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| Europe |
| In Europe, an unhealthy fixation on Israel |
| 2005-01-30 |
| It may not have been apparent on the surface, but Europe's recent commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was steeped in irony. Even while the Old World stirringly recalls the horrors of Hitler's death camps and vows never to forget the Nazi genocide of the Jews, it also embraces an increasingly -- and alarmingly -- antagonistic attitude toward the Jewish state that arose from the ashes of World War II. As the Middle East conflict burns on, more and more Europeans are turning against Israel. A growing number subscribe to the belief that the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the wellspring of much of the world's ills today, and that the blame for all this lies squarely with Israel -- and by extension, with its staunchest ally, the United States. As President Bush seeks to find common ground with Europe in his second term, he might do well to acquaint himself more thoroughly with this reality. For as surely as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides Jews and Arabs, it also divides Europeans and Americans. If you're looking for root causes of the growing transatlantic split that go beyond the easy cliches about U.S. unilateralism, it's time to sit up and take notice. Go to a dinner party in Paris, London or any other European capital and watch how things develop. The topic of conversation may be Iraq, it may be George Bush, it may be Islam, terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. However it starts out, you can be sure of where it will inevitably, and often irrationally, end -- with a dissection of the Middle East situation and a condemnation of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. I can't count how many times I've seen it. European sympathy for the Palestinians runs high, while hostility toward Israel is often palpable. And the anger is reaching new -- and disturbing -- levels: A poll of 3,000 people published last month by Germany's University of Bielefeld showed more than 50 percent of respondents equating Israel's policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi treatment of the Jews. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed specifically believed that Israel is waging a "war of extermination" against the Palestinian people. Germany is not alone in these shocking sentiments. They have been expressed elsewhere, and often by prominent figures. In 2002, the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago declared, "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz." In Israel just last month, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Irish winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, compared the country's suspected nuclear weapons to Auschwitz, calling them "gas chambers perfected." Moreover, in a Eurobarometer poll by the European Union in November 2003, a majority of Europeans named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Overall, 59 percent of Europeans put Israel in the top spot, ahead of such countries as Iran and North Korea. In the Netherlands, that figure rose to 74 percent. Perceptions of Israel in the United States, meanwhile, contrast sharply. A poll by the Marttila Communications Group taken in December 2003 for the Anti-Defamation League had Americans putting Israel in 10th place on a list of countries threatening world peace, just ahead of the United States itself. What accounts for this transatlantic values gap? Part of the explanation is that, despite all the Holocaust commemorations, the memory of that event really does appear to be fading in Europe. Increasing numbers of younger Europeans have no real sense of what the Nazis did. In Britain, Prince Harry isn't the only one who's oblivious to the realities of Nazi tyranny. A BBC poll of 4,000 people taken late last year, in the run-up to Holocaust Remembrance Day last Thursday, showed that, amazingly, 45 percent of all Britons and 60 percent of those under 35 years of age had never heard of Auschwitz -- the Nazi death camp in southern Poland where about 1.5 million Jews were murdered during World War II. Such ignorance compounds anti-Israeli feelings; for those who have no understanding of the Holocaust, Israel exists and acts in a historical vacuum. This faltering awareness of the most vivid example of racist mass murder in the 20th century is accompanied by enduring anti-Semitism. A poll in Italy last year, for example, by the Eurispes research institute showed 34 percent of respondents agreeing strongly or to some extent with the view that "Jews secretly control financial and economic power as well as the media." The Eurobarometer survey quoted above also showed 40 percent of respondents across Europe believing that Jews had a "particular relationship to money," with more than a third expressing concern that Jews were "playing the victim because of the Holocaust." Yet while the persistence of anti-Semitism is undeniable, it's not likely to be the chief explanation for European hostility to Israel. After all, surveys show that some anti-Semitic attitudes persist in the United States as well, but they don't translate into visceral animosity toward the Jewish state. Instead, the intense antagonism toward Israel appears to be a subset of the wider European hostility, emanating mainly from the left, toward the United States. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that the 2003 Eurobarometer survey put the United States just behind Israel as the greatest danger to world peace, on a par with Iran and North Korea. Many European intellectuals see Israel, perhaps rightly, as one of the central pillars of U.S. hegemony in the modern world. European leftists implacably opposed to America are implacably opposed to Israel as well, and for exactly the same reasons. Over dinner in Berlin not long ago, a Frenchwoman told me emphatically that Israel was "America's policeman in the Middle East." Her companion, nodding in furious agreement, insisted that the two countries are partners in a "new imperialism," leading the world inexorably into war. In the contorted universe of the chattering classes, Israel is at once America's servant and the tail that wags the dog -- doing America's bidding while forcing it into madcap adventures such as Iraq. As Peter Preston, the former editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper, put it in an op-ed last October, bemoaning both U.S. political parties' alleged servility toward Israel: "Republican policy is an empty vessel drifting off Tel Aviv, and the Democratic alternative has just as little stored in its hold." The left-leaning antipathy toward Israel is moreover buttressed by deeper and wider pathologies in Europe's collective memory, particularly in our overriding sense of guilt about the past, a guilt that springs from the great 20th-century traumas of war and imperialism. The first has made Europeans, especially continentals, overwhelmingly pacifistic: In the German Marshall Fund's 2004 Transatlantic Trends survey, only 31 percent of Germans and 33 percent of the French could bring themselves to agree with the ostensibly tame proposition that "Under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice." Such attitudes do not mesh well with television pictures of Israeli helicopter gunships firing missiles at militant targets in the crowded Gaza Strip, whatever the justification for Israel's actions. Europe is also awash in post-imperial guilt, and I frequently get the sense that Israel's claim to a piece of land in the Middle East revives guilt-inducing memories, among my English countrymen and others, of white Europeans carving up the Third World and subjugating "lesser peoples" in the 19th century. While the disturbing view that there's an equivalence between Nazi Germany and modern Israel is a relatively new development, another view equating Israel with apartheid South Africa and referring to Palestinians herded into "Bantustans" has been around for decades. Mixed with the supercharged ideological hostility of the European left, the demons of the continent's past can make for an intoxicating cocktail of anti-Israeli sentiment There is undoubtedly room for criticism of Israel and its policies in the Middle East, but reasoned criticism appears to be giving way to emotional and irrational antipathy that is coloring the wider debate. And as that sentiment grows, American support for the Jewish state will continue to scratch raw nerves in the Old World. There is much, of course, that the United States should be doing to improve its relationship with Europe. But repairing transatlantic relations is a two-way process. Americans should now be aware that on one crucial issue, at least, it is Europe, and not America, that needs to clean up its act. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #19 Ship - now that's funny! :-D |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-01-30 11:37:29 PM |
| #18 The revolution, the 444 day hostage crisis, the 200+ marines killed in beirut because of Iranian-backed terrorist... Don't forget the Khobar Towers. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2005-01-30 9:53:37 PM |
| #17 Perhaps the Left supporting tyrannies in preference to democracies needs no explanation. Otherwise, I think Europe sees its future in the Arab-Israli conflict and it is in denial. 'We are not nasty Jews and therefore this is not in our future.' |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-01-30 2:55:50 PM |
| #16 AP it's like redundant again humor. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-01-30 1:17:30 PM |
| #15 And in the meantime Blacks are killed in Sudan |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-01-30 12:26:53 PM |
| #14 It's all projection, isn't it, Seafarious? Shipman---saw that flash video a while back. "Cow Tse Tung" That was a great line. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2005-01-30 12:14:47 PM |
| #13 well said seafarious! |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-01-30 10:05:39 AM |
| #12 Jews with a State it's worst than, yep... here it comes! |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-01-30 9:34:36 AM |
| #11 Let's put it this way; if Israel and the Jews didn't exist, her enemies would be forced to invent one. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, all that hatred would find another outlet. It has *nothing* to do with Israel. It only has to do with hate...and envy. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-01-30 9:30:53 AM |
| #10 Re #8: We do have a significant Jewist population. The Europeans, under the wise (sarcasm here if you're missing it)guidance of the Germans, solved that problem. Growing up in the midwest, where there was hardly a black person to be seen, the racism against them was rampant and virulent. Same scenario. It's easy and cheap to be bigoted against people who aren't around to do anything about it. Same reason for supporting the paleos. Lots of moslems in Europe. Not wise to piss them off, since most of them appear to be crazy. |
| Posted by: Weird Al 2005-01-30 9:29:39 AM |
