How Israeli Leaders Make Antisemitism Worse (Part 4 of the Uninvited Series)

When a terrorist attacked a synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015, killing a young Jewish man on guard duty, something predictable happened within hours.

The Israeli prime minister flew to the microphones.

Benjamin Netanyahu's message to Danish Jews was not one of solidarity with their community or confidence in their government. It was a call to leave. "This wave of terror attacks can be expected to continue," he announced. "We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms."

The Danish Jewish community was not grateful.

Their chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said publicly that he was disappointed. "Terror is not a reason to move to Israel," he said plainly. Denmark's ambassador to Israel also pushed back, stating that the attack was an attack on all Danish citizens, that Danish Jews were an integral part of Danish society, and that Denmark would do everything to ensure they felt safe there.

What Netanyahu had done, in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, was tell the world that Danish Jews did not really belong in Denmark. That they were temporary residents in a foreign land. That their true home was elsewhere.

Few things could be more damaging to a Jewish community trying to maintain its place in the society around it.

The same scene played out in France weeks earlier, after a terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. Netanyahu tweeted that Jews "know deep in their hearts that they have one country — the state of Israel, home for all of us." French political leaders objected. French Jewish leaders objected. One journalist summarized the situation by pointing out that in the previous twenty years, eighty times more people had been killed inside Israel than Jews killed by terrorists across all of Europe — and that hundreds of thousands of Israelis had actually left Israel in recent years, in part because they feared for their security.

None of that mattered. Netanyahu was not really talking to French Jews. He was talking to Zionist supporters everywhere, reinforcing the central Zionist narrative.

And that narrative requires Jewish communities abroad to feel endangered.

This is how Zionist ideology functions. From its earliest days, Zionism depended on the premise that Jews could never truly belong in other countries. That premise had to be kept alive. Every antisemitic incident, every attack on a Jewish institution, every hostile environment on a university campus became, in Zionist hands, evidence for the conclusion that Israel had already drawn: Jews are not safe anywhere but Israel.

For any government trying to attract immigrants, fear is a powerful recruiting tool.

These declarations, meant to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel, often make life harder for the Jews who remain where they are.

When an Israeli leader announces that Jews are not safe in France, he is not merely expressing concern. He is reinforcing, to every French citizen listening, the idea that the Jews in their midst are not truly French. They are guests. Temporary residents. People whose real loyalty and real home lie somewhere else. Some of those French citizens will react to this message with sympathy. Others will react with suspicion or hostility.

Either way, the message makes the claim of equal citizenship harder to sustain.

Jewish communities around the world have recognized this pattern clearly enough that they have sometimes been forced to take the step of publicly contradicting Israeli leaders. After Netanyahu's tweet following the Paris attack, French Jewish representatives publicly stated that they were proud French citizens and did not accept his characterization of their situation. After his comments about Denmark, the Danish Jewish community similarly distanced itself from his remarks.

These communities were not rejecting sympathy. They were rejecting a political narrative that endangered them.

The 2004 episode in France is equally revealing. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared that French Jews were being persecuted and must leave for Israel. Jewish leaders in France were furious. A representative of the Jewish community called his remarks a pouring of "oil on the fire in an unacceptable fashion." Sharon's claim was not only insulting to France; it actively complicated the position of Jews who had built their lives there and had every right to be treated as full citizens of their country.

None of this stopped the pattern from repeating, and it's worth asking why.

The answer lies in the foundational claim of Zionism: that Jews everywhere constitute one political nation, that Israel is their state, and that Jewish life in other countries is therefore inherently provisional. If that premise were true, then encouraging Jews to leave countries that experience antisemitism is not provocative — it is responsible governance.

But the premise is false.

Jews living in France, Denmark, Turkey, Mexico, or anywhere else are citizens of those countries. Their political loyalty belongs to those countries. Their safety is bound up with their standing as members of those societies. When a foreign government tells the world that those Jews are not really French or Danish or Turkish — that they are Israelis-in-waiting, guests who have not yet accepted the invitation to come home — it undermines exactly the foundation on which Jewish security rests.

The communities that have pushed back most clearly against this pattern understand what is at stake. They are not rejecting Jewish solidarity. They are insisting on a truth that Zionism has worked hard to obscure: that they are full citizens of their own countries, that their governments are responsible for their safety, and that no foreign prime minister has the right to declare otherwise.

A government that genuinely cared about the safety of Jewish communities around the world would reinforce that truth, not contradict it.

A movement that genuinely sought to protect Jews would not need them to feel endangered in order to sustain itself.

The communities left to manage the consequences of these declarations did not ask for the representation being imposed on them. They did not authorize a foreign government to speak in their name, cast them as foreigners in their own countries, or use their suffering as a political argument.

And yet they continue to pay the price.