Who could have foreseen that Berlin in 2015 would be home to a community of Israeli Jewish expatriates who prefer Germany to Israel? It is an extraordinary turn of events that there is a fast growing Jewish presence in the capital of the European country that has held grisly associations for Jewish people.
Israelis are settling in Berlin because it is cheaper to live there than in the land of their birth. But they are also going to Berlin as informal political refugees repelled by the current public atmosphere of Israel, with its increasing hostility toward Arabs and intolerance of dissent. The German city once the epicenter of Nazi anti-Semitism evidently appeals to them more than the Zionist state established to ensure that Jews need never again be afraid. It would be hard to conceive a more piquant irony.
Berlin’s re-emergent Jewish community perhaps counts as the kind of “good news story” of which the West’s doom-fixated media is apt to fight shy. What is certain is that the western public has been far more exposed to claims that, across Europe, Jews are facing a terrifying new upsurge of anti-Semitism. The British weekly paper the Jewish Chronicle recently reported that 63 percent of UK Jews question if they have a long-term future in Britain, while the Jewish director of BBC television, Danny Cohen, confessed during a visit to Israel that for the first time he feels uncomfortable as a Jew living in Britain.
That the incidence of anti-Semitism has risen in the UK and elsewhere cannot be doubted. Israel’s savage military onslaughts on Gaza have precipitated anger toward the Jewish state that has manifested itself in verbal and on occasion physical abuse of Jews on the streets of British and other European cities. The signs are that some people see Israel’s wars as essentially Jewish wars. And this tendency has hardly been discouraged by the deepening Israeli preoccupation with ethnicity. Insisting that Palestinians and the world at large recognize Israel as the “Jewish state,” Israel is itself in danger of reinforcing ignorant perceptions that its violence has a specific racial, if not racist, cast.
Yet on any sober assessment, the alarm of Jews in the UK and other parts of Europe is wildly exaggerated. If that alarm is assuming fantastic dimensions, it is because, in time-honored fashion, it is being cynically exploited by Zionist propagandists in order to persuade diasporic Jews that they have no alternative but to migrate to Israel if they wish to be safe. So far from considering Europe unsafe for Jewish people, the noted British Palestinian writer, Ghada Karmi, has made the case for offering a formal, funded, “right of return” to Jews or their descendants who migrated to Israel from Europe. She believes that Europe in general and Germany in particular could thereby atone for making the Palestinian people bear the long-term consequences of the historic eruption of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Nazi death camps.
Jews in countries who live in dread of a fresh holocaust will hardly welcome Karmi’s proposal; they will be mindful too that amid a fresh wave of anti-immigrant sentiment far-right extremism is stalking Germany anew. Not that the issue is other than academic, for there is little possibility of any such proposal being formally adopted. After all, Germany has sought to expiate its crimes against Jews by systematically outlawing statements or gestures that could be deemed offensive to Jewish people or indeed to the Jewish state. And though towns and cities in post-unification Germany have made a point of extending hospitality to Jews, no German politician would endorse a grand pan-European initiative that could be seen as implying that Israel is not the promised land of the Jewish people.
Still, Berlin’s “Jewish renaissance” indicates that some Jews are not waiting for the kind of official declaration favored by Ghada Karmi. Disaffected Israelis may be said to be taking matters into their own hands, conscious that, for all its enduring embodiment in the state of Israel, Zionism is a discredited project, fit only for what a famous Russian Jew called the “dustbin of history.”
