Enough with the careful language. Enough with the solemn statements, the emergency meetings, the polished condemnations written by people who will sleep just fine tonight. Jewish families in Europe are being shown, on walls and with knives, what all those speeches have failed to stop.

In Prenzlauer Berg, one of Berlin’s richest and most self-consciously progressive neighborhoods, someone walked through the night and spray-painted “Kill All Jews” on the wall of a residential building. People live behind those walls. Children pass that corner. Families come home there after work, after school, after ordinary days in a city that tells itself it has learned from history.

Then it happened again. Same street, same message, roughly two weeks later.

The response from the neighborhood was moving. Children drew hearts on the pavement. Residents painted over the hate. Phrases like “No place for hate” and “Love is louder” appeared where someone else had tried to plant fear. It was beautiful in the way decent human reactions often are, and painful for the same reason. No child should have to answer a call for Jewish murder with sidewalk chalk.

Then came Golders Green.

On April 29, in a North London neighborhood where Jewish life is part of the street itself, two Jewish men were attacked with a knife. One was 34. One was 76. One of the victims later told the BBC from his hospital bed that he felt God had given him his life back. He had been stabbed in the chest. His lungs had to recover.

Try to sit with that for one moment. A man walks down a street in London and later thanks God from a hospital bed because he survived the morning.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Jewish people in Britain are scared to show who they are, scared to go to synagogue, scared to send their children to school as Jews. He said nobody should live like that in Britain, but Jews do.

That sentence should shame an entire political class.

For years, people have chanted “Globalize the Intifada” in European cities and insisted everyone else misunderstood them. They said it meant solidarity. They said it was metaphor. They said it was resistance language, campus language, protest language.

But words move. They gather force. They shape what people think is acceptable to say, to excuse, and eventually to do. A slogan does not put a knife into anyone’s hand by itself. But a culture that excuses it, repeats it, and defends it should not be surprised when the street begins to reflect it.

A wall in Berlin said “Kill All Jews.” A Jewish man in London was stabbed in the chest. Another man, 76 years old, was attacked with him. The Jewish community stepped in, as it so often has to do, through its own volunteers, its own medics, its own security networks, because Jewish life in Europe has again become something that has to be protected in real time.

There is something obscene about that. Europe is comfortable with Jewish memory when it belongs to the past. It builds memorials, gives speeches, lights candles, and teaches children what must never happen again. But Jewish people living now are told to wait, to trust the process, to accept another round of concern.

Concern is no longer enough.

Some of this hatred is imported. Some of it is homegrown. Europe has to face both honestly. Antisemitism does not become less dangerous when it is wrapped in political language, religious language, or the language of social justice. The wrapping changes. The target does not.

This is where the rest of society has to decide what kind of people it wants to be. Jewish communities cannot carry this alone. It is not enough to feel sympathy after the attack, to post a sentence after the graffiti, to say privately that things have gone too far. Public hatred requires public resistance. Silence tells the people who do this that the space belongs to them.

If you hear antisemitism online, answer it. If someone excuses October 7, say clearly what they are excusing. If a march in your city turns a call for intifada into a chant of belonging, do not pretend you do not understand what that does to the people who hear it.

Jewish life belongs in Berlin. Jewish life belongs in London. Jewish life belongs in every European city without apology, without disguise, without calculation.

A mezuzah on a door should be ordinary. A kippah on a head should be ordinary. A Jewish child going to school should be ordinary. A man walking through Golders Green should come home from that walk.

This is what “Globalize the Intifada” looks like when the slogan leaves the march and enters real life. Europe has been warned often enough. Now it has to decide what it is willing to defend.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)