On the Belgian State’s Structural Relapse in the Face of Antisemitism

In the night of 8 to 9 March 2026, shortly before four in the morning, an explosion blew out the windows of the Liège synagogue. Not in Antwerp, where the density of Jewish life and the thickness of the security apparatus make the threat both more visible and more anticipated. Not in Brussels, kept under sustained vigilance since the attacks of 2014 and 2016. But in Liège: a working-class, secular city attached to its civic self-image, and perhaps for that very reason less inclined to imagine its own vulnerability. The bomb did not strike just anywhere. It struck where attention was weakest. It found the blind spot.

What this attack reveals is not merely the violence of one or several individuals. It also compels us to question the coherence of a system I have been documenting for several years: that of a recurring institutional failure, not always articulated as such, not always openly assumed, yet sufficiently constant to form a political pattern. In Belgium, in the face of antisemitism, silence is not merely the absence of speech; it too often functions as a mode of governance.

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Protected Stone, Exposed Lives

The synagogue on Rue Léon Frédéricq is a listed monument of Walloon heritage. Inaugurated in 1899, it is not merely a place of worship; for decades it has also housed a museum dedicated to the memory of Jewish life in Liège. The Belgian state protected it as an architectural object with all the care deemed appropriate. It has proved far less diligent in protecting the people who use it.

This image — protected stone, exposed lives — is not a convenient metaphor. It describes, with almost cruel precision, a Belgian constant: commemorative excellence guarantees nothing when it comes to political vigilance. Facades are maintained, memory is honoured, buildings are restored; yet the state struggles to secure, with the same consistency, the concrete conditions of safety, continuity, and dignity for those who keep such places alive. This is what I recently described as “the silent erosion of Jewish life in Belgium”: not always declared hostility, not a pogrom, but the gradual narrowing of the conditions of existence for a minority the state claims to protect without always giving itself the real means to do so.

There is also a symbolic resonance in this attack that would be a mistake to minimize: once again, the bomb was placed not only against a synagogue, but against a Jewish museum. What was targeted, therefore, was not only a synagogue, but also a site of Jewish memory. And it was already in a Jewish museum — the Jewish Museum of Belgium, on Rue des Minimes in Brussels — that murderous antisemitism struck on 24 May 2014 with a brutality then thought unprecedented. In eighty-two seconds, Mehdi Nemmouche, a French jihadist returning from Syria, murdered four people there: Emanuel Riva and Miriam Riva, Israeli tourists visiting Brussels; Dominique Sabrier, a French volunteer recently settled in Belgium; and Alexandre Strens, a member of the museum’s communications staff. Four lives, each in its own way tied to Jewish presence, transmission, and memory. Twelve years later, it is once again a site of Jewish memory that is struck — this time at night, with an explosive device, and without fatalities at this stage. The progression in premeditation and sophistication is hardly reassuring. On the contrary, it signals a mutation in method, though what matters even more is the permanence of the target: no longer merely bodies, but the symbol itself — the inscription in stone of Jewish presence in Belgium.

Belgium the Docile — The Foundational Precedent

To understand what happened in Liège on 8 March 2026, one must return to what historians have named, with cruel precision, La Belgique docile. The report produced in 2007 by CegeSoma (the Study and Documentation Centre on War and Contemporary Societies), at the request of the Belgian Senate, established with devastating rigour that the Belgian authorities interpreted their obligation of administrative collaboration with the Nazi occupier in a maximalist way. It was not the ideological brutality of a fascist state. It was something more insidious: technocratic docility — civil servants filling in registers, escorting convoys, maintaining order because it was their job, because institutional machinery had taken precedence over moral conscience.

Between October 1940 and June 1942, seventeen anti-Jewish ordinances decreed by the Nazis were carried out by Belgian institutions without significant resistance. Of the 25,490 Jews deported from Belgium to Auschwitz-Birkenau, only 5% survived. It was not until 6 December 2012 — sixty-seven years after the events — that the Belgian Senate unanimously recognized the “responsibility of the Belgian state” in the persecution of the Jews. Sixty-seven years: a generation and a half of institutional denial, political caution, and calculations mixing collective guilt with electoral timidity.

That delay is not incidental. It reveals a behavioural constant, a form of path dependency: institutions reproduce inherited logics, even unconsciously, long after the circumstances that first generated them have disappeared. Belgium did not choose antisemitism. Structurally, and on several occasions, it chose the comfort of omission when Jews on its soil were placed in danger.

