Europeans should remember why Israel exists

Timothy Garton Ash points the finger and suggests that Euros--especially the left--should reconsider their reflexively critical attitude towards Israel.

...observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe's own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting "à bas les juifs" as Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulets at the Ecole Militaire; the festering anti-Semitism of Austria about 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-Semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel...

...never again would Jews go as lambs to the slaughter. As Israelis, they would fight for the life of every single fellow Jew. The 19th century stereotypes of German Helden and Jewish Händler have been reversed. The Germans, and most of today's bourgeois Europeans, have become the eternal traders; the Jews, in Israel, the eternal warriors.

Of course, this is only one thread in perhaps the world's most complicated political tapestry, but it's a very important one. I don't think any European should speak or write about today's conflict in the Middle East without displaying some consciousness of our own historical responsibility. I'm afraid that some Europeans today do so speak and write; and I don't just mean the German right-wing extremists who marched through the town of Verden in Lower Saxony on Saturday, waving Iranian flags and chanting "Israel — international genocide center." I also mean thinking people on the left...

...the issue here is not just changing the realities on the ground in the Middle East. How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at July 27, 2006 10:02 AM