Not only the perpetrator is to blame for the new act of anti-Semitic terrorism in Zurich

From Sacha Wigdorovits

Last Monday, February 2, 2026, a 40-year-old Kosovar man beat up a 26-year-old Orthodox Jew in the middle of the city of Zurich. Brave passers-by overpowered the attacker before he could do anything worse and held him until the police arrived. The police then reported that the man was still shouting anti-Semitic abuse when they arrived. There can therefore be no doubt about the motive for his crime.

There is also no doubt that the assassin is not solely to blame, but that others share responsibility for the fact that the attack could and did occur. First and foremost, the Federal Administrative Court should be mentioned here. As nebelspalter.ch has now uncovered, the court prevented the man from being deported to Kosovo in 2019, even though he did not have a valid residence permit and had several previous convictions.

The Federal Administrative Court thus defied the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM), which had demanded the deportation of the Kosovar. In 2012, the Administrative Court of the Canton of Zurich had already attested that the man, who already had several criminal convictions at the time, had a high level of criminal energy and risk of reoffending and demanded his deportation back to Kosovo. The Federal Administrative Court prevented this on the grounds that the man would then lose his disability pension and thus his livelihood, and that there would be no “interdisciplinary team” in Kosovo for his psychotherapeutic treatment.

In its ruling, the Federal Administrative Court wrote that “the interest of the complainant (the Kosovan man, editor’s note) in remaining in Switzerland (…) is currently to be classified higher than the not insignificant public interest in keeping him away.” The federal administrative judges thus enabled the man’s anti-Semitic attack on the Orthodox Jew.

The fact that this actually happened is partly the responsibility of others besides the perpetrator himself. It would be convenient to point the finger solely at social media, where hatred of the “Zionists”, as the current slur for Jews is called, can be stirred up daily and millions of times without hindrance, including incitement to violence.

But it is not only social media that has made public hatred of Jews socially acceptable in the city of Zurich and at least indirectly promotes it. It is also the authorities, some of the political parties, the rectors of educational institutions such as ETH, the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and their political supervisory bodies.

For years, Zurich City Council, the executive, has been authorizing demonstrations on its streets that claim to stand up for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, but in fact demand nothing other than the complete annihilation of the Jewish state (“From the river to the sea”). And in institutions such as the Red Factory and the Central Laundry, which are subsidized with city funds, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel agitators are allowed to spread their messages unhindered with the blessing of the city government.

The municipal council, as the city’s legislative body, is no better. At a time when the large chamber of the national parliament, the National Council, was doing exactly the opposite, it supported the UN Palestinian Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) with 380,000 francs. Even though it has been proven that it is closely linked to the terrorist organization Hamas, right up to the leadership level, and that anti-Semitic hate messages are conveyed in its schools by teachers and textbooks.

The municipal council also did not refrain from criticizing the cantonal government of Zurich when it refused to accept children from Gaza for treatment at Zurich hospitals. This was because it judged their escorts to be a security risk for the Jewish population in the city and canton due to their suspected proximity to Hamas. (Incidentally, it soon became clear that the cantonal government was right in its fears: at least one case is known in which the child allegedly in need of help did not require any medical treatment after arriving in Switzerland. In other words, it had only been brought here to enable its accompanying persons, who had the blessing of Hamas, to leave Gaza).

The blind Palestinian-friendliness of the city parliament has to do first and foremost with the Social Democratic Party, the strongest parliamentary group in the city parliament, and secondly with the Green Party. The SP of the city of Zurich is obediently following in the footsteps of its national parent party, which has always pilloried Israel in recent years and tried to delegitimize it with outrageous accusations. For example, with the unfounded accusation of committing genocide in the war in Gaza. It is a mockery that the SP representatives on the municipal council, together with all the other parliamentary groups, should also strongly condemn the attack on the Orthodox Jew.

What is also shocking is the cowardice with which those responsible at cantonal universities and the ETH allow some of their students and, in some cases, their professors and other teaching staff to continue to give free rein to their hatred of Jews and Israel. Or that they even financially support events in which the dissemination of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli messages is already foreseeable in advance. In this context, it is also incomprehensible and shameful that the Cantonal Director of Education, Cantonal Councillor Silvia Steiner, does not take action against this.

Yes, the person who attacked an Orthodox Jew in Zurich on the evening of February 2 because he is Jewish was an individual. But he did not create the climate in which he committed his act. City politicians, those in charge of the major federal and cantonal educational institutions and those who are supposed to supervise them are responsible for this. Through their actions or their cowardly omissions, they all encourage anti-Semitism to be practiced openly and unhindered in the city of Zurich today.

This commentary also appeared on nebelspalter.ch: https://www.nebelspalter.ch/themen/2026/02/am-neuen-antisemitischen-terrorakt-in-zuerich-ist-nicht-nur-der-taeter-schuld

Sacha Wigdorovits is President of the Fokus Israel und Nahost association, which runs the website fokusisrael.ch. He studied history, German and social psychology at the University of Zurich and has worked as a US correspondent for the SonntagsZeitung, was editor-in-chief of BLICK and co-founder of the commuter newspaper 20minuten.