Individuals in Brussels have conflated Israel’s fight against Hamas with the Holocaust, defiling memorial cobblestones across the city remembering those killed in the Shoah.
Stolpersteine—or memorial stones, which can be found throughout Europe at former residences of Holocaust victims—were discovered on Tuesday with the word “Gaza” scrawled over them in white graffiti. This was about a week after members of Jewish youth movements cleaned the stones.
Sharing images of the vandalism on social media, Belgian politician Mathias Vanden Borre said the conflation was “completely reprehensible and must be removed as soon as possible.”
A Belgian campaign group against antisemitism also condemned “in the strongest terms this instrumentalisation of the memory of the Shoah, as well as any attempt to trivialise or deny its history.”
According to the European Jewish Congress,
Such acts are not only offensive but are part of a growing trend where anti-Zionism serves as a thin veil for antisemitism.
In the Netherlands, Stolpersteines have previously been stolen, in what was described as an act of “pure Jew-hatred.” Earlier this month, memorial stones in Oslo, Norway, were defaced with black paint.
This latest desecration comes after Bella Swiatlowski, whose parents were killed in Nazi camps while she herself was in hiding, was told by local schools in Anderlecht that she could not address students about the Holocaust, as she has in the past. Despite insisting that her talk is about the Second World War rather than current events in the Middle East, Swiatlowski explained that school officials “are afraid of the parents.”
The teacher at another school in the capital also told reporters earlier this month that his lessons about the Holocaust have been cut short by students who he said “identify with the violence suffered by Gazans.”
