– despite all the warm words in Jerusalem,
(JNS) People dining this week on the charming terrace at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel were surprised to find at the next table Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
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So does this mean the E.U. is now changing its attitude to Israel? Until now, it has been hostile. It promotes the Palestinian Arab narrative that seeks to delegitimize Israel through lies about its “illegal” settlements and alleged Israel Defense Forces’ aggression; it funds NGOs devoted to harming and destroying Israel; in an aggressive move in 2015 against Israeli “occupation” of the disputed territories, it started to label products from the “West Bank.”
Despite all the warm words in Jerusalem, there’s no sign that this E.U. hostility is about to ease. For on the same day that von der Leyen was kissing up to Bennett, she stood alongside Palestinian “Prime Minister” Mohammad Shtayyeh in Ramallah and announced the transfer to the Palestinian Authority of some 214 million euros (about $224 million).
This money had previously been frozen because of the incitement against Israel in Palestinian Authority schoolbooks. Now it’s been unfrozen, even though the incitement remains.
Last week, the commission dismissed Israeli documentation showing that six Palestinian NGOs were acting on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; it then resumed funding them.
So much for von der Leyen’s pledge to “put the fight against anti-Semitism at the core of the European Commission’s agenda.”
The Europeans are playing the double game so familiar in the West—pledging support for the Jewish people while empowering Israel’s mortal enemies. Now the global energy crisis is producing a further double game—supporting Israel when it supplies the Europeans with essentials while abandoning Israel in its defense against its existential foes.
This twin-track has long been the strategy of both Britain and America. They maintain deep ties with Israel over military and intelligence cooperation along with mutually beneficial trade links; but at the political level, they undermine Israel’s security and promote the Palestinian narrative of lies and distortion.
In part, Western leaders support the Palestinian Arabs through left-wing, “anti-colonialist” ideology and through ignorance. There’s also a significant measure of fundamental, institutionalized anti-Jewish prejudice.
But there’s also something even more twisted. The British and Europeans in particular resist acknowledging that antisemitism is the motor of Palestinian Arab aggression because of a neuralgic obsession arising from the collective guilt they feel about the Jews.
They refuse to acknowledge the protean nature of antisemitism throughout history, morphing from theological to racial to national, because their own culture was so deeply involved in this bigotry. They pay pious lip service to Jews murdered in the Holocaust. But in order to pretend that their own culture had nothing to do with how they died, they present Israeli Jews as a different breed altogether.
While the Jews murdered in the Shoah are depicted as passive and powerless, Israeli Jews are presented as militarily powerful. Because they have power, it is assumed they cannot be victims.
Since the Palestinian Arabs are viewed as powerless, it’s assumed, in turn, that they must be victims of the Israelis. Palestinian antisemitism must be denied because that would instead turn Israeli Jews into victims. That must be resisted.
For casting Israeli Jews instead as oppressors, thus erasing the unbroken line of antisemitism from antiquity to the Palestinians, gives the Europeans a free pass in their minds over the victimization of the Jews in the Holocaust in which they feel at some deep level complicit.
In this respect, another remark by von der Leyen was as revealing as it was jarring. “Europe and Israel are bound to be friends and allies,” she said, “because the history of Europe is the history of the Jewish people.”
This was an extraordinary thing to say. The history of the Jews in Europe is one of centuries of murderous persecution, mass conversions, hideous pogroms, and eventually, the Holocaust. Historically, Europe was the epicenter of antisemitism and was described by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as “the graveyard of the Jewish people.”
Yet von der Leyen implied instead that Europe had always been bound together in friendship with the Jewish people.
No less startling was that Bennett chose to agree with her. “You said Israel and Europe are bound to be friends and allies because the history of Europe is the history of the Jewish people. I could not agree more,” he said.
Was Bennett choosing to accept her revisionism in the interests of better relations with the E.U.? His eagerness for such a development is understandable. But no Jewish leader should ever connive at sanitizing Jewish persecution.
Was von der Leyen deliberately ignoring these unpleasant facts for the purposes of diplomacy? If so, that doesn’t inspire much confidence. If Europeans can’t acknowledge the crimes against the Jewish people in the past, they won’t be able to acknowledge the crimes being committed against them now or in the future.
The Europeans come and make nice with Israel’s government when they need what Israel has to offer them. They rely on Israel to do their dirty work for them in fighting off the Iranian regime.
But when it comes to acknowledging their obligation to defend and protect Israel against the enemies of the Jewish people and of civilization itself, we shouldn’t hold our breath.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
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