A citizen is not always stripped of status by decree. Sometimes it suffices to narrow what his passport still enables him to obtain. By confining consular protection for Belgians living in Judea and Samaria to emergencies alone, Belgium is inaugurating a conditional citizenship: intact in principle, diminished at the counter. The measure purports to target a territory; in its effects, it reaches a Jewish population. This is where antisemitism by omission begins: not in proclaimed hatred, but in inequality made administrative.
A State reveals itself less in its grand declarations than in the ordinary gestures by which it recognises its own. Citizenship is never more real than when it becomes practical: a passport renewed, a civil-status record registered, a consular presence when a national is far from home. It is there — in the modest materiality of the civic bond — that a State’s fidelity to the equality it proclaims is truly measured. And it is precisely there that Belgium has now introduced a rupture.
By restricting to emergency assistance alone the consular services offered to Belgians living in Judea and Samaria, the federal government has not merely translated a diplomatic position into an administrative measure. It has displaced the conflict from the inter-state arena into the civic body of its own nationals. It has turned place of residence into the silent criterion of a diminished citizenship. The decision presents itself as the rigorous application of international law; in practice, it produces a hierarchy among nationals. It claims to target a territory. It reaches a population.
It is in this gap — between the apparent neutrality of the criterion and the singularity of its effects — that the gravity of the precedent lies. Belgium does not formally withdraw nationality; it reduces its use. It does not name Jews; it reaches them through a geographic mediation. It proclaims no exclusion; it organises one in the language of legal compliance. The measure presents itself as territorial. Its effect, however, is confessional.
This is not a mere bureaucratic dispute. When a State withdraws from a portion of its citizens ordinary access to the protection it owes, in principle, to all — passport renewal, registration of civil-status documents, security of electoral registration, even the administrative continuity of pension entitlements accumulated over decades of Belgian contributions — it is not moving a diplomatic frontier: it is fragmenting the national body itself, making domicile the silent criterion of a hierarchy among nationals. Citizenship then ceases to be a fully operative status and becomes a revocable bond, suspended by the moral judgment the State passes on the soil where its national lives. It is this reversibility that constitutes the real rupture.
The justification is familiar, and it appears unassailable: in its advisory opinion of July 2024, the International Court of Justice declared unlawful the situation resulting from “occupation and colonisation.” Belgium draws from this the consequence it believes itself bound to draw. But this is where the reasoning breaks down. The obligations that opinion imposes on third States are erga omnes obligations of non-recognition and non-assistance in relation to an unlawful situation attributable to the occupying power; they govern the relationship between one State and another, not the relationship between a State and its own citizens. Nothing in that opinion requires a government to reduce the consular protection owed to its own nationals solely on account of their place of residence. By transposing onto the individual an obligation designed for States, Belgium privatizes the erga omnes: it makes a Belgian national living in Maale Adumim bear the weight of a duty that belongs to chancelleries, not to private persons. The citizen is made answerable, in his administrative existence, for an illegality of which he is neither the author nor its primary legal subject.
Along this fault line between the language of neutrality and the mechanics of selection lies what I have already called antisemitism by omission. The term does not refer to invective or to declared hatred. It identifies a colder form of hostility: one that passes through criteria, procedures and exceptions. An administrative architecture that never articulates the difference in religious terms yet produces it in practice — reaching Jews primarily through a politically disqualified geography. Omission is not an absence; here, it becomes a modality of exclusion — the hardest to indict because it invokes the law, and the most efficient because it dispenses with hatred.
This concept is not a rhetorical flourish: it has a legal counterpart. European non-discrimination law has long recognised the category of indirect discrimination: an apparently neutral criterion — here, residence in a “settlement” — that disproportionately disadvantages a group defined by religion or origin, and that is rendered lawful only on the strict condition that it be objectively justified and proportionate to its aim. Yet the communities targeted are, in fact, Jewish communities; Palestinian residents of the same territories, whether Muslim or Christian, are not the population practically affected by the measure. The geographic criterion thus maps, without ever naming it, onto a determinate population. Neutrality becomes, here, no more than a technique of presentation: what the measure distributes is not merely kilometres, but belonging.
