US and Israel escalate clash with Belgium on circumcision law

The US and Israel have redoubled their attack on Belgium over its circumcision laws, as meanwhile the EU examines legal ways to punish West Bank settlers.

The US ambassador to Belgium and the Israeli foreign minister both denounced the host country of the EU institutions on X on Wednesday (6 May).

“The prosecution of these religious figures (mohels), one of whom is American, is WRONG and won’t be tolerated. Belgium will be thought of now as anti Semitic by world [sic],” said the US ambassador, Bill White.

Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said the case was a “scarlet letter [badge of shame] on Belgian society”.

“With this act Belgium joins a short and shameful list, together with Ireland, of countries that use criminal law to prosecute Jews for practicing Judaism,” he said.

The act in question was Wednesday’s decision, by the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office, to seek a trial of two men (not three, as Sa’ar claimed) accused of circumcising boys without having the legally required medical licence to do so, which it called “intentional assault or battery with premeditation against minors”.

Antwerp’s Chamber of Indictments will decide on 18 June whether to proceed.

The affair has angered Jewish groups, such as the Brussels-based European Jewish Congress, ever since Belgian police first raided homes in Antwerp in May 2025.

“A 3,500-year-old covenant, practised in Antwerp for the last 800 years, criminalised for lacking EU medical licenses … it’s state harassment of Jewish life”, said rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, on Wednesday.

It already became a diplomatic incident on 16 February, when White first accused Belgium of conducting an “ANTI SEMITIC ‘PROSECUTION’,” prompting a formal Belgian rebuke to the US.

And Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prévot also fired back on Wednesday.

“Enough with these caricatures, minister [Sa’ar] … since you yourself recently urged against conducting diplomacy via Twitter, I suggest that we discuss all these issues during a meeting in Israel,” said Prévot on X.

The Belgian minister told the US envoy: “It is inappropriate to publicly criticise a country and tarnish its image simply because you disagree with judicial proceedings. I have already told you this [in February]”.

“To portray those [legal proceedings] as a country’s desire to undermine the religious freedom of Jews is defamatory,” said Prévot.

At the same time, Prévot has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics in the EU Council and Belgium, along with several other EU states, has called for trade sanctions on Israel.

“I was personally in Beirut on 8 April the day the [Israeli] bombs fell,” he told press in Luxembourg on 21 April, speaking of an Israeli airstrike that killed some 300 people.

And Israel has a track record of accusing all its EU critics of antisemitism, both in their foreign policy and treatment of Jewish minorities.

Trivialising anti-semitism

But for Claudio Francavilla, from the Human Rights Watch group in the US, its tactics were wearing thin.

“The greatest disservice to [fighting] antisemitism is its trivialisation, and Israeli authorities have been engaged in it for far too long,” he said of Wednesday’s circumcision row.

And Sa’ar’s administration had lost the moral high ground anyway, Francavilla said.

“It’s pretty rich from Israeli authorities to accuse the Belgian ones of partisanship, while Israeli courts rubber-stamp genocide [in Gaza], apartheid, illegal settlement policies, and continue to acquit IDF [Israeli] soldiers and state-backed settlers accused of the most serious crimes against the Palestinians [in the West Bank],” he said.

EU action on Israeli settlers

Germany and Italy have so far blocked trade sanctions on Israel, but Italy and France support action against West Bank settlers.