Belgium formally summoned United States Ambassador Bill White on Monday after the diplomat publicly accused the Belgian government of anti-Semitism — a charge Brussels rejected as "unacceptable statements" that violated the norms of diplomatic conduct between two NATO allies.
Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot called the ambassador to the Egmont Palace, Belgium's foreign ministry, to deliver that rebuke in person. The summons — a formal diplomatic instrument used to register the most serious protests — is not a routine gesture between partners who share a defence alliance, a trade area, and 75 years of Atlantic solidarity. It is a threshold moment.
The underlying dispute concerns three mohels — practitioners of Jewish ritual circumcision — whose homes were raided by Antwerp police in May 2025. The Antwerp prosecutor's office stated the investigation focused on "medical procedures and circumcisions performed without the intervention of a doctor." The case is a matter of Belgian law. Ambassador White chose to make it a matter of American foreign policy.
In a post on X, White described the prosecutions as "anti-Semitic" and "disgusting," and demanded that Belgium legally protect "the religious freedoms of Jewish families." He announced plans to travel to Antwerp the following week to meet the affected mohels — a visit that would place the American ambassador in ostentatious opposition to an ongoing judicial proceeding in a sovereign ally's court.
<blockquote>"Anti-Semitism is UNACCEPTABLE in any form and it must be rooted out of our society."<br>— US Ambassador Bill White, in a post on X</blockquote>
Prevot did not dispute that anti-Semitism must be combated. His government's objection is to the characterisation itself: a lawful criminal investigation, conducted by an independent prosecutor, being labelled bigotry by a foreign diplomat. The Foreign Minister described the ambassador's statements as "unacceptable" — a word chosen with diplomatic precision.
<h2>A Pattern, Not an Incident</h2>
Belgium is not alone. In the past several months, European capitals have accumulated a ledger of formal protests, summoned ambassadors, and public rebukes directed at Washington that, taken together, mark a qualitative change in transatlantic relations.
Denmark summoned the US ambassador after senior American officials, including the Vice President and the Secretary of State, openly discussed annexing Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Panama's government issued formal protests after President Trump threatened to "reclaim" the Panama Canal. Canada's newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney has made pushback against American economic pressure a central plank of his governing agenda — including, as reported separately, driving EU and Indo-Pacific partners toward a counter-US trade coalition.
These are not squabbles between rivals. They are eruptions within alliances. The language of formal summoning — previously reserved for adversaries or during acute crises — is now being deployed by countries that share intelligence, defence commitments, and centuries of cultural exchange with Washington.
<h2>The Domestic Belgian Dimension</h2>
The Belgian political context is worth noting briefly, because it shapes how Prevot — a centrist from the Francophone MR party — chose to respond. The Health Minister attacked by Ambassador White, Frank Vandenbroucke, is from the rival Flemish socialist Vooruit party. Prevot nonetheless closed ranks. Whatever the domestic rivalries, a foreign power publicly branding a Belgian minister an anti-Semite demanded a unified response.
That calculus also speaks to the broader European dynamic: American interventions in European domestic politics — whether backing particular parties, attacking individual ministers, or demanding policy outcomes — are generating backlash that transcends national divisions.
<h2>Why It Matters Beyond Brussels</h2>
For readers in London, the parallel is instructive. The United Kingdom, outside the EU but deep inside the American orbit, faces structurally similar pressures. An American administration that describes a criminal prosecution of Jewish ritual practitioners as anti-Semitism — regardless of the legal merits — is an administration prepared to use anti-Semitism as a foreign policy instrument rather than a human rights principle. That distinction matters.
For readers further afield, the signal from Brussels on Monday is this: European governments, even small ones, are no longer absorbing American pressure silently. They are reaching for the formal instruments of diplomacy — the summons, the demarche, the declared protest — to register that something has changed. Brussels decides more than you think — and when Brussels summons an American ambassador, the whole of the Atlantic alliance notices.
