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Dateline: Middle East
Volume 25 • Winter 2008
Published by The Student Coalition for a Just Peace in the Middle East

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: FIRST STEP TO RECOVERY
Elana Herzog

Addictions experts suggest that many alcoholics go undiagnosed and untreated because they are in denial of having a drinking problem. This not only rejects any possible resolution of the problem, but also allows for its further deterioration. Europe today is, unfortunately, in some respects exhibiting similar behaviour with its antisemitism problem.

Much of official Europe resents the attention being paid to the return of anti-Jewish hatred to the continent. Former French president, Jacques Chirac admonished a Jewish editor in January, 2002, saying “Stop saying
that there is antisemitism in France, there is no antisemitism in France.“ Yet, a survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League, shows that 30 per cent of Europeans harbour traditional anti-Jewish views. Another
recent survey indicates that antisemitism has more than doubled in Spain over the past three years, with a rise from 21 percent to 46 percent, while more than one in three Poles and Russians also had unfavourable
opinions of Jews. In the same period, antisemitism in Germany and France, expressing unfavourable opinions of Jews, also rose from 21 percent to 25 percent in Germany, and from 12 percent to 20 percent in France.

Yet what is even more disconcerting is that anti-Jewish sentiments seemingly increased, becoming ever more open in public forms, since the start of Israel’s military operation in Gaza on December 27. The Gaza defense, an operation Israel launched in order to defend itself from rocket fire targeting its civilian population for eight years, has allowed many of these anti-Jewish viewpoints in Europe to be translated into concrete violence against Jews.

Soeren Kern, a Senior Fellow at the Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group, documented overt antisemitic episodes across Europe since the start of the Gaza battle. In a January 17 article in The Brussels Journal, Kern insists that violent antisemitic incidents have been rapidly increasing over
the past couple of weeks since the start of the Gaza operation. “Minor” symptoms, such as the presence of antisemitic graffiti, have also become commonplace in European cities.

Recent incidents include scores of arson attacks against synagogues and Jewish community centers and schools, as well as physical assaults and death threats to Jews in several French cities, in London, in all major cities in Spain, in Sweden, in Brussels and Charleroi, in Sweden and in various other towns as well. In Denmark, two Israelis were shot and wounded in a shopping mall in Odense. In nearby Vollsmose, a public school principal declared that Jewish students are not welcome at his school and advised Jewish parents to send their children elsewhere. The principal is an active supporter of the Danish Boycott Israel campaign,
which specializes in organizing anti-Israel protest marches in Copenhagen and elsewhere.

In Italy, the leader of a far-left trade union has called for a boycott of all Jewish shops in Rome. According to union leader Giancarlo Desiderati, the organization has already urged its members to blacklist Israeli products. Equally revealing of Europe’s increasingly brazen antisemitism is the shouting of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” in several pro-Palestinian protest rallies taking place in Germany and the Netherlands.

The fact that these opinions are permitted to manifest themselves openly, coupled with outright violence, either reflects Europe’s complete denial of an antisemitism problem, or, frightfully, its tacit acceptance of the
resurgence of this long-standing syndrome.

Daniel Schwammenthal of the Wall Street Journal argues that the rage against the Jews in Europe is not spontaneous sympathy for Muslims in Gaza, but rather that this hatred of Israel must have been carefully nurtured over a period of time. How else, Schwammenthal says, can we explain the silence when Muslims
in other conflicts, from Darfur to Chechnya, are being killed?

Curiously, thousands of Europe’s governing elite continue to insist that their nations are friends of the Jewish people and of Israel. Kern suggests that the European political class is afraid to admit that Europe has a problem with antisemitism because doing so would shatter the belief that Europe and the European Union is a postmodern multicultural utopia where people of all ethnicities, tongues and nations live together in perfect harmony.

A recent report on antisemitic violence in the European Union shows that most European countries do not even keep official records of antisemitic crimes. (The first such report, which was published by the EU Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in late 2003, was initially suppressed and only publicized after months of public outcry.) What the governing elite in Europe continually fail to comprehend, or to acknowledge, is that recognizing the existence of antisemitism is the first step to recovery.

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