Skip to content
Shoresh Wiki

Attacks on Jews outside Israel

The largest terrorist attack on a Jewish target since the Second World War was in Argentina. Eighty-five people were killed at the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994, two years after twenty-nine were killed at the Israeli embassy in the same city. Argentine prosecutors and courts attributed both to Hezbollah acting for Iran. Buenos Aires is seven thousand miles from Jerusalem.

This page exists to answer one question with a list. If the violence is a response to Israeli policy, its targets should be Israeli. They are not. They are Jewish schools, Jewish museums, Jewish community centres, kosher shops and synagogues, in countries that have no part in the conflict, aimed at people who have no say in it.

The record

Section titled “The record”
DatePlaceDeadTarget and attribution
17 Mar 1992Buenos Aires, Argentina29Israeli embassy, attributed to Hezbollah and Iran
18 Jul 1994Buenos Aires, Argentina85AMIA Jewish community centre, attributed to Hezbollah and Iran
11 Apr 2002Djerba, Tunisia21El Ghriba synagogue, al-Qaeda, mostly German tourists
15 Nov 2003Istanbul, Turkey27Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues, al-Qaeda linked, most of the dead Muslim passers-by
26 Nov 2008Mumbai, India6Nariman House Chabad centre, Lashkar-e-Taiba, including Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg
11 Mar 2012Toulouse, France4Ozar Hatorah school, Mohammed Merah, a teacher and three children aged 3, 5 and 8
18 Jul 2012Burgas, Bulgaria6tour bus of Israeli holidaymakers, attributed to Hezbollah
24 May 2014Brussels, Belgium4Jewish Museum of Belgium, Mehdi Nemmouche, returned from Islamic State in Syria
9 Jan 2015Paris, France4Hypercacher kosher supermarket, Amedy Coulibaly, on a Friday before Shabbat
15 Feb 2015Copenhagen, Denmark1Dan Uzan, volunteer guard outside the Great Synagogue during a bat mitzvah
9 May 2023Djerba, Tunisia5El Ghriba synagogue again, during the annual pilgrimage

Six of those eleven are attacks on a building whose only distinguishing feature is that Jews are inside it. A museum. A school. A supermarket that sells kosher food. A synagogue on the night of a girl’s bat mitzvah. There is no version of “resistance to occupation” that reaches a three-year-old in Toulouse, and Mohammed Merah, who filmed himself doing it, did not claim there was one: he said he was avenging Palestinian children, then shot a girl in the head after pulling her back by the hair.

Two directions, one target

Section titled “Two directions, one target”

Attacks on Jews in the West do not all come from one direction, and the pattern splits by continent. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point studied attacks on Jewish targets in Western countries between 2012 and 2019 and found what it called an Atlantic divide: in Europe the attackers were overwhelmingly jihadist, and in the United States they were overwhelmingly far-right.

The American cases prove it. The deadliest attack on Jews in United States history was Pittsburgh, 27 October 2018, eleven murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue by a white supremacist who believed Jews were importing migrants. Six months later a gunman with the same ideology killed a worshipper at Poway. In Halle, Germany, on Yom Kippur 2019, a neo-Nazi tried to shoot his way into a synagogue with fifty-one people inside and killed two others when the door held.

Publishing that is not a concession, it is the point. The same target is being attacked from two directions by movements that agree on nothing except which building to attack. That is what a hatred older than both of them looks like from underneath, and it is why the answer to “why do they keep going after Jews” is never found in the politics of the current decade.

Diaspora Jews are not a proxy for a government

Section titled “Diaspora Jews are not a proxy for a government”

The argument that this violence is downstream of Israeli policy has to explain why the response to a policy is enacted on people who are not party to it, in countries that are not party to it, on the basis of religion.

Nobody firebombs Chinese restaurants in Ohio over Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang. Nobody shoots Russian Orthodox congregations in Lisbon over Ukraine. The reason the analogy sounds absurd is that everyone understands, in every other case, that a citizen of one country is not a diplomatic instrument of another. The exception made for Jews is the whole phenomenon, and it has a name and a two-thousand-year history.

Section titled “Related pages”

Sources

Section titled “Sources”