Antisemitism is ‘morphing’ and has become ‘tsunami’, Israeli special envoy says

Israel’s special envoy for antisemitism has warned there is a “tsunami” of antisemitism in the US that has increased since the Hamas attacks on 7 October. 

Michal Cotler-Wunsh told Sky News people have been trying to “attack Jews around the world on university campuses, online, on the streets elsewhere”. 

She said the fact antisemitism had risen directly after the attacks on Israel “should have all of us thinking” as it is the “opposite of what should have happened”. 

Asked when incidences had started to increase, she said there was a “surge” the day after the attacks. 

Ms Cotler-Wunsh addressed Israel’s offensive on Gaza, saying it is “tragic when any innocent loss of life is incurred”.

But she said Hamas is calling for the end of the Jewish state and the murder of Jews, so “what do we do with an organisation that has embedded itself in civilian population purposely?”. 

The special envoy made a recent trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a complex of concentration camps where historians estimate about 1.1 million people – mostly Jews – were killed. 

Ms Cotler-Wunsh said she was “reflecting on how for the first time in thousands of years of Jewish history, as a prototypical indigenous people that were stateless for thousands of years and unable to protect ourselves, I can’t help but quote Golda Meir – ‘the world hates a Jew that hits back, the world loves us only when we are to be pitied'”. 

There has been a “morphing of antisemitism”, she said, which is now “the negation of Israel’s very right to exist”. 

She added that Israel is being held to a different moral standard following the Hamas attacks, saying “we always have to ask ourselves what would the UK do, what did the US do after 9/11, because that is what Israel must do as an equal member state in the family of nations”.