Noah Feldman, Columnist

When the 'Arab Street' Comes to Sweden

Anti-Jewish violence spreads to liberal Europe, where immigrants enjoy the freedom to protest.

December 11, 2017 at 9:17 PM UTC

Corrected

December 12, 2017 at 2:40 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Expected: Violence in the West Bank, not Sweden.
Photographer: Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

It’s no surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has sparked violence in the West Bank and Beirut, or even protests in far-flung Indonesia, which is majority Muslim.

But Sweden? Yet the western Swedish city of Gothenburg, headquarters of Volvo Car AB, saw the firebombing of a synagogue on Friday. The same evening, demonstrators in Malmö, in Sweden’s far south, called for their own “intifada” and threatened to shoot Jews.