Israel has won the war, but Hamas has succeeded in consigning the Jews to moral and cultural exile

Last week, an El Al flight from Tel Aviv landed at Amsterdam Airport. On board were a mother and her children, who had travelled to the Netherlands for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. After collecting their luggage, they headed for the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel. They didn’t get very far. “Have you arrived from Tel Aviv? Come this way!” All passengers were forced to have their luggage subjected to an additional X-ray scan. The writer Sivan Behr was also on board: she had travelled that route many times, but had never witnessed such a scene. But this is Europe in 2026. Families arriving for a Jewish festival had their suitcases searched simply because they were coming from Israel. This was the result of a Dutch law that came into force on 22 September. The measure bans the import, purchase and sale of goods produced in Israeli settlements, including Golan wine, which is often used for celebrations. European governments, which took twenty years to blacklist terrorists and which secretly buy up as much Israeli technology as they can, have begun imposing anti-Jewish sanctions. Meanwhile, Yael, a character in a novel by the author Meg Keene, was originally supposed to be called Sue. This was one of the suggestions received from a literary agent – herself Jewish – whilst she was trying to sell the book.

Keene, the author of two guidebooks that have sold 150,000 copies, was also asked to remove Hebrew expressions, scenes set in Israel and a Star of David from the manuscript. An Israeli name, her agent told her, might have caused “concern amongst publishers”. Keene did not alter the book. The novel has yet to find a publisher. Rebecca “R. F.” Kuang is a highly successful Chinese-American writer. Her seventh novel, Taipei Story, has just been published. It contains a scene featuring an Israeli musician. This was enough to spark a literary shitstorm, despite Kuang supporting the boycott of Israel. These events are documented in a report by the Anti-Defamation League which examines “the ousting of Jews and Israelis from American culture since 7 October”.

The Jews have returned to exile. It is not an exile of suitcases and ships, but a subtle, modern one: exile from conversation, from bookshops, from the lecture hall, from hotels, from festivals, from aeroplanes. It is an exile in which one can remain in Tel Aviv and yet be cut off from the world that, until yesterday, was called ‘the West’. Since 7 October, Israel has dismantled battalions of terrorists from Rafah to Beirut. But in Europe, the opposite of what the war manuals promise has happened.

The further the military campaign advanced, the more the space in which an Israeli – or a Jew who had not declared themselves at the ‘right’ time – could appear without being treated as an outsider narrowed. It is the eighth front, and it is not in Gaza. It is the Einaudi Campus of the University of Turin, where on 7 October an event entitled ‘Three years of genocide, three years of resistance’ is being held. It is the film jury in Marseille that has expelled an Israeli director. It is the bookshop in Tel Aviv that has had to cancel a meeting with the French writer Emmanuel Carrère. It is the microphone at Glastonbury inciting people to kill Israeli soldiers. It is the Granada literary festival blacklisting the Jewish writer Ariana Harwicz. It is the stage from which Barbara Butch – a French, lesbian, left-wing and Jewish singer – was forced to step down. Butch was singing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.

Imagine if there were no more Jews. On the eighth front, there must be none left.

Music has become the language of the ban. When the Israeli singers arrived in Malmö and Basel for the Eurovision Song Contest, they were met not by a red carpet but by a crowd intent on killing them. Meanwhile, the English Royal Ballet cancelled its performance of "Tosca" in Tel Aviv. In museums, the boycott is rampant, from scholars refusing to speak at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris to the British Museum cancelling an event on Jewish history. In universities, exile is an unwritten law. In Ghent, Amsterdam, Dublin, Barcelona, Pisa and Brussels, university authorities are suspending exchange programmes and terminating partnerships. The New York Times has recorded more than a thousand instances of academic boycott. Israeli writers have been left gasping for air. Deborah Harris, who for half a century has sold Jewish and Israeli authors to fifty countries, says that since 7 October she has not placed a single Israeli author abroad. Publishers who once bought manuscripts now ask the agent whether the author has "spoken out" on Gaza. Howl, the satirical novel by Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson about Jews in the diaspora after 7 October, was published in the UK in March, but has failed to find a publisher in the United States. From Isabel Allende to Sally Rooney to Nobel laureate Han Kang, Hebrew has been turned into a language of shame. It can be translated into Farsi by publishers in Tehran, but not into Hebrew in Tel Aviv.

This week, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Israeli Institute for Literature did not bring a single writer. And the annual Jerusalem Writers’ Festival, held against the walls of the Old City, has an increasing number of empty seats. Editors are leaving Guernica, a respected American magazine, over an essay by Joanna Chen, an Israeli writer and peace activist. A publishing house has pulled a book by Holocaust scholar Rafael Medoff: it did not condemn Israel. In the film world, the mechanism is even more insidious because it also affects those whom Israel accuses. Nadav Lapid, a fierce visual dissident in his own country, has had to pull out of a festival in France. The Israeli film festival ‘Shalom Europa’ has been cancelled in Strasbourg. To the sound of drums and deafening noise, the streets of Europe are calling for the destruction of the tiny Jewish state from the river to the sea. Tourists from the Jewish state discover their exile at reception: Israeli nationality is a political test at check-in. Air travel isolation is the most literal metaphor for the eighth front: you can win on the ground only to discover, like the Brussels Airlines pilots, that no one wants to fly you home any more. Meanwhile, Jean Quatremer has to leave Libération after forty years: no left-wing journalist will be forgiven any more for defending Israel. And Ed Sheeran, in tears, apologises.

Hamas was not set on defeating the IDF. Its aim was to transform the Jewish state into what the German novelist Maxim Biller called ‘Morbus Israel’. Meanwhile, the terrorists’ vocabulary has also found its way into school textbooks published by Hachette: ‘Following the deaths of 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of attacks by Hamas’.

But whilst the eighth front was expanding and eleven Jews were leaving France every day, synagogues were being burnt in England, the Greens were declaring that Zionism is racism, and in Germany Chancellor Merz was saying that ‘the Jews are in danger’; the first front to come under attack on 7 October – the kibbutz on that festive Saturday morning – was once again more populated than it had been before the pogrom. For the first time in a year, no missile was fired from Gaza. The Jewish people will not return to exile.