[When President Barack Obama warned of “international fallout” if Israel fails to embrace the latest U.S. Middle East peace proposal, Newsmax asked noted author and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz to comment on the growing talk of a European boycott against Israel.]
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?
Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe?
To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
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False.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans — by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.
If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.
“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We’re left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”
Nonsense.
The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire, to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red — victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites.”
Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.
He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.
Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!
“But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”
No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.
Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?
Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns — because there weren’t any.
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians.
Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided “aid and material support” to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.
The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.
Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe for seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine. And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel.
None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups — including the Palestinians.
Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their forbearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.
As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine” — by which is meant Israel.
Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases.
Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
For shame!
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@ ArnoldHarris:
I have been saying this to my friends for well over 3 years now. Dump the USA and Europe and let them rot in their own cesspool. China and Russia would love to have Israel as their ally and will treat Israel with respect. Considering that there will not be a republican president elected in the USA for the next 16 years or more, Israel has no future with the USA. Just more pressure on it to capitulate and commit suicide. With friends like that, I’ll side with the enemy any day!
Dershowitz is a leftie and has been for years. Unfortunatly for him, there are so many worse lefties these days no one cares what he has to say. So recently, his need to be read hit a point where he understood he needed to be more honest and so now he will defend Israel and Jews from time to time. There is nothing in this article that is newsworthy or even news. Any sane person knows that Europe hates Israel by and large.
Any sane person also knows that pointing out any of Israel’s flaws in the same article just goes to show that a leopard can never change his spots. Is there any country that is perfect that he has to point out that Israel isn’t? Is there any person that is perfect (aside from Dershowitz of course). In comparison to any arab/moslem country, Israel is not only perfect, it is a model to aspire to. And lately, you can add the USA and Europe to the list of arab/moslem countries. Their behavior and actions are beyond immoral.
He makes some good points but what’s with this garbage: “None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies.”
Seems that the institutional servants must maintain this ‘Israel does some really evil things, but why are they focusing only on Israel?’ line. Israel’s only imperfections entail doing too much to facilitate the death of Jews at the hands of Muslims. Has Dershowitz ever complained about this? Does he criticize Israel’s policy of caving in to antisemitic US policy?
There is only a single rational response from the Jewish nation and the Jewish state for all this purposely provocative Jew-hatred among the nations and governments of Europe.
That response should be for the Jews to abandon all connections to Europe as rapidly as feasible. For a long time now, I have been calling for Israel and the Jews to ditch western civilization altogether, and especially the foolish Jewish dependence on promises from this failing empire of what used to be the United States of America. There never has been any mutual security agreement between Israel and the USA and certainly not between Israel and the rotten and failing civilizational belt of Europe. Jewish illusions were all that existed.
Once again, I say the time has come for Israel and our nation to seek out and join in an alliance with the coming powers that will dominate the world. These are Russia, China, India, Japan. Russia is in the process of building a functional Eurasian Union with an existing Eurasian Customs Union as its foundation. The USA, the European Union and NATO has been fighting the new Eurasion entity since Putin formed it about four years ago. The reason? The Eurasian Union, too large and potentially rich to be taken down by economic blockades, threatens the monopoly capitalists who now pull the strings that control what is left of western civilization. That was the conspiracy that led to the Banderista neo-Nazi coup against the ethnic Russian elected president of Ukraine, which to date has been answered by the break-off of Crimea and its planned re-absorption into the Russian Federation. As more such anti-Russian provocations are pushed by the Obama and Kerry gang, that will inevitably lead to the break-up of the Ukrainian state, with its Russian-speaking oblasts calling for similar re-adsorption into the Russian Federation.
I live in this country, and I served it in my youth in uniform for three years during and after the Korean War. Today, I look around here and I see only the increasingly rotten decay of a failed society. Massive numbers of persons with no means of support and unemployment compensation no longer available to them. A failed economy with its prized manufacturing industries now located everywhere but inside the USA. A culture increasingly dominated by homosexuals whose rise to power and influence threaten the very basis of normative marriage and family life. Children experimenting with dangerous hallucinogenic narcotics made possible by states voting to legalize their sale and use. Open access to abortion which has become normative behavior of women of this land. A national debt which cannot now ever be repaid, because of a society that all but lives off of government of entitlements no longer coverable by taxation. A national population that once mainly was white and European now with minorities that one day will lead to the breek-up of this country of a type that destroyed Jugoslavija and Czechoslovakia and is now doing the same to Ukraine and one day will also destroy Canada.
It was foolish and dangerous for the last Jewish kingdom to pretend itself to be a partner with the Roman Empire of Augustus. It would have been even more foolish and dangerous to have depended upon the crashing Roman Empire of 400 years later, as the Germanic bribes broke the Roman borders all across western and central Europe.
Act now, while there still is time.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ Salomon Benzimra:
And if it isn’t about “occupation” then it would have been about something else.
Esav hates Ya’akov. It’s that simple.
Dershowitz is right in pointing out the festering anti-Semitism in many European countries. He sees the growing anti-Zionism as a natural extension of the centuries-old hatred of Jews. He is partly right.
What he doesn’t mention is the impact the failed “peace process” has had over the past twenty years. The Europeans created a pseudo-rationality for their hate of the Jewish State by stressing the “occupation of Palestinian lands”, a myth so pervasive that it reinforces the simmering anti-Semitism. In other words, the “peace process” and its delusional “two-state solution” have largely contributed to fan the anti-Jewish flames in Europe.