Month: November 2023

The captain of a Russian airplane at Dagestan’s Makhachkala airport on Sunday urged passengers not to “try to open any doors, there is a mob is raging outside!” The aircraft had parked beside another plane that arrived from Tel Aviv just minutes ago.

Outside, frightening scenes were unfolding. Dozens of angry men were screaming and running around on the tarmac. None of the commotion seemed coordinated, but the atmosphere was clearly aggressive. One of the men managed to climb onto the wing of the Tel Aviv plane, while others attempted opening its locked doors. One picture that circulated after the incident showed one of the men peering into the airplane’s nozzle. The angry mob was searching for Jews and people with Israeli passports. 

A few thousand men had stormed Makhachkala airport, smashing windows and tearing out doors as they headed for the tarmac, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” As the event unfolded, videos of the unrest were posted online almost by the minute.

Rioters rushed onto the tarmac, chanting antisemitic slogansImage: AP/picture alliance

This outbreak of violence appeared to have taken Dagestan authorities completely by surprise. The police was slow to respond, and it took hours until authorities pacified the angry crowd. Ultimately, 60 individuals were arrested, 20 people injured, two of them seriously. Dagestan’s investigative committee has launched an inquiry into the unrest.

Meanwhile, much of the world remains aghast by this outburst of antisemitism in Russia’s Dagestan republic.

Antisemitic sentiments amplified by social media

Oleg Petrovich Orlov of the Memorial human rights organization told DW that antisemitic sentiments had been simmering in the Caucasus region since the latest Israel-Hamas conflict erupted. Even so, no one had expected such an outbreak, not even Dagestan authorities in the capital Makhachkala, Orlov added.

While he did say Dagestan is known as a region “where street action is much more visible than elsewhere in the Caucasus,” Orlov also emphasized that Telegram channels had played a “provocative role.” He said they called for the storming of the airport, above all the Morning Dagestan Telegram channel.

While the creators behind Morning Dagestan deny being antisemitic, their channel is full of antisemitic content and provocative articles. The fact that such a channel can exist is surprising given how closely Russia’s FSB intelligence agency controls such media outlets and how quickly, if necessary, it can block them, Orlov told DW.

“Of course, I don’t believe that the intelligence services would have deliberately wanted protests of such magnitude; it is possible the situation simply got out of control,” he said.

The Memorial expert said that although Russia is growing ever more totalitarian, the Russian state appears weak. In Dagestan, the Russian state has been caught off-guard, just like last June, when Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin marched on Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, used the Dagestan riots to attack the West. At a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, Putin said the events had been instigated in no small part from Ukrainian territory, “at the hands of Western intelligence services.” Putin did not provide evidence for the claim of foreign involvement. The US, meanwhile, rejected the allegations.

Some rioters were seen waving Palestinian flagsImage: Ramazan Rashidov/TASS/dpa/picture alliance

A feeling of helplessness

The fact that such an aggressive riot against people of the Jewish faith and Israeli citizens could break out in the first place stems from Dagestan’s dire overall situation, says Saida Sirashudinova of the Dagestani “Caucasus. World. Development” research center.

Personal and social problems as well as a lack of prospects had caused an “accumulated feeling of helplessness,” Sirashudinova told DW. “Of course, the situation of the Palestinians, which is not getting better [either], influenced people [in Dagestan].”

Even so, Sirashudinova mainly blames social media platforms for having incited this violence and having called on Dagestan’s Muslim population to protest.

“This aggression is dangerous, incendiary,” she told DW. “It is being orchestrated by radical, determined Muslims, who have not lived in Dagestan for a long time.”

In this regard, it is important that Dagestan’s religious leadership has taken a clear stand against the attacks, Sirashudinova said. Even so, there is a growing number of people willing to resort to violence, according to the researcher. This is a problem, she said, that is not being addressed: “This outburst of negative energy was possible because there was no outlet for people’s anger.”

She said it was important to emphasize that “not all of Dagestan wants to go around dragging Jews off planes.” DW asked her how prevalent antisemitism was in the Russian Caucasus, to which she replied that the region was highly diverse. “We are also seeing reactions from the Dagestani public that are not antisemitic,” she told DW, adding that Jews have lived in Dagestan for centuries.

Experts warn of a growing propensity to inflict violenceImage: AP/picture alliance

Will riots spill over into other Russian republics?

Sirashudinova said that for the past five to seven years, antisemitic sentiments in the republic had been stoked from outside. She said Jews have increasingly been made scapegoats, with people in Dagestan who are uneducated especially susceptible to such manipulation.

“Education is an issue in Dagestan,” the research said. “And this is also manifesting itself in this conflict.”

