The Israelis have reacted with fury to the survey published this week suggesting the majority of Europeans believe that Israel represents the greatest threat to world peace.
There are two factors at work here — a calculated act of remembering and an equally calculated act of forgetting. What is remembered is the unspeakable depravity of Nazi Germany. Only 60 years ago, a civilized European nation became driven by forces of prejudice and brutality. This brought shame to every German and to the many fellow travelers in occupied European countries who went along with the Nazis’ savagery. The Israeli state was built from the wreckage of Nazi butchery but the cement that held the masonry together was the guilt felt by Europe for allowing such wickedness to take place. Europe’s shame was exploited masterfully by early Israeli governments, who also levered open the pocketbook of an ill-informed but sympathetic United States, into which successive Israeli governments have dipped deeply and regularly to keep their state alive.
What Israel is forgetting is that it, too, has long behaved with savagery toward the Palestinians. How can a people who suffered so much then go on to inflict suffering on another innocent people? That is the question thoughtful Europeans are asking themselves. Unlike purblind policy-makers in Washington, they see Israeli aggression as the fount of most of the violence that is disfiguring the Middle East, nourishing despair and terrorism. They realize that unless Israel remembers its own terrible wounds in a different way, the agony that is Palestine could become a far wider and more terrible strife.
But Israelis accuse anyone who criticizes them of being anti-Semitic, as if somehow their past places them above stricture. This is a dangerous madness. Honest men believe that Israel is wrong and are saying so. They are not bigots. If Israelis cannot deal calmly and rationally with its critics, then it will be opening the way for those who do not think.
Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Nathan Sharansky has said the survey is proof that anti-Semitism lies behind political criticism of Israel. Europe, he said, must “stop the rampant brainwashing against and demonizing of Israel before it deteriorates once again to dark sections of its past.” There are 15 countries in the European Union, and many of them suffered greatly during World War II, not least because they believed that what the Germans were doing to the Jews was barbaric. Of the 15, many have been among Israel’s staunchest friends. Such intemperate accusations might even make enemies of friends.
Perhaps this is what Israel wants. Maybe its leaders believe Israelis need to feel hated to stay strong and united. It is a horrifying calculation, and currently the sums are being made with the bodies of innocents, Israeli as well as Palestinian. If so, the Europeans are right. Such a warped realpolitik does pose a considerable, if not the greatest, threat to world peace.
