Once upon a time it was noteworthy that Jews in Eastern Europe felt safer than Jews in Western Europe. Now it is a mundane fact.
In the time it went from noteworthy to mundane, October 7 happened. And from October 7 to now, the collapse of Jewish security in Britain proved not only that Eastern European Jews were justified in feeling safer but that Western Europe’s once-earned sense of democratic superiority is fading.
It also provides a fair amount of evidence that different countries’ public discourse on Israel is a key reason for the disparity.
Eight years ago, Evelyn Gordon wrote a COMMENTARY post about this, based on the regular survey conducted by the Joint Distribution Committee: “In the east, a whopping 96 percent of respondents felt safe, while only four percent felt unsafe. In the West, 76 percent felt safe, and 24 percent felt unsafe. Respondents from places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—countries routinely accused of having anti-Semitic, borderline fascist governments—felt safer than Jews in liberal countries like France and Germany by a 20-point margin.”
Gordon pointed to evidence from the survey that strongly suggested a correlation between the way Israel was portrayed in each country’s media—a general stand-in for public discourse, though arguably not public sentiment (U.S. media is overwhelmingly, ferociously anti-Israel, but the American public is not)—and the level of anti-Semitism.
Gordon granted that this correlation was speculative. The JDC’s most recent such survey, published in 2024, certainly buttresses that idea. From the survey:
“Concern about antisemitism increased in both regions, with leaders across the continent now regarding combatting antisemitism as their top priority. The rise in concern, though, was much greater in the West (from 77% to 86% vs. 50% to 55%.), and while Westerners ranked it the most serious threat, Easterners ranked it only 7th.
“Westerners were also more than twice as concerned as Easterners about terrorism and violence against Jews as a serious threat (72% vs. 34%). Correspondingly, Easterners overwhelmingly reported (95%) that their cities remain safe for Jews, in contrast to a marked deterioration in the West.”
There was one more data point in the 2024 report that caught my attention and, I believe, deserves much wider discussion:
“[L]eaders in the West give higher priority to functioning as a pressure group in national politics, scoring it a 7.1 (vs. 6.8 overall), substantially higher than their Eastern counterparts’ 5.7.”
In the past, one might have argued that this discrepancy is in part due to the fact that governments in Western Europe are more open to being pressured by Jewish and pro-Israel groups. But that is obviously not the case today, when Western European governments (Germany excepted, and for exceptional reasons) could not possibly care less what their Jews have to say or how the governments’ rhetoric and policies make Jews unsafe.
Indeed, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the leftists in its orbit have shown an almost sadistic pleasure in raising the temperature of the rhetoric against the Jewish state even as the level of violence against Britain’s Jews increases along with it.
The recent London firebombing of ambulances owned by a Jewish charity—ambulances that serve all people, and therefore whose disabling might very well cost Jewish or non-Jewish lives—seems to have made the anti-Semitism crisis undeniable even to the sleepy establishment and the Jew-baiting media. But it has inspired exactly zero practical improvements from Keir Starmer and his merry band of incompetents.
Starmer is very sorry all of this is happening to the Jews, of course. Or at least he says he is. Emmanuel Macron in France is slightly better, but only slightly. The French do take security as a general issue more seriously than British Labourites, but neither country’s government has shown a desire to tamp down state-encouraged anti-Zionism and therefore prevent the need for that increased physical security in the first place.
Which is to say, plainly: You can publicly combat anti-Zionism and the demonization of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, or you can watch ambulances get blown up and synagogues attacked and Jewish businesses picketed and vandalized.
In the parts of Europe where governments don’t kowtow to violent anti-Zionist mobs and don’t demonize Israel, this is far less of a problem.
Which brings us back to the reason for the discrepancy between Eastern and Western European Jews’ prioritization of acting as a political pressure group. It’s less important to influence the government’s rhetoric and policies on Israel in the East, because those policies need less influencing.
One can, correctly, assign the term “authoritarian” to Eastern European leaders much more readily than to Western European ones. But what does that mean for the Jews of London who are arrested for literally showing up in public wearing identifiably Jewish items because it is considered provocative to the marching Hamasniks? An Israeli-owned factory was broken into, vandalized, and had property destroyed by sledgehammer-wielding “anti-Zionists” who were acquitted at trial despite admitting to their actions because the jury sympathized with their desire to attack Jewish sites. What kind of democracy is that? Democracy for whom?
Extend the blessings of democracy to the Jews, and perhaps you can claim some bragging rights over Hungary or Poland. But at the moment, Western Europe does not, in fact, offer substantially more freedom to its Jews than Eastern Europe, and it often offers far less security.
Let’s call this what it is: democratic backsliding. And let’s be clear on what to call the engine driving this backsliding: anti-Semitism. Any reasonable way forward begins by admitting the the truth of those two statements—and then actually, you know, doing something about it.
