Why Europe Hates Israel

FREEMAN E-MAIL LIST ^ | November 29, 2001 | By Bret Stephens, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

[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.

 

 

 

[AGAviator]

The U.S.A.'s involvment in Afghanistan is brutal and hegemonic. The U.S.A. is brutalizing the Afghan population with its bombs and is approaching public enemy #1 status as Russia was (is).

For once, you have it right. Oh, and how do you like those Russians landing in Kabul? You don't think they're there to send America any kind of a message about whose back yard that country is, do you?

[AGAviator]

The U.S.A.'s involvment in Afghanistan is brutal and hegemonic. The U.S.A. is brutalizing the Afghan population with its bombs and is approaching public enemy #1 status as Russia was (is).

For once, you have it right. Oh, and how do you like those Russians landing in Kabul? You don't think they're there to send America any kind of a message about whose back yard that country is, do you?

[Lent]

Oh, and how do you like those Russians landing in Kabul?

Good for them. It's their backyard they should be there as well as are Canadians, Brits, Turks....

[AGAviator]

Hall of Spam of Lent

Grand Mufti

Sheik Palazzi

Bat Y'eor

Dhimmis

Yassir Arafat

Jonathan Pollard

Julius Rosenburg

Simon Moglievich

Wannabe

[Lent]

Boy you're original! Do you come up with your own ideas?

This concept runs directly contrary to one certain people running around saying they have a right to take a particular piece of real estate by force because they are "God's chosen."

Mmmmm. Sounds like the Muslims to me.

A Palestinian child dressed as a suicide bomber parades at a Hamas rally in Nablus last week to mark the 12th anniversary of the organization's founding. Theatrical shows at the rally
included the blowing up of cardboard Israeli buses and
setting mock Jewish settlements on fire.

Members of Hamas, girded with fake explosives march through the Gaza Is this your child AGAviator?.

[TopQuark]

Thanks for the post, Dennis.

[AGAviator]

America is explicitly founded on the premise that *****ALL MEN, REPEAT ALL MEN***** are created equal by their Creator. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Any American support of a loosely-defined theocratic tribal regime which maintains it has a divine mandate to push aside and uproot people who have been living there for generations, if not millenia, and relegate them to second-class citizenship in their own country, is contrary to America's most basic principles and traditions.

You rhetorical demagoguery is a desparate attempt to obfuscate the fact that it is you who is anti-American according to the principles on which our country is founded.

[Lent]

Here's your heroes the Palestinians. Back in action:

PHOTOCOMPOSITE FROM LATEST PALESTINIAN/HAMAS TERRORISM: 12/2/01 -- TWO BOMBERS, NAIL BOMBS, MORE THAN 12 DEAD OR CRITICAL MORE THAN 160 WOUNDED

[Lent]

principles on which our country is founded.

You're not an American. You're a Muslim-prop and an Intifada supporter as well as anti-Western. I doubt you live in the States. Likely in some Jihad country.

[AGAviator]

So more bombings.

Unfortunately this is a world, and particulalry among the Islamic countries, where only force is respected and not some wimpering concept of foreign policy.

158 posted on 12/1/01 12:31 PM Pacific by Lent

More of your "force being respected," eh Thumper?

[Lent]

No terrorist shill. If Israel were barbaric like your Muslim friends a few well placed daisy cutters on the PalPots heads would have been real force. Right now the Pals are being handled with kids gloves and that's why your psycho Muslim friends are blowing up women and children.

Dance and celebrate with the Palestinians as they and you celebrate Bin Laden's evil work.:

We all saw how Yassir Arafat - THE father of world terrorism, spoke about how bad he felt over the greatest terror attack in the history of humanity - but we also saw how his people, the Palestinains, drunk on their "victory" in Durban, South Africa, went dancing in the streets, giving out sweets, and shooting in the air, to show how happy they were.

The Palestinains wern't alone, as the article we bring below from Egypt tells us...

On the other hand - reports in the Israeli media tell us of threats that were receievd by the foreign press agencies to destroy any and all pictures and videos taken of these celebrations. That is why you will only see pictures from East Jerusalem and Lebanon below.

GAMLA will do it's best to bring more of these picture from the other cities, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, Tul Karem and more of the huge celebrations that went on there last night.

CLICK PICTURE TO ENLARGE	Celebrations in East Jerusalem
Celebrations in Lebanon

[AGAviator]

I am an American, too bad for you sitting on the outside looking in. You're an outsider trying to hijack our country to fight your jihads the same way Al-Quaida hijacked Afghanistan to fight its. And the day can't come soon enough when you share the same fate as they do.

Sharon and Bin Ladin are both Semitic mass murderers.

[Lent]

You should go visit your favourite museum. You have the same mentality as your Musli PalPot terrorist friends:

Palestinian students walk under a replica of a Sbarro pizza restaurant sign, which reads "Kosher" in Hebrew, during the opening of an exhibition at Al Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, Sunday, Sept. 23, 2001, to commemorate one year since renewed violence broke out between Israelis and the Palestinians. The Sbarro section of the exhibition, replete with body parts and pizza slices strewn across the room, is a replica of the Aug. 9 Sbarro suicide bombing which killed 15 Israelis and thebomber in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

Palestinian students visit a re-enactment of the Aug. 19 Sbarro pizza restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem, replete with body parts and pizza slices strewn around the room, during the opening of an exhibition at Al Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, Sunday, Sept. 23, 2001. The exhibit on the suicide bombing, which killed 15 Israelis and the bomber, is part of an exhibition to mark the passing of a year since renewed violence broke out between Israelis and the Palestinians. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

[AGAviator]

As you have so thoughtfully pointed out already, I have duly noted there are many other non-Muslim, non-Middle Eastern countries where there was also celebration or at least smug satisfaction. These countries include Greece, South America, China, and Russia.

There are more and more people starting to get an active dislike for Amreica believing it can do whatever it pleases anywhere and escape the consequences because it has better weapons.

If it hasn't dawned on the rest of the world already to try to catch up in its armaments, I think the day will soon come.

[Lent]

Your Muslim friends praising Bin Laden. Notice the Koran your favourite book.

[onyx]

Shall I conduct a search and re-post your nasty e-mail to muslims@earthlink.com wherein you state your hatred for FR --- "it stinks" ---?

You're a disruptor, void of all integrity.

[Lady In Blue]

Another question might be why the sorry,miserable leftists in this country hates Israel?!

[Lent]

Shall I conduct a search and re-post your nasty e-mail to muslims@earthlink.com wherein you state your hatred for FR --- "it stinks" ---?

Well that confirms it. The putz hates FR, he's a Muslim shill, anti-American, and he doesn't live in the U.S. What a fake.

[AGAviator]

Now that you've showed up, I'm with exactly the people who "stink" up the place the most.

[AGAviator]

No, no, no.

My favorite book is Deuteronomy. The Koran is too lame compared to that one.