Barbara Herman

The impact of the conflict in Gaza on antisemitism in Belgium

ABSTRACT Taking Belgium as a case study, this article aims to assess the impact of a foreign conflict (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip) on intergroup relations in Europe. It asks whether intensification of the conflict in Gaza increases the number of antisemitic incidents in Belgium, and makes use of a database of complaints to the Centrum voor gelijkheid van kansen en voor racismebestrijding (Center of Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism), a federal anti-racism agency, and of an analysis of political claims-making in the written press. It is often stated that the conflict between Palestine and Israel leads to increased levels of antisemitism in Europe but rarely is this based on statistical analysis. The authors of this article undertook such an analysis and concluded that complaints about antisemitism in Belgium indeed showed a statistically significant increase during the Israeli military operation Cast Lead (December 2008–January 2009). Time series and intervention analysis on data spanning a period of one-and-a-half years, however, showed that this effect was not lasting and wore off after a couple of weeks. Apart from the temporary effect of the Gaza war on domestic intergroup relations, there seemed to be no systematic and continuous link between events in the Middle East and acts of antisemitism in Belgium.

Ethnic Social Capital and Political Participation of Immigrants

During the last two decades immigrants from outside the European Union have been increasingly granted access to political rights and citizenship. Political elites have de facto and de jure recognised that the presence of migrants is not a temporary phenomenon and that it would constitute a democratic deficit if they were indefinitely kept out of the polity. As a result, several countries have facilitated access to citizenship through more liberal nationality legislations and a number of them have also granted (local) voting rights to foreign residents. Nevertheless, there is often still a schizophrenic twist to the societal debate on political participation of migrants of non-European origin: while some participants to the public debate applaud active citizenship of migrants as a matter of principle and want to push it to comparable levels with the general population, others only condone political participation by migrants if it remains of an ‘invisible’ nature and does not mobilise ethnicity as a political marker. As migrants of non-European origin tend to have lower socio-economic status and thus have less individual resources for political participation, engagement in politics is likely to be tied to processes of group identification and collective mobilisation (Leighley, 2001).