by Zvika Klein
The message is simple, and very old: if you are visibly Jewish, if you defend Israel, if you challenge the narrative that paints Hamas as “freedom fighters,” you are the problem.
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Is being Jewish a provocation?
Is having a pro-Israel agenda in France something that licenses violence?
Is being Israeli illegal in Europe?
Is saying that Hamas is a terror organization somehow “disconnected from reality”?
All of these questions should be answered by a simple two-letter word: no.
But in today’s Europe, and in parts of the US, let alone the Middle East, the practical answer that too many people give is yes.
That warped logic was on full display this week in Paris, where Israeli celebrity and advocate Noa Tishby was attacked in the street for the crime of being visibly Jewish and Israeli in public.
Tishby’s video shows her walking in Paris when pro-Palestinian protesters confront her. A man suddenly snatches and throws the phone of the person filming, prompting her to say on camera that they are being attacked.
Around them, protesters chant and argue that Israel is an “apartheid, genocidal state,” that Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti “never committed any violent acts,” and that “Hamas is very popular and is fighting for freedom.”
One man screams, “F*** Zionists, and f*** Israel.”
If this sounds like a normal political disagreement, then something in your moral compass is broken.
Yet as soon as the clip hit social media, the question was not “How did we get to a place where Jews are openly menaced in Paris?” but “What did she do to provoke it?”
On X, one user wrote in response to the video: “So a mouthy, antagonising, radicalised, overly aggressive b**** got pushed around a bit. Big deal! She wasn’t attacked or hurt in any way; she was dealt with… she put herself in that location, stole flags, and caused the situation intentionally. No sympathy!”
Another insisted that the story was exaggerated: “The video is crystal clear. She was aggressive, waving her hands in their faces and demanding they leave as if she had any authority… Stop spreading her story as fact. Watch the video.”
Notice the pattern. The focus is not on the crowd that shouts abuse at a Jewish woman, glorifies Hamas, and denies terrorism. The focus is on her tone of voice, her hand gestures, and the fact that she dared to show up at a demonstration where many people hate everything she represents.
The message is simple, and very old: if you are visibly Jewish, if you defend Israel, if you challenge the narrative that paints Hamas as “freedom fighters,” you are the problem.
You are the provocation.
I was there before Noa
I know this script, because I lived it on those same streets.Ten years ago, I stood where Noa now stands, only the atmosphere was already thick with fear, even before October 7, even before this current global wave of antisemitism.
In 2015, in the shadow of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other terror attacks in France, I walked through Paris for a day wearing what I wear every day, a kippah on my head and tzitzit showing from under my shirt. A photographer, Dov Belhassen, walked behind me with a GoPro camera hidden in his backpack. We were accompanied by a bodyguard, who had been assigned to me because, even then, walking openly as a Jew in Paris was considered risky.
It was zero degrees. Thousands of people hurried to work, collars up against the wind. We started in the quieter parts of the city, across from the Eiffel Tower, along the Champs-Élysées, through Jewish neighborhoods. At first, it was “only” stares.
The further we walked from the postcard Paris, into predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, the more the atmosphere changed.
“What did I experience?” I wrote back then. “Go f*** from the front and the back.” “Viva Palestine.” “Hey, you, with the kippa, what are you doing here?” These were just some of the remarks that came my way while I tried to do something that should be utterly unremarkable: walk down a European street wearing a kippah.
At a nearby café, people pointed at us. A few minutes later, two thugs waited for us on the corner. They shouted “Jew,” spat at me, and made it clear that we were not welcome. “I think we’ve been made,” Dov whispered. On the next street, two more young men were waiting. Word had spread that a Jew was walking in their neighborhood.
They told us we had better leave. We listened.
“A few more minutes and this would have been a lynching,” our bodyguard said as we got into the car. “Leave this area right now.”
I ended that exposé with a question:
“Is this what life is like for Paris’s Jews? Is this what a Jew goes through, day in and day out, while walking to work or using public transportation?”
I noted that most French Jews had already internalized the unofficial dress code. Community leaders urged them to wear hats over their kippot or go bareheaded. As for nights out, many preferred to stay home. It was safer inside.
‘Wasn’t your kippah the provocation?’
What haunted me even more than the curses was a question I was asked afterwards by a British journalist in an interview about the video.“As a Zionist with a particular standpoint,” she said, after I proudly identified myself as such, “do you accept what some critics say, that the video, or the way the video was made, was an act of provocation?”
In other words: if you walk around as a visible Jew, in public, in Europe, are you not asking for it?
“I don’t think it should be a provocation because this is the way I dress,” I answered. “I wear a kippah on my head every day, everywhere I go, except for certain places in Europe, because I’m afraid for my safety.”
A decade ago, some people thought I was exaggerating. That maybe I had “brought it on myself.” That if you go into certain neighborhoods with a kippah and a camera, you cannot be surprised when you are cursed and threatened.
Today, after synagogues have been firebombed, after Jews were murdered in Toulouse, in the Hyper Cacher supermarket, in homes, schools, and streets across the world, after mobs in 2023 and 2024 have marched calling for intifada and “resistance” and terror, nobody can seriously claim they did not see this coming.
Not because of my video, or Noa Tishby’s video, but because Jewish blood has been spilled again and again.
The same old blame game
The reaction to Tishby’s experience is part of a larger trend. When Jews are targeted, the first instinct of too many people is to put Jews on trial.Were they “provocative”?Did they walk into the “wrong” place?Did they “escalate” by answering back, by filming, by holding an Israeli flag?
The location is always wrong, the words are always too strong, the tone is always too loud. The only way to be an acceptable Jew, in this logic, is to be silent, invisible, and apologetic.
We have heard this logic before in other contexts. It is the same toxic instinct that asks what a woman was wearing instead of what a man did to her. Now it is applied to Jews who dare to exist in public as Jews, or to Israelis who dare to say out loud that Hamas is a terrorist organization and not a misunderstood social movement.
When a crowd shouts that Israel is “genocidal” while praising Hamas as “fighting for freedom,” and the person who gets blamed is the Jew who filmed it, something very fundamental has gone wrong.
From Paris to everywhere
I have walked those streets. I have felt the spit on my face, heard the threats, watched people’s eyes change when they noticed the small piece of fabric on my head.Ten years ago, some thought it was an isolated experiment, a media stunt, maybe even an act of “Zionist provocation.”
Today, after October 7 and everything that followed, there is no need for hidden cameras to prove that antisemitism is alive and thriving in Western societies. We have the funerals, the police reports, the viral videos, the statistics, and, perhaps most painful of all, the normalization of hatred in polite conversation.
The danger is not only the extremists who shout in the street. It is also the “reasonable” voices that rush to explain why the Jew or the Israeli must have done something to deserve it.
So let us go back to those questions.
Is being Jewish in a Western country provocative?Is having a pro-Israel agenda in France something that can “allow” violence?Is being Israeli illegal in Europe?Is saying that Hamas is a terror organization disconnected from reality?
The answer, in any democracy that wants to remain worthy of that name, must stay the same: no.
The real provocation is not a kippah, an Israeli flag, or a woman filming herself in Paris. The real provocation is a society that tells its Jews that the safest thing to do is to hide who they are.
Zvika Klein
Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-879727
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