State Antisemitism by Omission — The Contemporary Version

The contemporary version of this docility wears no uniform, keeps no registry, and bears no administrative stamp. It takes more muted forms, but forms no less structuring for that. The case of the Antwerp mohalim offered a particularly revealing illustration: not because it alone would establish a state policy, but because it shows how judicial procedure can, in its concrete effects, weaken a practice constitutive of Orthodox Jewish life without any authority appearing fully to measure the symbolic and practical gravity of such a precedent. It is in this sense that I speak of “antisemitism by institutional omission”: not an explicitly antisemitic law, but a chain of decisions, blind spots, and arbitrations that end up restricting real Jewish life while allowing everyone involved the comfort of believing themselves innocent. A minister who strengthens protection where electoral pressure is visible and eases it where silence prevails: that is antisemitism that does not speak its name, precisely because no one needs to name it for its effects to be felt.

The international reaction, by contrast, was immediate. Last month, U.S. Ambassador Bill White published on X a message of unusual diplomatic severity, denouncing what he described as the “unacceptable harassment” of the Jewish community in Belgium and urging the authorities to guarantee by law the ability of mohalim to perform their religious functions. The Belgian government’s response was instructive. Rather than opening a calm political examination of the substance of the accusation, it first chose to disqualify the messenger. Maxime Prévot summoned the ambassador and denounced “dangerous disinformation,” rejecting as “totally false, offensive and unacceptable” any suggestion that Belgium could be antisemitic. This reflex is telling: in Belgium, once the accusation of institutional blindness is voiced from abroad, the state’s first instinct is not introspection, but the reflexive defence of its own innocence.

To this institutional failure must be added another register, more diffuse but no less decisive: that of media representation. On 10 February 2026, the Jonathas Institute published a second report, RTBF, Israel and Gaza: The Original Bias, concluding, on the basis of its analysis, that the Belgian public broadcaster had treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a structurally unbalanced way since 7 October 2023. The issue here is not to settle an abstract editorial debate. It is to recall that a systematic bias in the narration of Israel, Hamas, Gaza, and more broadly contemporary Jewish conflict is never without consequences for a country’s intellectual climate. When a public broadcaster installs, even indirectly, asymmetrical frames of perception, it helps normalize an environment in which Jewish concern appears excessive, and the hostility that gives rise to it almost secondary. It is no longer only the judicial or administrative apparatus that contributes to the erosion of the framework of Jewish life in Belgium: it is the fourth estate itself which, through its editorial choices, insidiously legitimizes what it claims to condemn.

It is this mechanism of denial — judicial, diplomatic, media-driven — that I have elsewhere described as one of the engines of the new European Jewish exodus. Belgium does not expel its Jews; it makes, for a growing number of them, their presence more precarious, more burdensome, at times more difficult to sustain, through the accumulation of negative signals, inadequate protections, and official blind spots. The result is not, in legal terms, an expulsion; yet humanly and politically, it can produce some of the same effects. Boris Daune expressed it in July 2025 with devastating restraint: “I am leaving Belgium for Israel because, for Jews, the atmosphere there has become unbreathable.” Not a pogrom. Not an exceptional law. An atmosphere.

This silent exodus is the rational response to a structural insecurity the state does not take charge of. It is proof that structural violence — the kind that leaves no trace in a penal code but is inscribed in bodies, in decisions to emigrate, in the gradual closing of schools and synagogues — produces the same effects as physical violence: contraction, then disappearance. The Jonathas report (A Perfect Storm, May 2025) provided the quantitative demonstration of what my articles had formulated analytically: only 37% of Belgians believe antisemitism is widespread in their country, while 97% of Belgian Jews report having experienced an antisemitic act or remark in the previous year. This gulf of perception is not trivial. It is the thermometer of a social body that has learned not to see, and of a political body that has learned not to look where looking costs votes. In a society the Jonathas report describes as moving toward archipelagization — fragmented into increasingly sealed communal islands where cross-cutting civic solidarity erodes — the Jewish minority, small in number, is condemned to a structural solitude that neither institutions nor the majority opinion can overcome.

Why Liège? The Logic of the Blind Spot

The question asked by all those following antisemitism in Belgium is this: violence was expected in Antwerp or Brussels. Why Liège?

The answer is counterintuitive but rigorous. It is precisely because no one expected it in Liège that it struck in Liège.

Antwerp has for decades been a paradoxical fortress: its Haredi community is dense, organized, and politically connected. Flemish parties — N-VA as well as Vlaams Belang — accommodate it for distinct yet converging reasons. Security there is heavy, visible, permanent, and was reinforced after the 2014 attack. Brussels, since the Jewish Museum attack of May 2014 and the terrorist attacks of March 2016, has been a city under heightened vigilance around its community institutions. The perpetrator of the Jewish Museum attack was tried and convicted. Trauma produced mechanisms.