| #9 Our own left espouses the same views as this article. It just seems overwhelming to me, the ignorance and self-righteousness that goes behind those on the left (and extreme far right), who wish to blame Israel. Start any discussion about anything and they will always bring it back to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. If you ask me, it's all marketing. Someone has done a GREAT job of marketing the Palestinian conflict - to the point where all other massacres, genocides, starvations are simply ignored - not because they don't care, but because they don't really know about them. If during a rant about Israel, you ask someone on the left why they care so much more about the numerically fewer Palestinian deaths (usually terrorists) than the other civilian mass genocides of the day - such as Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe, mass starvation in Korea, etc. etc. they get incredulous because they don't even know about them. And it's actually kind of fun to bring it up - cause they get really defensive because they can't argue what they don't know about - it strips them of their self-righteous I'm smarter than you because I understand the nuance that you don't grasp and they usually just will get huffy and walk off. Educating about the Holocaust is important - but it does nothing to suppress the beliefs by this crowd, who have a disconnect between the "Jews" of Nazi Germany and the "Israeli's in Israel". Plus, as I've said before, and believe strongly, educating the holocaust in a vacuum without the context of the multiple other ethic cleansing genocides - reinforces Hitler's "Jews are bad, Jews to blame" propaganda to a whole new generation...many will reject it - but many will believe. Sigh. I don't have any answers - but it's easy to see that, as in Hitler's time, it is the relentless propaganda in the media that is to blame for fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. CNN, AP, BBC, NPR have all been marketing the Palestinian crisis as "Jews bad" Palestinians good" for decades. IMHO that's where the battle against anti-Semitism needs to be fought - not in the history books - but in exposing the reasons why the MSM fails to put their focus on anything except The Plight of the Palestinians Against the Evil Jews.TM |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-01-30 9:19:27 AM |
| #8 This article misses two important reasons for the difference between US and European attitudes toward Israel: 1) The USA has an influential Jewish community that energetically and effectively explains Israel's postions and actions in public discussions. 2) The USA and its citizens have been attacked and targeted by Moslem terrorists many times over the past several decades. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-30 9:06:20 AM |
| #7 Europeans had to suppress their natural impulses for (almost) 60 years --- since Nazis made anti-semitism unfashionable. Now, when they've found an alternate rationale for judeophobia, the Europeans are just making up for lost time. |
| Posted by: gromgorru 2005-01-30 8:40:40 AM |
| #6 The revolution, the 444 day hostage crisis, the 200+ marines killed in beirut because of Iranian-backed terrorist, and they are the core of training and financing terrorist in the Middle East even now. It just happens to be that, Israel is constantly fighting terrorist supported from Iran, but it's the US and World's problem too, especially if they aquire Nukes. |
| Posted by: Slomoling Choque7531 2005-01-30 4:36:40 AM |
| #5 Soros said his spending to defeat Bush was not an ``investment gone bad because when you stand up for principles you have to do it whether you win or lose.'' Pretty damned easy to say when one has money to burn. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-01-30 4:27:44 AM |
| #4 Nope, we still have a little score to settle from November of 1979. |
| Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-01-30 2:49:45 AM |
| #3 A poll by the Americans putting Israel in 10th place on a list of countries threatening world peace, just ahead of the United States itself. I would be rather sceptical of poll results where Americans viewed their own country as a #11 "threat" to world peace. Sheesh. Anyways, there were only 1200 people polled, so not a large sampling. However, I'd say it is a safe bet that Americans' views of Israel would be comparable to Europeans if GWB antagonizes Iran. Iran is clearly viewed as Israel's threat not ours. Americans have already done the sacrifice of conscripted American sons for a foreign country per the Vietnam War - bad memories. And the ME country as purveyor of WMD against America has been used recently with embaressing revelations about our intelligence gathering. So let's hope that the Iran situation cools off so Israel's #10 position as a threat to peace stays the same. |
| Posted by: 2xstandard 2005-01-30 1:56:49 AM |
| #2 I have been trying to post a few articles and they've been going into the void. What am I doing wrong??? OT: Soros said this, cos I can't post the article: Soros Says Greenspan Lost Credibility Helping Bush (Update1) ...While China loosening its decade-old peg of the renminbi to the dollar would ease pressure on Europe, ``probably it's best not to push China because it might hurt their national pride,'' he said.... Soros said his spending to defeat Bush was not an ``investment gone bad because when you stand up for principles you have to do it whether you win or lose.'' He said he now believes Democratic presidential nominee Kerry ``did not, actually, offer a credible and coherent alternative.'' Soros said he would remain active in American politics, although he hasn't decided in what form. |
| Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-01-30 12:58:05 AM |
| #1 Back to normal. |
| Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-01-30 12:55:32 AM |