Two Explosions in Two Days: How the Iran War Is Reaching Europe's Jewish Communities

Early Saturday morning in Amsterdam, an explosion damaged the outer wall of a Jewish school in an upscale residential neighbourhood. No one was injured — the blast happened overnight, when the building was empty. But Amsterdam's mayor, Femke Halsema, didn't mince words. This was, she said, "a deliberate attack against the Jewish community."

It was the second such attack in the Netherlands in two days. On Friday, four teenagers were arrested after an arson attack on a synagogue in Rotterdam, the country's second-largest city. And these aren't isolated incidents. They're part of a pattern that is spreading across Europe, propelled by a war being fought thousands of miles away.

The Expanding Map of Violence

The Netherlands attacks fit into a timeline that European security officials have been tracking with growing alarm.

On March 3, an explosion hit a historic synagogue in Liège, Belgium, at four in the morning. Authorities are investigating it as a potential terrorist attack. Days later, Cyprus arrested a suspected Hamas arms smuggler whose weapons were allegedly intended for attacks on Jewish institutions in Germany.

On March 9, a bomb damaged the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. Three Norwegian brothers — citizens with Iraqi heritage — were arrested and charged with terrorism. Investigators are probing possible connections to foreign state actors.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement recorded 136 antisemitic incidents across European countries in the first week of March alone. Of those, 27 — nearly one in five — were directly motivated by the Iran war. And these are just the incidents that get reported.

The Numbers Behind the Violence

Europe's antisemitic violence didn't start with the Iran war. It accelerated with it.

The UK's Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, already at historic highs following the October 2023 attacks and the war in Gaza. Between 2023 and 2025, the CST documented 562 incidents targeting synagogues alone.

In Germany, Berlin prosecutors recorded 820 antisemitic offences in 2025, up from 757 in 2024 and 589 in 2023 — a steady, year-on-year escalation. France saw antisemitic acts quadruple in the final months of 2023, with 92 incidents near synagogues and Jewish schools recorded in a single month.

The Iran war has poured fuel on what was already burning. Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Euronews that "threats against Jews and Israelis in Europe have increased over the past two and a half years — and continue to rise."

What makes this moment different from 2023 is the diversity of perpetrators. "We're dealing with a very complex and heterogeneous threat," Vidino said. Some attackers are lone actors with extreme anti-Israel views. Others are affiliated with jihadist networks. Still others have connections to Iran-backed groups — or, alarmingly, Russian operatives working to destabilise European societies.

The Mechanisms of Spread

How does a war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran translate into a bomb at a school in Amsterdam?

Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, describes a radicalisation effect that crosses traditional sectarian lines. Tehran has long supported both Shia groups like Hezbollah and Sunni groups like Hamas. The Iran war has created what Schindler calls a "solidarity effect" — Sunni extremists who might normally oppose Iran's Shia government are finding common cause against shared enemies.

"The threat is not limited to Shiite extremists," Schindler warned. "Both online and offline, we are seeing further radicalisation across the entire spectrum of violent Islamist extremism."

Social media accelerates this. The same platforms carrying war propaganda and deepfake videos about the Iran conflict are also carrying content that conflates Jewish communities in European cities with the actions of the Israeli military. The distinction between a government's war policy and a diaspora community's right to safety collapses online in ways that have real-world consequences.

Rebecca Schönenbach, a German counterterrorism adviser, pointed to Iran's existing infrastructure for targeting Jewish institutions abroad. "The Iranian regime has always carried out attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets," she said. That network includes agents linked to embassies, freelance operatives trained by the Revolutionary Guards, and contract killings through organised crime networks.

"For individuals, lone actors are the most dangerous," Schönenbach said. "For institutions, organised criminal agents pose the greatest threat."

How the Story Is Framed

The Amsterdam and Rotterdam attacks made international headlines, but the framing varies in telling ways.

Dutch media treated the events as a domestic security crisis, focusing on police response and community safety measures. Mayor Halsema's condemnation was front and centre.

Israeli media, particularly Haaretz, framed the attacks as evidence that the Iran war's consequences extend far beyond the Middle East — a point directed partly at the Israeli government's own war calculus.

American coverage, led by CNN and the New York Times, connected the Dutch attacks to the broader wave of antisemitic violence "amid the ongoing US-Israeli conflict with Iran." The framing implicitly acknowledges American responsibility for the conflict's global ripple effects.

European security outlets, like the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), focused on the operational question: are these attacks coordinated, or are they independent acts fuelled by the same catalyst? The Oslo embassy bombing, the Liège synagogue explosion, and the Netherlands attacks share a timeline but may not share a command structure.

This distinction matters. Coordinated attacks by state-backed networks require one kind of response. A diffuse radicalisation wave, where the war creates the motivation and social media provides the instruction manual, requires something entirely different. Europe appears to be facing both simultaneously.

The Human Cost of Distant Wars

There's a pattern here that Albis has tracked across multiple conflicts: wars fought between states end up targeting communities that had nothing to do with starting them.

Jewish children in Amsterdam didn't choose the Iran war. They didn't vote for the military strikes. They share a religious heritage with a country involved in the conflict, and for some attackers, that is enough. The same logic has driven attacks on Muslim communities after 9/11, on Asian communities during COVID, on Ukrainian diaspora communities by Russian nationalists.

The Amsterdam school attack happened overnight, when no children were present. The damage was limited to a charred wall and a broken drainpipe. But the message was clear, and the next attack might not be so carefully timed.

Dutch authorities have stepped up security at all Jewish institutions across the country. Amsterdam's Jewish community — one of Europe's oldest, with roots dating back to the 1600s — is once again calculating the risks of daily life: which routes to walk, which buildings to enter, whether to wear identifying symbols in public.

That calculation is the real damage. Not the charred wall, but the fear it creates. Not the headline, but the thousand small decisions that follow it.

What Comes Next

The Iran war shows no signs of ending soon. As long as it continues, the threat to Jewish communities in Europe will remain elevated. Experts agree the threat level will stay high "as long as the Iran conflict and the regime exist."

This week, 154 antisemitic incidents were recorded across Europe. Next week, the number will likely be higher. The war in the Middle East is a media story, a geopolitical story, an energy story. But in cities across Europe, it's also a story about whether your neighbour's child can safely go to school.

That's the part of the story that rarely makes the front page. The explosions do. The fear doesn't.