 7, recorded antisemitic acts increased by 1,000 per cent in Belgium – a founding member of what was to become the European Union and host to EU institutions as well as Nato.

Rather than curbing this tidal wave of antisemitism – the most severe since the end of World War II – many politicians and mainstream media have actively fuelled it.

Out of electoral opportunism, cowardice or repressed antisemitism, most political parties have aligned themselves with Hamas’s narrative regarding the October 7 pogroms and the ensuing war. That took place almost instantly on the left and far left, and progressively among others on the centre-right of the political spectrum.

This included Alexander De Croo, who until last month served as prime minister, and who in November 2023 travelled to Israel for an official visit, only to cause a diplomatic incident on his departure.

Together with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, de Croo held a bizarre press conference at Egypt’s Rafah crossing, just minutes ahead of the release of the first Israeli hostages. Neither Belgium nor Spain took part in the hostage negotiations and both leaders used this occasion to attack Israel, suggesting the Jewish state violated international law.

Not surprsingly, Hamas welcomed “the clear and bold positions” of the Belgian Prime Minister.

The same applies to the then-Parliament Speaker Éliane Tillieux and other members of de Croos’s cabinet, such as Environment Minister Zakia Khattabi, who, in the days following the October 7 massacres, refused to label Hamas a terrorist organisation; Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter, who sought to prosecute the State of Israel before the International Court of Justice for “genocide”; Development Cooperation Minister Caroline Gennez, who equated the State of Israel with the Third Reich; and Culture Minister Bénédicte Linard, who called for Israel’s exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest.

Likewise, the presidents of the Socialist Party, Paul Magnette, the Green Party, Rajae Maouane — who, in 2021, posted an Instagram story featuring a song calling on the Arab people to engage in armed struggle against the "sons of Zion" — and the Communist Party, Raoul Hedebouw, all shamelessly marched in pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Brussels, where furious calls for an intifada and the slogan of the Final Solution 2.0, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” echoed loudly.

One glimmer of hope is that last month, Belgium formed a new governing coalition, shifting from centre-left to centre-right — a change that, while unlikely to resolve the existential challenges facing Belgian Jews, should at least provide them with a few years of respite.

The media also bear their share of responsibility for the current situation. A few examples.

On the evening of October 7, 2023, while the pogroms were still ongoing in southern Israel, Belgium’s public broadcaster RTBF invited François Dubuisson, a professor of international law at the Free University of Brussels, onto its programme to “try to better understand what is happening there”.

For three long minutes, Dubuisson attempted to legitimise the massacre perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists and civilians, invoking “context” and “international law” – without a single word of condemnation for those who had just carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

On October 13, 2023, the daily Le Soir gave a platform to Marianne Blume, a former teacher in Gaza who, just days earlier, had exulted over the unbearable videos released by Palestinian terrorists and the hostage-taking. “I cannot help but rejoice,” she wrote on Facebook on October 7.

The antisemitic diatribe by Herman Brusselmans – who wants to “stab every Jew [he] meet[s] in the throat” – is yet another example, along with another of his columns published on December 13, 2023, in Humo, titled “Israel uses the same methods to destroy an entire race as the Germans did,” which began with the monstrous statement: “It is not inconceivable that someone, anyone, could become antisemitic against their own nature.”

To this grim picture must be added the walls of the capital of Europe, defaced with antisemitic graffiti, Palestinian flags, swastikas, Stars of David, and slogans such as “Free Palestine” or “Israel apartheid”; the unlawful occupations of university campuses; the daily pro-Palestinian demonstrations; the activism of numerous NGOs, politicians, academics, and journalists; and extremist organisations, including the antisemitic BDS movement.

What we have been witnessing since October 7 is nothing less than a Dreyfus trial on a global scale, where prosecutors have replaced the Jewish captain with the Jewish state, conducting a one-sided case and condemning Jews collectively to public vilification. Within this kangaroo court, two types of “judges” emerge: the antisemite who, as philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch put it, sees in anti-Zionism a way to be antisemitic while still appearing democratic; and the coward who, in Winston Churchill’s words, “feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Whatever their motivations, these sorcerer’s apprentices will one day learn the hard way the metaphor of the (Jewish) canary in the (Belgian) coal mine. History has taught us: antisemites always start with the Jews but never stop there. In other words, the Jews are the appetiser, but others are the main course.

We saw this with the Islamist terrorist attack that struck the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014, followed by the attacks at Brussels Airport and a metro station in March 2016.

The same pattern emerged in France, where terrorists first targeted soldiers and a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, then journalists, police officers, and a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015, before, ten months later, turning their guns on young people at cafés, concertgoers at the Bataclan, and, on July 14, 2016, on the crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

Belgian politicians who have sacrificed their Jewish fellow citizens on the altar of electoral gains have failed to heed the lessons of history. If they refuse to learn from the past to avoid repeating the tragic mistakes of their predecessors, they could at least read The Scorpion and the Frog fable and perhaps realise that those whose cause they champion today will one day turn against them. Such is the unrelenting pattern of history.

Joël Rubinfeld is the President of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism