=======================
The
weekend Australian, by DAVID PRYCE-JONES 7-3-2015
RIGHT
across Europe, museums and memorials and special days of prayer commemorate the
Holocaust.
Dead
Jews then, get respect, but a majority of living Jews prefer survival.
To that
end, they have Israel, a nation-state with a very strong identity, a citizens’
army and the will to defend its interests.
I happened to be a reporter in the Six-Day War of
1967. The general expectation was that the encircling Arab armies were about to
wipe out Israel in a second Holocaust. This was nothing less than a challenge
to civilisation, and I saw grown men shed tears over it.
The cunning of history, in Hegel’s immortal phrase,
set to work immediately. Israel won that war and subsequent wars as well, but
each time it is seen as the wrong kind of victory.
Half the Israeli population consists of refugees born
and bred in the Muslim world, but Israel is unmistakably a Western country with
a First World economy. Having just rid themselves of the British and the
French, Arabs were not going to accept any Western successor in their midst.
Anti-Semitism always rests on attributing to Jews
whatever is considered bad character in the culture prevailing wherever they
might be living. To Arabs and Muslims, Israel is an unwanted coloniser, racist
and imperialist, viciously victimising virtuous and innocent inhabitants of
the Third World.
Partly this is a Western outlook derived by
intellectuals at second hand from Marxism, and partly it is a traditional act
of faith in the minds of Muslims themselves.
Three instances in the Koran tell of Allah turning
Jews into apes and pigs. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein,
is only one eminent preacher who treats this trope as literal truth rather than
metaphorical.
Reaching for a wider audience, a song running on the
television channel of the Palestinian Authority responsible for the West Bank
has a couplet, “O Sons of Zion, O most evil among creations / O barbaric
apes, O wretched pigs.”
Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an elderly and much
respected Egyptian Sunni cleric who implores, “Oh Allah, take this
oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one
of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last
one.”
Preaching in al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in November,
Sheik Omar Abu Sara declared, “I say to the Jews loud and clear: The time for
your slaughter has come. The time to fight you has come. The time to kill you
has come.” He is only one of innumerable imams urging on another Holocaust
Last northern summer, war between Hamas and Israel
offered a copybook example of misrepresentation. In command of the Gaza Strip, Hamas
is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a militarised jihadi group
that very openly, even honestly, declares its aim is genocide, the complete
eradication of Israel.
Over a limited period, Hamas had fired into Israel
something in the order of 8,000 missiles. Finally provoked beyond endurance, Israel
put a stop to it with a military campaign that killed just over 2000 people,
fairly equally divided between Islamist terrorists and civilians.
Hamas, the original aggressor, portrayed Israeli
self-defence as a war crime. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the
Islamic Republic of Iran as well as paymaster and armourer of Hamas, accused
Israel of the genocide he had hoped his proxies would accomplish.
This stratagem frees Arabs to fire more missiles or
to murder Jews as and when it suits them, and still more dramatically obliges Jews
to take a position about Israelis. Some conclude that Israelis must take
whatever steps are required for survival, others feel guilty at the violence
involved, and a few, mostly intellectuals again, dissociate themselves
altogether from Israel.
There are Jews so frightened and insecure about their
identity that in a psychological defence mechanism they detach anti-Semitism
from its historical context, blaming it instead on the contemporary
determination of Israelis to keep their fate in their own hands rather than
surrender it to Arab or Muslim opponents such as Hamas in Gaza.
European intellectuals are continually adding to this
Jewish dilemma by misrepresenting either Jews or Israel, or both. Jostein
Gaarder is a bestselling Norwegian novelist who comes up with an old, old
smear, “to act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a
crime against humanity”.
The Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate Jose
Saramago seriously thought that the Israeli presence on the West Bank was worse
than Auschwitz.
Another Nobel prize winner, Gunter Grass, kept his
service in the SS a lifelong secret but declared that Israel was a threat to
world peace.
Tom Paulin, a poet and university lecturer, writes
about a Palestinian “gunned down by the Zionist SS”. A member of the European
parliament, Gianni Vattimo, supposedly a philosopher in Italy, says: “I’d like
to shoot those bastard Zionists.”
In Britain’s House of Lords, Jenny Tonge suggested
the Israeli medical team helping victims of the earthquake in Haiti had come to
harvest human organs.
