Envoys against antisemitism from 25 countries on Tuesday published a joint statement against Jew-hatred, eliciting praise from some Jewish community leaders but criticism by others because the text did not mention anti-Israel hatred as a focal point of the phenomenon.

The declaration published in Geneva after a meeting of the envoys “speaks extensively about antisemitism while carefully avoiding the central issue driving much of contemporary antisemitism in Europe: the obsessive demonization and singularization of Israel,” said Angel Mas, the president of the Action and Communication in the Middle East group, which is a high-profile organization fighting antisemitism in Spain.

Steve Winston, managing director of the United Kingdom’s National Jewish Assembly, also commented on this point, telling JNS: “It is striking that there is no meaningful acknowledgment of the role that the demonization of Israel has played in fueling hostility toward Jewish communities across the world.”

Ralph Pais, spokesperson of Belgium’s Jewish Information and Documentation Center (JID), a communal watchdog on antisemitism, welcomed the envoys’ declaration but noted the omission of any relevant reference to Israel in the text. “When Jews in Europe are intimidated, insulted or attacked because of developments in the Middle East, society must have the honesty and moral clarity to call this phenomenon by its real name,” Pais said.

The envoys met alongside of the World Jewish Congress’s Governing Board meeting in Geneva. The WJC, in a statement about the declaration, thanked the envoys “for their commitment to bringing national and multinational tools and responses for protecting Jewish life.”

In its statement, WJC did allude to how hatred of Israel affects antisemitism, writing that the envoys’ meeting dealt with how “geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and international debates spill over into Jewish life and negatively impact Jewish communities.” WJC also mentioned “the role of multilateral institutions such as the U.N.,” which Israel and the U.S. have accused of adopting anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes. The EJC statement did not mention the omission of Israel from the envoys’ text.

Spain’s envoy to fighting antisemitism is one of the declaration’s cosignatories. Israel and others have accused Spain’s government of fanning the flames of antisemitism by focusing on hostility toward Israel. Others included the envoy of Belgium, where Jewish circumcisers are reportedly being prosecuted in that Israel and the U.S. said was an antisemitic indictment — and of Ireland, which has accused Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza.

The envoys expressed “deep concern over the alarming rise of antisemitism across the globe,” adding, “Synagogues, schools and Jewish gatherings in many countries have become the target of horrific antisemitic attacks” meant to “intimidate Jewish communities and disrupt and threaten Jewish life.” The envoys “unequivocally condemn, in line with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, all forms of contemporary antisemitism targeted at Jewish communities around the world,” the text said.

The IHRA definition includes examples of demonizing Israel and singling it out for criticism. Critics of Spain, Belgium and Ireland argue that those countries did this by joining the 2024 disputed International Court of Justice lawsuit against Israel, alleging genocide. In addition to the envoys from individual countries, cosignatories included seven envoys from international organizations, such as the Council of Europe and the European Commission. Israel and the U.S. were represented, respectively, by Arezoo Hersel-Rohila, director of the Department for Combating Antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, U.S. Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism.

Following the Second Intifada in 2000, Europe saw the advent of what historians call “new antisemitism”—a phenomenon in which Jews and Jewish communities were targeted by terrorists, often of Arab and Muslim descent, who cite Israel as their motivation for attacks. This “new antisemitism” meant a major increase in the volume and severity of attacks throughout Western Europe. Since the 2000s, conflicts involving Israel have consistently triggered upticks in antisemitic incidents in Western Europe and beyond.

After the Hamas-led massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to a regional war, record levels of antisemitic incidents were recorded in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia and the United States, among other countries.

“Jewish communities are increasingly exhausted by symbolic declarations that are not followed by visible action,” Pais, the Belgian-Jewish group’s spokesperson, said. “Core elements of Jewish religious life are increasingly coming under pressure, including ritual slaughter and now even brit milah” as attacks proliferate, Pais said. “Combating antisemitism cannot remain limited to diplomatic conferences, carefully worded declarations and symbolic signatures in Geneva.”

The Belgian official who signed the envoys’ declaration, Isabelle Leclerq of the Federal Public Justice Service, “has, to our knowledge, never publicly taken a strong position regarding the current explosion of antisemitism in Belgium, nor established meaningful contact with several of the country’s leading Jewish organizations,” Pais added.

Spain “is a particularly revealing example” of how ”antisemitism today is increasingly being normalized, legitimized, and amplified not despite governments, but often through political rhetoric, activist ecosystems, publicly funded structures, and aligned media environments connected to them,” Mas, president of ACOM, said in a statement about the declaration.

While Spain itself has not been an antisemitic country in recent decades, Mas said, government discourse today is driving antisemitism. “This is why so many official declarations against antisemitism feel like little more than symbolic exercises—paper shields, moral self-congratulation, and public-relations operations with almost no impact on the real problems Jews face,” he added.

Winston, the acting head of the National Jewish Assembly of the U.K., commended the declaration for “rightly addressing the growing threat of antisemitism,” but criticized that it ignored how “the repeated distortion of facts, the spread of inflammatory narratives, and accusations such as ‘genocide’ against Israel have contributed to an atmosphere in which hatred toward the Jewish state increasingly spills over into hatred toward Jews themselves.”

Any serious effort to confront modern antisemitism, he said, “must be prepared to address that reality honestly and directly.”

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