The gravity of the precedent lies in the nature of what is being suspended. Hannah Arendt named the “right to have rights” as that primary belonging without which all other rights remain a dead letter; the passport, the registered birth certificate, the consular attestation are its modest but decisive supports. By reducing that bond to emergency assistance, the Belgian State allows nationality to subsist on paper while emptying it in practice: it manufactures a citizen of full status and half-treatment, intact in title, diminished in the concrete exercise of his rights. Graduated citizenship is no novelty in history; it is one of history’s oldest temptations, and Europe knows better than anyone where it leads when applied to Jews.
The irony of the Belgian sequence only sharpens the logic. The minister who signed this restriction is the same one who, at the height of the diplomatic crisis born of the Antwerp investigation into the mohalim, declared that “Belgian Jews deserve all our protection” and that they should not be instrumentalised as leverage in a dispute over international law. The statement was right. Today it turns back upon its author. For consular protection is, par excellence, the most tangible form of that protection owed — and it is precisely this protection that the decision reduces for Belgian Jews on account of where they live. One could hardly better illustrate the distance between the generous register of speech and the administrative act that curtails it.
There remains the test of consistency, and it may be the most damning. A State that converts the unlawfulness of a territory into a criterion for consular restriction should, for consistency’s sake, apply that principle wherever a comparable situation arises. Yet it does not. Nothing of the kind is imposed, for instance, on Belgians living in or travelling through Western Sahara, a territory whose status remains disputed, where the Moroccan presence structures the administrative and security reality, and where the Sahrawi question continues to belong to an unresolved international dispute. No Belgian living in that space, no Belgian-Moroccan dual national, no citizen connected to that contested geography is, for that reason alone, assigned to a reduced form of consular citizenship. The singularity of the treatment speaks volumes about the singularity of the object being targeted. It is not unlawfulness in general that mobilises the administration: it is this unlawfulness, and the population it covers. Selectivity does not, by itself, prove intent. It establishes a structure of prejudice — and it is on structures, as much as on intentions, that contemporary antisemitism feeds when it abandons the shout and adopts the circular.
At a time when Europe likes to imagine itself as the guardian of law, there is something dizzying in watching it produce, through the very instruments of law, an inequality among its nationals. Bureaucracy here gives exclusion an acceptable form: it does not persecute, it “regulates”; it does not exclude, it “limits to emergencies”; it names no one, it “takes residence into account.” The elegance of the procedure must not obscure its conceptual violence, for what is at stake is not merely an error of foreign policy, but a moral test — and that test reveals how easily equality can be suspended once the Jews concerned live in a space deemed unworthy.
Inequality does not always begin with brutal proclamations. It sometimes begins with technical restrictions, administrative exceptions, apparently neutral categories, counters that cease to answer all citizens in the same way. This is how a society learns that a right may survive in the texts while retracting in practice; that citizenship may remain intact in principle while becoming conditional in its exercise; that a passport may continue to attest belonging while no longer granting access to the same protection.
Belgium has proclaimed no doctrine. It has inscribed no inferior citizenship into law. It has merely decided that, for several hundred of its own, the consular bond will no longer mean quite the same thing. It is precisely this “merely” that should alarm us. For the most serious ruptures do not always take the form of scandal; they often advance under the guise of procedure. They do not say: you are excluded. They say: you fall under another regime.
In Jewish matters, however, Europe ought to know that administrative distinction is never innocent when it maps — even without naming it — onto a determinate population. Contemporary antisemitism does not always need slogans. Sometimes a criterion is enough; a circular, a silence, a half-closed counter. Belgium has just invented this discreet form of disenfranchisement: not withdrawing the passport, but diminishing its reach; not expelling the citizen, but teaching him that his protection now depends on where he lives. It seems little, at first glance. But in such matters, habit has never been a boundary. It has always been a slope.