Henryk Broder, a brilliant polemicist, was addressing
his fellow Germans when he said, “You’re still your parents’ children. Your Jew
today is the state of Israel”, but he was putting his finger on a much wider instinctive
reaction.
In Paris during the Gaza crisis, pro-Palestinian
rioters armed with axes and knives were prevented at the last moment from
storming a synagogue with a large congregation inside. Nothing like this had
occurred in that city since the German occupation when the SS blew up seven
synagogues.
At that same moment in Berlin — of all places —
demonstrators charged towards a Jewish couple shouting, “Jew! We’ll get you!”
In Wuppertal, a judge ruled that the town’s synagogue
had been torched for no reason except to draw attention to conflict. A man
whose name is given as Mahmudul
Choudury put a photograph of Hitler on Facebook and has him
saying, “You were
right. I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you
know why I was killing them.”
Demonstrators carry placards, “Jews to the gas” and
“Hitler was right”. French comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala said of a
colleague, “When I hear him talking, I say to myself, Patrick Cohen, hmm … the
gas chamber.”
In the atmosphere of rising moral chaos, Jewish
institutions make sure to have as much human and physical protection as
possible. Jewish children enter schools that are little fortresses, and they
are taught how to defend themselves as street-fighters.
Going about their daily lives, Jews cannot help
thinking about those who have been murdered just because they were Jews: among
them, Ilan Halimi,
kidnapped and tortured to death by Muslims in Paris; a teacher
and three children in Toulouse; four visitors in a Jewish museum in Brussels; shoppers
in the kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes; a security guard in Copenhagen;
and Alberto Nisman, the public prosecutor investigating the bombing in Buenos
Aires of a Jewish community centre that left more than 80 dead, himself
murdered hours before he was due to reveal some findings.
Howard Jacobson, the novelist who specialises in
weighing Jewish hopes and fears, finds that the mood music of the moment is
“ugly”. Danny Cohen, ostensibly secure as the BBC’s director of television,
confesses, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as I’ve felt
in the last 12 months. And it’s made me think about, you know, is it our
long-term home, actually?” Emma Barnett, a lively journalist on Britain’s The
Telegraph, recently wrote that for the first time in her life as a British
Jew she feels scared, anxious and bewildered.
Pressure groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and
the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement demonise Jews. Various unions,
professional associations and 700 individuals in the world of pop culture are
busy boycotting Israel, apparently oblivious that Hitler launched his
persecution with a boycott campaign. Roland Dumas, a former French foreign
minister, takes it for granted that Prime Minister Manuel Valls is “under
Jewish influence”.
On Swedish public broadcasting, Helena Groll revealed
a mindset when she asked the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, “Do the Jews
themselves have any responsibility for the growing anti-Semitism that we see
now?”
Commenting to the daughter of Holocaust survivors in
the aftermath of the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and Jewish shoppers
in Paris, Tim
Willcox of the BBC said, “Many critics, though, of Israel’s policy would
suggest that the Palestinians suffer tragedy at Jewish hands as well”, managing
the double feat of treating anti-Semitism as evidence of Jewish wrongdoing and
patronising Palestinians for their passive suffering of it. This was “poorly
phrased”, he had to concede later.
The Community Security Trust is a voluntary body set
up to safeguard Jewish lives and property in Britain. It reports that in 2013
there were 535 anti-Semitic incidents, and 1168 in 2014, the highest level ever
recorded.
Since the year 2000, 7650 anti-Semitic incidents have
been reported in France. The number of French Jews estimated to be leaving this
year for Israel is 15,000, twice as many as last year. Michel Gurfinkiel, one
of the most thoughtful intellectuals in France, foresees a time when there will
be none left in the country. Menachem Margolin, a rabbi who speaks for Jewish
organisations in Europe, on the contrary, calls on governments to make it
easier for Jews to arm themselves.
The German Chancellor, the British Prime Minister,
the French President and his Prime Minister have all made high-flown
declarations that their countries are home to their Jews and there is no need
to seek refuge in Israel. There are no meaningful measures to be taken to back
up such assurances.
Europe is set on a future without nation-states and
no discernible identity, but a Muslim population estimated at anywhere between
20 and 50 million.
That doesn’t look like doing any Jews a favour.
