Published: 4 July 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
New research finds one in 10 attacks on Jewish people was related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; French protesters vandalise Holocaust memorial.
Of the 2480 antisemitic incidents in Germany last year, 11% involved some link with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the annual report from the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) has found.
These included two assaults, three threats, three targeted attacks on property, and more than 140 cases of abusive behaviour.
Marco Siegmund, a spokesperson for the group, said in many cases the attacks were due to antisemitic conspiracy theories that powerful Jewish forces were secretly “directing world events” being delusionally applied to the Russian war on Ukraine.
Siegmund cited one example documented in the report in which a taxi driver in Berlin had told a Jewish passenger that only Americans and Israelis were benefiting from the Ukraine conflict because it was all about "power and money,” and claiming that Israelis owned 60% of the German capital.
Nicholas Potter, a researcher at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti-racism organisation in Berlin, said that the war in Ukraine had proven the latest issue around which antisemites could frame their conspiracy narratives, as the COVID pandemic had been before it.
“Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine has served as a canvas onto which antisemites can project their ideology – not least because [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is Jewish,” he told VICE News. “Central to all conspiracy narratives is the question, who benefits? And in the mind of antisemites, it’s the Jews.”
He said that the antisemitic narratives circulating around the war in Ukraine typically related to “the alleged power and wealth” of Jewish people, with Jews supposedly standing “to profit from the war and are secretly pulling the strings behind it.”
The far-right recently secured its greatest success in Germany since World War II with the election of candidate Robert Sesselmann from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a local government election on June 25.