Liège concentrates, in almost pure form, the conditions of this silent erosion: an old, dignified, rooted community, present since the eighteenth century, reconstituted by Central European Jews in the nineteenth century, yet numerically fragile, barely visible in the national debate, and politically too weak to impose its own security centrality. In a city governed for decades by a political culture persuaded that the “Jewish question” does not constitute a major issue there, the absence of visible conflict may have been mistaken for analysis. Yet this kind of administrative tranquillity sometimes produces its opposite: not lucid peace, but underestimation. When a society does not perceive antisemitism as a structuring reality, it does not protect its synagogues as probable targets; it treats them as elements of heritage, visits them as museums.

And that is where the circle closes with implacable logic: the Liège synagogue is a museum. A museum visited by tourists, listed by the state, cherished by local memory — and one that no one had deemed necessary to protect with the same seriousness as those in Antwerp or Brussels. The blind spot is not an accident. It is the direct and logical product of silent erosion: one does not protect what one does not see disappearing.

The Perfect Storm and Relapse

The very title of the Jonathas report — A Perfect Storm — provides the appropriate analytical framework. A perfect storm is not an isolated accident; it is the convergence of several distinct dynamics whose meeting produces a rupture. In Belgium, at least four such dynamics overlap: classical far-right antisemitism; third-worldist far-left antisemitism; Islamist antisemitism present in certain radicalized milieus; and finally what I call institutional default antisemitism — the antisemitism of under-protection, slowness, denial, and political underestimation. The figures in the Jonathas report give this configuration alarming depth. But the fourth component is politically the most serious, because it does not belong to a hostile fringe, but to the direct responsibility of the state. It is this component that manufactures blind spots. In Liège as elsewhere.

The historical sequence now almost writes itself with the cold clarity of facts:

• 1940–1944: administrative docility in the face of Nazi persecution, seventeen anti-Jewish ordinances implemented without significant resistance.
• 6 December 2012: parliamentary recognition of the Belgian state’s responsibility, sixty-seven years after the events.
• 24 May 2014: attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium, four dead — the first deadly antisemitic act on Belgian soil since the Second World War.
• May 2025: the Jonathas report, A Perfect Storm, documents with supporting figures the perfect storm under way — without visible operational consequences from the public authorities.
• 10 February 2026: the Jonathas report, RTBF, Israel and Gaza: The Original Bias, based on the AI analysis of 2,181 articles, demonstrates the systematic bias of the Belgian public broadcaster, the fourth estate financed by taxation, including by Belgian Jews themselves.
• February 2026: U.S. Ambassador Bill White publicly denounces the “harassment” of Antwerp mohalim and is summoned by the Belgian government, which prefers to sanction the messenger rather than examine the message.
• 8 March 2026, shortly before 4:00 a.m.: a bomb is placed in front of a synagogue-museum and heritage site in Liège. The federal prosecutor’s office takes over the case — its jurisdiction specifically covers terrorist acts and hate crimes of systemic gravity. Same type of site of memory as in 2014. Same structural security void. Different method: no longer an armed man killing in broad daylight, but an explosive device planted in darkness against the symbol itself. While Belgian political debate remains absorbed by the Gaza conflict and its electoral repercussions. The escalation lies not in the number of victims — fortunately there were none this time — but in symbolic intentionality: no longer the targeting of bodies, but of memory, of the inscription in stone of Jewish presence in Belgium.

What Liège Compels Us to Say

There is something in the reaction of the Belgian authorities in the aftermath of the explosion that feels painfully familiar: unanimous condemnations, predictable formulas about “fundamental values,” an emergency meeting. Prime Minister De Wever described antisemitism as an attack on “our values.” The mayor of Liège denounced the “importation of external conflicts.” Interior Minister Bernard Quintin promised a “reinforcement of security measures” and described the act as “abject antisemitism.” Yves Oschinsky, president of the CCOJB, called it an “extremely worrying, grave and troubling act.”

All of that is necessary. None of it is sufficient.

For the real question is not only one of security. It is political, and in the end philosophical: how far is the Belgian state prepared to recognize not only what radicalized individuals commit, but what its own failures make possible? Criminal law will prosecute the perpetrators; that is its function. Politics, however, must answer for something else: structural inaction, electoral myopia, the chronic under-protection of a numerically small minority, the bias of certain public intermediaries, the constant importation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into Belgium’s internal life, and above all that reflex of denial by which the institution prefers to exonerate itself rather than reform itself. It is precisely that climate which Liège forces us to confront.

The Belgian state took sixty-seven years to recognize its responsibility in the deportation of its Jews. It has now taken twelve years, since the attack on the Jewish Museum, to realize that securing Jewish community sites outside the major metropolitan centres remains a grey zone.

This is what I have been trying to name for several years. Liège, on 8 March 2026, does not create a concept; it confirms one. Silent erosion is not an image. It is a political logic — diffuse, unacknowledged, sometimes even unconscious of itself, yet real in its effects. And the logics no one claims are often those no one corrects.

The only question now is the one Belgian history asks with almost unbearable insistence: how many more years will it take before what is repeating itself before our eyes is fully named?