Posted on 11/29/2001 3:56:50 PM PST by dennisw
Commentary November 29, 2001
Why Europe Hates Israel
By Bret Stephens, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
BRUSSELS -- Yesterday, a Belgian court heard arguments from
lawyers representing 23 Palestinians, survivors of the 1982 Sabra and
Chatilla massacres near Beirut, that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon should be prosecuted in Belgium for crimes against humanity.
Though Mr. Sharon almost certainly will never sit in a Belgian jail,
the trial could hardly be freighted with more significance.
More than a half-century after the Holocaust, a Europe awakened to
the importance of human rights is looking to sanction the leader of
the world's only Jewish state for a crime that was actually committed
by a Christian Lebanese militiaman, later employed by the Syrian
regime of Hafez Assad. And yet blame for the massacres seems to be
apportioned to Mr. Sharon alone. Why?
Sensational Indictment
The short answer is the Belgian legal system, whose well-meaning
laws lend themselves to this sort of opportunistic and sensational
indictment. A slightly longer answer is that many Europeans are
sincerely convinced that Mr. Sharon really is a war criminal, as a
BBC documentary attempted to show last summer.
But the real answer is that
European governments today are,
by and large, tacit enemies of the
state of Israel, much as they
might protest that they merely
take a more "evenhanded"
approach to the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Consider a few recent examples.
In April, France voted to censure
Israel at the U.N. Human Rights
Commission in Geneva -- while
abstaining from a vote of censure against China. During his
diplomatic foray to Tehran in September, British Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw offered that "one of the factors which helps breed
terrorism is the anger which many people in this region feel at events
over the years in Palestine." The European Union has so far refused
to follow America's lead by freezing the assets of terrorist groups such
as Hezbollah and Hamas, with the European Commission's external
relations spokesman, Gunnar Wiegand, arguing that "Hezbollah could
play a major role in regional stability."
That Europe today should be hostile to Israel may seem a bit of a
mystery, not least given the usual sympathy of aims between
democratic states. The explanation comes in several parts. First, as
historian Howard Sacher points out, Europe's left sees in Israel's
political evolution a betrayal of its utopian ideals. It's easy to forget
that in the years following the establishment of Israel, many
Europeans looked to it as a model socialist country. They admired its
largely state-run economy and especially its collectivist kibbutzim.
Hundreds of young European leftists, most of them non-Jews, flocked
to these farms in the 1960s, looking for the kind of workers' paradise
they could not find on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
This fondness, however, evaporated after the 1967 war, when Israel
went from being the Middle East's underdog to its Goliath, holding a
colonial-like mandate over the lands that came into its possession.
Partly under the sway of Soviet propaganda, partly in keeping with
the fashion of radical chic, European leftists abruptly transferred their
allegiances to the Palestinians and the PLO, which in the 1970s drew
the likes of current German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to their
meetings. Meanwhile, successive Israeli governments veered to the
right. "The era when Yitzhak Rabin or Golda Meir could address their
European counterparts as 'comrades' at gatherings of the Socialist
International had passed," says Mr. Sacher.
There was also a shift of attitudes on the European right. With the
exception of Britain, whose notoriously Arabist Foreign Office has
dominated its Mideast policy under both Conservative and Labour
governments, much of the Continental right had at one time looked
on admiringly at "plucky little Israel." Thus, beginning in 1952, the
conservative German government of Konrad Adenauer provided Israel
with critical financial support in the form of Holocaust reparations,
while Charles de Gaulle's France helped to build its nuclear reactor at
Dimona.
But it was also de Gaulle who, in 1967, slapped an arms embargo on
Israel for firing the first shot in the Six Day War. Thereafter, the
hostility increased, partly because France fancied itself a champion of
its former Arab colonies, partly out of simple anti-Americanism. But
the chief reason, of course, was Europe's dependence on Arab oil. As
French President Georges Pompidou put it to Henry Kissinger during
the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, "You only rely on the Arabs for about a
tenth of your consumption. We are entirely dependent on them."
Since then, Europe's reliance on Mideastern oil has abated, but the
habit of reflexively seeking to appease the Arabs at Israel's expense
has not. In 1974, French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert toured the
Middle East, seeking to earn price concessions on oil for France by
mouthing a hard anti-Israel line. In 1980, the European Community
formally recognized the PLO despite the fact that Yasser Arafat had
neither made peace with Israel nor dropped his overt sponsorship of
terrorism. Currently, the EU supplies the Palestinian Authority with
the bulk of its foreign aid, even as much of that money goes
indirectly to funding textbooks describing Jews as monkeys and
vermin.
Given all this, many Jews have been led to conclude that what's at
work here is a thinly veiled form of anti-Semitism. But while there
might be some truth to this, it's easily exaggerated. Mr. Straw, of
German-Jewish descent, is clearly no anti-Semite, and the one bright
spot of Jacques Chirac's presidency has been his efforts to
acknowledge the sins of France's suppressed Vichy past.