Dennis Volkov of Russia’s independent Levada polling center, however, doubts antisemitic aggression will spill over from Dagestan into other Russian regions.

“There is limited protest potential at the moment, although smaller demonstrations can be seen here and there, from time to time,” Volkov told DW.

He says current polls show two-thirds of the Russian population are not at all interested in the Middle East conflict: “People in Russia are much more concerned with their own problems.”

This article was originally written in German.

In Los Angeles, a man screaming “kill Jews” attempts to break into a family’s home. In London, girls in a playground are told they are “stinking Jews” and should stay off the slide. In China, posts likening Jews to parasites, vampires or snakes proliferate on social media, attracting thousands of “likes”.

These are examples of incidents of antisemitism, which have surged globally since the attack by Hamas gunmen on southern Israel on Oct. 7 and subsequent war on the Islamist group launched by Israel in the Gaza Strip. “This is the scariest time to be Jewish since World War Two. We have had problems before, but things have never been this bad in my lifetime,” said Anthony Adler, 62, speaking outside a synagogue where he had gone to pray in Golders Green, a London neighbourhood with a large Jewish community.

Adler, who runs three Jewish schools, temporarily closed two of them after Oct. 7 because of fears of attacks on pupils, and has beefed up security at all three. “The biggest fear is that there will be a random attack on our community, on our families and our children,” he said. In countries where figures are available from police or civil society groups, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa, the pattern is clear: the number of antisemitic incidents has gone up since Oct. 7 by several hundred percent compared with the same period last year. In some countries, such as the United States and Britain, Islamophobic incidents have also increased since Oct. 7.

In the case of the antisemitic incidents, most consist of verbal abuse, online slurs or threats, graffiti, and defacing of Jewish properties, businesses or sites of religious significance. Physical assaults represent a significant proportion. One common thread is that anger over the deaths of thousands of Palestinians as a result of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is invoked as justification for verbal or physical aggression towards Jews in general, often accompanied by the use of slurs and tropes rooted in the long history of antisemitism.

“Whatever their opinion on the conflict, even if they are extremely critical of the Israeli government’s policy, Jew is for them equal to Israel, equal to killing Palestinian children,” said political scientist Nonna Mayer, a member of France’s CNCDH, an independent human rights commission. She was describing what was in the minds of those behind antisemitic incidents.

‘ANY EXCUSE’

The climate of fear is worse for many Jews than in previous rises in antisemitism linked to flare-ups of violence in the Middle East, partly because of the intensity of the Gaza conflict and partly because of the trauma of Oct. 7. “The idea that Israel was the ultimate shelter, that idea is totally shattered by what happened on Oct. 7,” said Mayer.

The most chilling antisemitic incident globally was the storming of an airport in Russia’s Dagestan region on Sunday by an enraged crowd looking for Jews to harm after a flight arrived from Tel Aviv. Rabbi Alexander Boroda, president of Russia’s Federation of Jewish Communities, said in response that anti-Israeli sentiment had morphed into open aggression towards Russian Jews.

Shneor Segal, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Azerbaijan, said the incident showed that “antisemites will use any excuse – the current Middle East crisis being just the latest – to terrorise the dwindling numbers of us that still remain” in the Caucasus. “And where do they think they are chasing these Jews away to? The very country whose existence is such an abomination to them!” he said, referring to Israel. But without reaching such extremes, a string of incidents all over the world show the fears and tensions affecting Jewish communities.

In Buenos Aires, pupils at a well-known Jewish school were asked not to wear their usual uniforms to be less easily identifiable, parents said. Other schools cancelled planned camping trips and activities outside their premises.

At Cornell University in upstate New York, security was increased around the Center for Jewish Living after online threats, including a call for it to be bombed. In Johannesburg, pro-Palestinian protesters marched to an area with a large Jewish community on Saturday, tearing off pictures of Israeli hostages in Gaza from the perimeter walls of a community centre while a Shabbat service was being held at a nearby synagogue.

“I feel rage towards the people who are trying to curtail my freedom of religion and my freedom of movement, for the most part based on their antisemitism,” said Akiva Carr, who was in the synagogue when the incident took place. Official responses to the surge in antisemitism has varied from country to country. In the United States and Western Europe, authorities have mostly been quick to express strong support for Jewish communities, denounce antisemitism and in some cases reinforce security at relevant locations.

In Israel, the government said after the Dagestan incident that Israeli citizens should “review the necessity to travel abroad at this time” and urged Israelis residing abroad to be vigilant and stay away from demonstrations. In China, where the government routinely censors words or phrases it considers sensitive on social media, there was no indication that it had taken any steps to curtail a torrent of antisemitic vitriol on social media. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Chinese law prohibits the use of the internet to propagate extremism, ethnic hatred or discrimination.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Reuters)