Three days before the Six-Day War, when tiny Israel was surrounded by the vast armies of the Arab states that promised to throw the Jews into the sea, it was Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, who imposed an arms embargo. France, Israel’s main arms supplier, abandoned it at the most dangerous moment, raising the Israeli stakes in going to war and in the dramatic opening blow.
Months after the victory, de Gaulle delivered a cutting divorce to Israel in a traumatic speech: “Many have asked themselves, including many Jews, whether the settlement of this community on lands not always bought under just circumstances, among hostile Arab peoples, will not lead to endless conflicts and disputes? There were also those who feared that the Jews — who until now were in exile, but had always remained elitist, self-assured and dominant — would now gather in places of their ancient glory and turn the prayer they had rehearsed for generations, ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ into a language of conquest.”
De Gaulle managed to pack all religious anxieties, envy, hypocrisy and European loathing of the Jews into a single sentence. Britain, meanwhile, contributed to Israel’s isolation two years later by halting shipments of Chieftain tanks.
The Yom Kippur War began with a surprise attack against Israel in the open expanses of the Sinai and the Golan, with no relation to “a massacre and the starvation of the Palestinian population.” When the United States belatedly began to rescue Israel with an airlift of weapons, Europe’s righteous refused to allow American planes to fly or refuel over their territory, despite their dependence on the U.S. amid the Cold War. The United States refueled its aircraft on regional islands without seeking Portugal’s permission — the islands are under Portuguese sovereignty — and flew only over the Mediterranean, along the pariah route that Netanyahu is now flying when he visits the United States.
Today, Palestinians have made life much more comfortable for antisemites
Today, Palestinians have made life much more comfortable for antisemites. In ’67 and ’73 they were not part of the discourse, nor were the words “starvation” and “genocide,” yet Europe did just fine without those pretexts when it tried to cut Israel off from the supplies it needed for survival.
In the darkest hour for the Jewish people, Nazi Germany enjoyed broad cooperation across Europe. Britain — which ruled Mandatory Palestine — closed the gates to immigration, and the pleas of Weizmann and other leaders to bomb the rail lines from Hungary to Birkenau were passed on (to the Americans, who refused). Ukrainians assisted enthusiastically in the murder of more than a million Jews, and the Dutch contributed by handing over about 80% of their Jews. The Danes, and to a lesser extent the Italians, who sheltered Jews in their countries, were a small minority. And all this follows an endless list of edicts, expulsions, forced conversions, blood libels and pogroms inflicted on Jews over a thousand years.
Antisemitic obsession is marked by a willingness of peoples to harm themselves if only they can harm Jews. At the end of the war Hitler preferred to allocate trains to the extermination effort at the expense of the war effort.
Europe’s powers are drowning in trouble today. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, effectively has no government, the economic crisis is immense, and the country is flooded with Muslim migrants who have driven up crime and undermined public order and social cohesion. Germany is in economic and social crisis, and the British government is wrecking the economy with taxes and swamping the country with migrants, most of them Muslim. The new home secretary, Suella Braverman, now responsible for migration, home security, police and intelligence, will probably ensure a “kill-confirmation” for ‘Great Britain.’
Alongside all this, Europe faces a historic low birthrate — 1.38 children per woman on average — reflecting a pessimistic society. The continent that was a paradise after the war is becoming a hell.
A cycle has formed in which antisemites and the influx of migrants push Jews to Israel, thereby strengthening it and weakening Europe further
At the same time, demonstrations in favor of Hamas continue unabated. For Israel they are unpleasant shouts; for Europeans, they are the ones who are left housing these supporters of terror at home after the protest ends. Parties opposed to migration are branded racist, in some countries it’s illegal to speak against migration, and Marine Le Pen appears to have been handed a neat case that could prevent her from running.
In such a Europe there is no future for Jews, but unlike the wretched Europeans, they have a refuge — Israel. A cycle has formed in which antisemites and the influx of migrants push Jews to Israel, thereby strengthening it and weakening Europe further.
At the same time we hear claims here that we are to blame for the loss of sympathy that once existed for us after the massacre. It’s a convenient attempt to blame the government, while forgetting that Jews were loved in Europe when they were on the cross, and that a Jew who steps down from the cross and begins to strike back at his persecutors — in a way and to an extent that arouses envy among those who can no longer defend themselves — becomes intolerable.
Such self-flagellation is accompanied by remarks about how bad it is here and how good it is there, and the conclusion is relocation to supposedly “sane” places like Berlin or Paris. To that we say: Are you coming now? Exactly at the farewell party?
A desperate Europe has developed an obsession with the Palestinians and is trying to establish a state for them. In the same Europe where the cross was raised as a symbol of religious antisemitism, and later the swastika as a symbol of racial antisemitism, the Palestinian flag now flies — a symbol of national antisemitism, used to try to destroy Israel.
We are witnessing a scene from a typical European tale in which, on her deathbed, the witch reaches for the hated maiden and tries to drag her to the grave. And, as Karl Marx said: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce” — the antisemitism of generations against the Jews of Europe was a terrible tragedy. European antisemitism today, with the continent in decline and Jews protected in their flourishing, strong, optimistic state, is a farce.