Underlying Guilt
Underlying European policy is an uneasy sense of guilt. In the
immediate postwar period, Europe's guilty conscience worked in
Israel's favor. But in the postcolonial spirit of the '60s, the balance of
guilt switched to the Arab side: It was they who were being oppressed;
and it was Europe that, with its previous support for Israel, had
helped inflict the oppression. So Europe pressures Israel to withdraw
from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, heedless of the dire security
consequences that such withdrawal would entail. That Israel has so far
refused to accede to this pressure stands as an infuriating rebuke to
modern Europe's fundamental conception of itself as the virtuous
defeated, free to pass judgment while absolved of the moral
responsibilities of wielding actual power.
Whatever the case, a foreign policy based on a combination of
left-wing disillusionment, French opportunism and all-around
cravenness cannot yield good results. With the U.S. State Department
increasingly leaning toward the European line on Israel, it's well that
the basis of that policy be properly understood.
"A generation later (520 B.C.), however, the Babylonian overlords had been replaced by a victorious Persian kingdom and these victors decided to allow some of the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, a task which they completed in about 516 B.C.
Jerusalem remained in a ruinous state for a long time, however, until Nehemiah, a representative of the rich Jewish community that had grown up in Babylon, returned to Jerusalem (445 B.C.). By 433 B.C., he and his followers had succeeded in rebuilding the city's walls, restoring traditional religious observances with the city precinct, and refocusing the Jewish religion on the Temple of Jerusalem.
The Book of Zechariah is a product of that period between the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of Jerusalem and is an illustration of how fervently the Jews awaited that restoration."
(I don't see any relationship to the British throne.)
Quite often any act of retaliation by the IDF against Palestinian actions of terrorism is reported as being provacative or inflamatory (never mind what the "poor defenceless Palestinians" did to illicit such a response).
The fact that young Palestinians are encouraged to attack IDF forces and are sometimes injured or killed also generates sympathy for their side.
Personally I think the fact that the rest of the Arab world is sympathetic to the Palestinians also plays a major part because of their monopoly on oil.
Finally there are many Arab propaganda spin-doctors working full time to convince the press that they are oppressed victims in the whole affair.
Most of the arabs and moslems I have met personally were virulently anti-semetic and in virtually every country in Europe there is a significantly higher population of arabs/moslems than Jews. Therefore their version of events is more likely to be the one being told
I don't know if you are Jew or Christian, but do you really care how other people worship? I don't, but the problems in Palestine are not about how people worship or the difference in their religious beliefs, its about the way they behave.
You know the OT is the history of the Israelites and their relationship with God. It is not the history of all the other people in the region.
Stop this phony and revisionist history. You Arabs just can't stop this false "3-4000" years B.S. If I got a nickle for every lie you've told for every name you've had on this site I'd be retired by now:
HALL OF SHAME (and name) (latest incarnation 'Patria One')
Passin Pilgrim
Lematha
J Harris
LeeAnn6
Astonished
Sawgrass
tynker
Kudzu Flat
Samaritan
Patria One
Under what principles of "conservatism" does one's own country support one particular other country in its tribal and territorial disputes with its own inhabitants and its neighbors?
There are none.
Lent
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Israel is here to stay, the USA will ALWAYS support Israel, and the Left-wing cranks in Europe, the new Nazis, can just twirl on it.
The don't much like the USA either. Jealous losers. Same as anti-Semites.
Because, you may not understand from the many "Zionist stole the land" posts but the Land of Israel is as important to Judaism as Jesus is to Christianity.
Every synagogue on Earth, in all of history, faces Jerusalem. The covenant involves Jews doing certain things and God doing certain things includes Israel as the homeland of the Jews. Some Jewish holidays are celebrated differently- longer- outside of Israel. Ad infinitum
Your natural question would be what happens to the relationship when the Jews didn't have control?
Prayer and observances still focused on Israel.
Think of this- possibly weak-analagy. Suppose a parent loses custody of a child to a kidnapping. The child is always in the thoughts and the love is always there. If somehow the child is restored to the parent, the child would be defended by the parent to the last drop of the parent's blood.
That's the Jewish people's (except for a few crazies)relationship with that tiny sliver of land.
Jesus, being a Jew, must have felt the same about the relationship of the Jewish people to Israel and Jerusalem. It follows that Christians should understand.
And the people that work in the media (usually middle class of left/liberal persuasion)generally have an idealised "picture-postcard" view of Muslims & Muslim culture in general because they don't live amongst them. Ordinary "working class" people who do, generally have a more realistic view.
As for anti-semitism, I live close to area with a large Jewish population in the UK and I can't say I'm aware of any problems. The odd isolated incident maybe.
Ever hear of Josephus? Don't pull you did you ever read this or that crap? That's your usual goofy methodology.
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