GAZA WAR“Backlash Effect”: Why the Middle East Conflict Triggers Hate Crimes in the U.S.
In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, a wave of antisemitism and Islamophobia has swept across the United States, putting American Jewish and Muslim communities on edge. There has been a staggering 312 cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault during the first two weeks of the war, a nearly five-fold increase from the same period last year.
In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, a wave of antisemitism and Islamophobia has swept across the United States, putting American Jewish and Muslim communities on edge.
A 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death outside Chicago on Oct. 14, a week after Hamas’ attack on Israel triggered the conflict. The attacker shouted, “You Muslims must die” before fatally stabbing the boy and injuring his mother.
A 20-year-old asylum-seeker from Jordan was arrested in Houston last month after posting online his support for “killing Jews.”
The American Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, has documented a staggering 312 cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault during the first two weeks of the war, a nearly five-fold increase from the same period last year.
The Council on American Islamic Relations fielded 774 complaints during the same two weeks, more than triple last year’s total for that period. That is the most since December 2015, when then-candidate Donald Trump called for a “Muslim ban.”
Most of the incidents fall short of hate crime classification. But police data from cities such as New York and Los Angeles show an increase in hate crime reports since Oct. 7.
The escalation is alarming, given that hate crimes were already at unprecedented levels, experts say. Last year, the FBI recorded the highest number of incidents since it began collecting hate crime data in 1991.
“The current conflict in Gaza is pouring gasoline on a fire that was already raging,” said Michael Jensen, senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.
How does a conflict thousands of kilometers away trigger such intense, domestic repercussions?
“Unfortunately, it’s actually not uncommon,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “Historically, we’ve talked about something called the ‘backlash effect.’ Events happening anywhere in the world end up having an impact domestically. We saw it during the Arab embargo,” when oil shipments to the U.S. and some other countries were cut off in 1973-74.
In the decades since, the pattern has largely held up.
An analysis of FBI statistics dating to the early 1990s shows that anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate crimes escalate during Israeli-Palestinian tensions. The analysis, conducted by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, was shared with VOA.