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The Long History of Blaming Jews for Anti-Jewish Violence

Mehdi Hasan. Photo: Screenshot

“History,” Mark Twain famously said, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The echoes of history were heavy on November 7, when a pogrom unfolded in Amsterdam, once home to Anne Frank, arguably the Holocaust’s most famous victim. Eight decades after the genocide of European Jewry, dozens of Jews were attacked and forced to hide.

In the aftermath of the assault, press and policymakers indulged in another long-running staple of antisemitism: blaming Jews for the violence perpetrated against them.  

Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host, claimed that the attacks were a “natural response” to the war between Israel and Iranian proxies in Gaza. Worse still, he alleged that the Israeli tourists — fans of visiting soccer team Maccabi — were guilty of “provoking” the mass assault. Others, from local Amsterdam officials to BBC reporters, put the onus for the violence on the victims.

The incident and its aftermath speak to something dark. There’s a long history of blaming Jews for anti-Jewish violence.

Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” is arguably the most infamous example. On November 9-10 1938, Nazis vandalized Jewish-owned shops, looted and burned synagogues, and attacked and murdered Jews throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. German officials claimed that the death toll was 91, but recent scholarship “suggests that there were hundreds of deaths, especially if one counts those who died of their injuries in the days and weeks that followed the pogrom,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) notes.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, scores of Jews, many of them victims of the mass rape that accompanied the violence, committed suicide. And the Nazis rounded up 30,000 Jewish males, placing them into concentration camps, marking the “first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity,” USHMM observes. The violence also spurred even greater emigration, with thousands of Jews attempting to flee Hitler’s grasp.

Many Holocaust scholars consider Kristallnacht to be a watershed moment, a point of no return where Nazi Germany and its supplicants embraced a murderous antisemitism which, in less than a decade, would culminate in the genocide of European Jewry. It opened the door to what the late historian Paul Johnson would call “the end of old Europe,” and it set the stage for the industrialized slaughter that was World War II. Then as now, what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. Kristallnacht was the prelude to more murder and tragedy.

The pogrom sparked condemnation and boycotts of German goods throughout the West. The Nazis, however, blamed the Jews.  

On November 7, 1938, a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed a German embassy official named Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Grynszpan’s parents, Jews of Polish citizenship residing in Germany, had recently been expelled, along with thousands of others, and were stranded in a refugee camp. The Nazi regime used vom Rath’s murder as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, an event whose scale and organization made it clear that it was preplanned and had state backing. Indeed, as the historian Thomas Childers observed, in the aftermath of vom Rath’s death, Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a “lengthy discussion about some sort of nationwide action against the Jews,” and it was decided that Goebbel’s “propaganda network would initiate the action” and that it should “appear to be a spontaneous action of an enraged nation.” Police and fire departments were not to interfere save to prevent fires from spreading to “Aryan” homes and businesses.

The Nazis blamed Jews for Kristallnacht, imposing a one-billion-mark indemnity on the Jews and “forcing them to pay for the destruction visited on them during that terrible night,” Childers noted in his 2017 book The Third Reich. Many of the pogrom’s victims held insurance policies that would have covered much of the property damage, but these were voided by the regime. Subsequent economic decrees aimed at further punishing the Jews and driving them from German life. Jews were forced to sell their retail businesses and were prevented from working as independent craftsmen, managers of businesses, or members of consumers’ cooperatives. Jewish children were expelled from public schools, had limited access to public sites like parks and movie theaters, were denied driver’s licenses and radios, and were excluded from the welfare system.  

Regrettably, Kristallnacht is only part of a broader pattern in antisemitism. 

In 1920, a pogrom unfolded in Jerusalem, formerly a part of the Ottoman Empire and then under British rule. Arab mobs murdered five and injured hundreds more. The riots were instigated by Arab leaders like Amin al-Husseini, who hoped to sway the British from supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Rioters attacked Jews, yelling “the Jews are our dogs.” Prior to the violence, Arabic-language notices began circulating in Jerusalem stating: “The Government is with us, [the British General Edmund] Allenby is with us, kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing the Jews.” Speakers whipped the crowd into a frenzy, leading to shouts of “We will drink the blood of the Jews.”

Zionist leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky had tried to get British officials to act, and failing that, had tried to get arms to besieged Jewish communities. For his efforts, Jabotinsky, a veteran of the British Jewish Legion, was imprisoned and, some years later, expelled from British-ruled Mandate Palestine. By contrast, Husseini, a future Nazi collaborator, was pardoned and made the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and given vast powers of patronage via the creation of the office of the Supreme Muslim Council, which he controlled. Worse still, the Palin Commission, the British investigation into the riots, placed the lion’s share of the blame for the pogrom on its victims, the Jews. 

Unsurprisingly, Husseini wasn’t deterred from his goals and orchestrated another pogrom in 1929. Arab rioters murdered Jews en masse in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and elsewhere, with many, including women and children, mutilated and tortured in the most barbaric ways imaginable. Yet again, a British inquiry, the Shaw Commission faulted the Jews. Ditto for the subsequent Hope-Simpson Report, which, among other things, recommended imposing severe limits on Jewish immigration. In the eyes of many, including Jabotinsky and other Zionist leaders, the British authorities were appeasing and rewarding anti-Jewish violence. 

Throughout the long history of pogroms, the message, if implicit, is clear: the Jews had it coming. It’s their fault for existing. As Paul Knabenshue, an American diplomat serving in the Middle East during the 1920s and 1930s, put it: “The Jews are always responsible, for they generally bring their troubles upon themselves.” To Knabenshue, the pogroms in Jerusalem and Hebron were justified: “provocative acts” by the Jews, he asserted, had incited “ordinary, law-abiding Arabs.” 

A century later, little has changed. From college campuses to newsrooms, justifications for anti-Jewish violence take many forms: “settlements” — that is, Jewish homes in Judea — are blamed for Palestinian “resistance” (terrorism) or, perversely, Israeli counterterrorist operations — that is, Jews defending themselves against terrorists — are a “war crime.” All of these excuses have one thing as their common denominator: the need to blame Jews. The eagerness by some press and policymakers to excuse a pogrom in 2024 Amsterdam is but the latest iteration. 

But history offers a warning: if Europe and the West fail to curb rising antisemitism, their future will be as ignominious as the past. 

The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

The post The Long History of Blaming Jews for Anti-Jewish Violence first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.

Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.

“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”

GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’

Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.

“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.

“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.

“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.

After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”

RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL

Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”

Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.

“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”

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Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco

Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.

People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.

“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”

Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.

On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.

Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.

On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.

“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.

Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.

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Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.

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