Having failed to annihilate Israel in far more vulnerable borders in 1948, 1956 and 1967, her enemies realized that they had no hope of defeating Israel in her now much stronger strategic position. They therefore adopted a strategy of negotiating, threatening and cajoling Israel back to the untenable 1948 borders in which they might again have hopes of annihilating her. Now that this has been largely achieved, in no small part due to support from the Israeli left, the mask is off. Israel’s enemies no longer pretend they are interested in her welfare, or even peace: now they openly call for her elimination, and for genocide against Jews everywhere.
In Paris, crowds shouting “Death to the Jews!” attack synagogues and Jewish shops. Neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic parties make large gains in Hungary and Greece. Britain and Spain embargo weapons sales to Israel while she is being bombarded with rockets fired by Hamas terrorists, and British MP Galloway declares his district an “Israel-free zone.” Trade unions, academic institutions, and other organizations sponsor boycotts of Israel. The UN’s top human rights official, Navi Pillay, accuses Israel of war crimes for not providing her Iron Dome to Hamas, an enemy openly calling for her destruction.
Few European Jews are surprised that a largely radicalized Muslim immigrant population openly displays violent anti-Semitism. After all, most of these immigrants come from countries in which hatred of Israel and Jews is instilled relentlessly by state-controlled media. What comes as a terrible shock to Jews on the left however, is that their own political allies condone, and even participate in, this new wave of vicious anti-Semitism.
Many of these Jews had long and loyally supported leftist causes, and had even personally adopted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian positions. They truly believed that their fellow travelers on the far left wanted Israel to relinquish strategic territory “for her own good.” They convinced themselves that in going along with boycotts and vilification of Israel they were actually helping her, and perhaps even serving some higher cause.
The crudely anti-Semitic riots in Europe not only shocked Jews; they also embarrassed European elites. Twenty-eight European foreign ministers recently felt it necessary to issue a joint statement condemning such public displays of anti-Semitism. After all, they had long claimed that their double standard towards Israel and support for her genocidal Palestinian enemy had nothing to do with the fact that Israel is the Jewish State.
In reality, there is nothing new here. Europe has been a cesspool of antisemitism since the First Catholic Church Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. began a program of alienating, ghettoizing and demonizing the Jews. This is the same Europe that gave us almost two millennia of anti-Semitic riots, massacres and expulsions; the Spanish Inquisition; the Russian Pogroms; and ultimately, the Holocaust.
Making matters worse is the European desire to lessen their guilt over the Holocaust by claiming that the Jews would do likewise, thus labeling every Palestinian casualty a “massacre” or a “holocaust”. The result is a perfect witches’ brew of age old European antisemitism with that of the Jihadists, Neo-Nazis, the far-left and their trendy but unconcerned with facts sycophants in the media and academia.
During the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, cries of “Death to the Jews” by Paris mobs awakened the Jewish national consciousness of a thoroughly assimilated reporter. Theodore Herzl went on to write “The Jewish State” and found the Zionist Movement. Let us hope that similar cries in Paris and other cities today awaken the national consciousness of apathetic and anti-Zionist Jews everywhere, and return them to the cause of their long-suffering people and our one and only Jewish State.
Devin Sper