Not at all.
The British were also colonists and they should have administered the turning over of the land to the majority culture there. The Zionist terrorists had another plan...
Why Europe Hates Israel
The balance of guilt has shifted to the Arabs.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Saturday, December 1, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
"BRUSSELS--On Wednesday a Belgian court heard arguments from lawyers representing 23 Palestinians,
survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Chatilla massacres near Beirut, that Israel's Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon should be prosecuted in Belgium for crimes against humanity. Though Mr. Sharon almost
certainly will never sit in a Belgian jail, the trial could hardly be freighted with more significance.
More than a half century after the Holocaust, a Europe awakened to the importance of human rights
is looking to punish the leader of the world's only Jewish state for a crime that was actually committed
by a Christian Lebanese militiaman, later employed by the Syrian regime of Hafez Assad. And yet
blame for the massacres seems to be apportioned to Mr. Sharon alone. Why?
The short answer is the Belgian legal system, whose well-meaning laws lend themselves to this sort of
opportunistic and sensational indictment. A slightly longer answer is that many Europeans are
sincerely convinced that Mr. Sharon really is a war criminal, as a BBC documentary attempted to show
last summer.
But the real answer is that European governments today are, by and large, tacit enemies of the state
of Israel, much as they might protest that they merely take a more "evenhanded" approach to the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Consider a few recent examples. In April, France voted to censure Israel at the U.N. Human Rights
Commission in Geneva--while abstaining from a vote of censure against China. During his diplomatic
foray to Tehran in September, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw offered that "one of the factors
which helps breed terrorism is the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the
years in Palestine." The European Union has so far refused to follow America's lead by freezing the
assets of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, with the European Commission's external
relations spokesman, Gunnar Wiegand, arguing that "Hezbollah could play a major role in regional
stability."
That Europe today should be hostile to Israel may seem a bit of a mystery, not least given the usual
sympathy of aims between democratic states. The explanation comes in several parts. First, as
historian Howard Sacher points out, Europe's left sees in Israel's political evolution a betrayal of its
utopian ideals. It's easy to forget that in the years following the establishment of Israel, many
Europeans looked to it as a model socialist country. They admired its largely state-run economy and
especially its collectivist kibbutzim. Hundreds of young European leftists, most of them non-Jews,
flocked to these farms in the 1960s, looking for the kind of workers' paradise they could not find on
the other side of the Berlin Wall.
This fondness, however, evaporated after the 1967 war, when Israel went from being the Middle
East's underdog to its Goliath, holding a colonial-like mandate over the lands that came into its
possession. Partly under the sway of Soviet propaganda, partly in keeping with the fashion of radical
chic, European leftists abruptly transferred their allegiances to the Palestinians and the PLO, which in
the 1970s drew the likes of current German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to their meetings.
Meanwhile, successive Israeli governments veered to the right. "The era when Yitzhak Rabin or Golda
Meir could address their European counterparts as 'comrades' at gatherings of the Socialist
International had passed," says Mr. Sacher.
There was also a shift of attitudes on the European right. With the exception of Britain, whose
notoriously Arabist Foreign Office has dominated its Mideast policy under both Conservative and
Labour governments, much of the Continental right had at one time looked on admiringly at "plucky
little Israel." Thus, beginning in 1952, the conservative German government of Konrad Adenauer
provided Israel with critical financial support in the form of Holocaust reparations, while Charles de
Gaulle's France helped to build its nuclear reactor at Dimona.
But it was also de Gaulle who, in 1967, slapped an arms embargo on Israel for firing the first shot in
the Six Day War. Thereafter, the hostility increased, partly because France fancied itself a champion
of its former Arab colonies, partly out of simple anti-Americanism. But the chief reason, of course, was
Europe's dependence on Arab oil. As French President Georges Pompidou put it to Henry Kissinger
during the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, "You only rely on the Arabs for about a tenth of your consumption.
We are entirely dependent on them."
Since then, Europe's reliance on Mideastern oil has abated, but the habit of reflexively seeking to
appease the Arabs at Israel's expense has not. In 1974, French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert toured
the Middle East, seeking to earn price concessions on oil for France by mouthing a hard anti-Israel
line. In 1980, the European Community formally recognized the PLO, even though Yasser Arafat had
neither made peace with Israel nor dropped his overt sponsorship of terrorism. Currently, the EU
supplies the Palestinian Authority with the bulk of its foreign aid, even as much of that money goes
indirectly to funding textbooks describing Jews as monkeys and vermin.
Given all this, many Jews have been led to conclude that what's at work here is a thinly veiled form of
anti-Semitism. But while there might be some truth to this, it's easily exaggerated. Mr. Straw, of
German-Jewish descent, is clearly no anti-Semite, and the one bright spot of Jacques Chirac's
presidency has been his efforts to acknowledge the sins of France's suppressed Vichy past.
Underlying European policy is an uneasy sense of guilt. In the immediate postwar period, Europe's
guilty conscience worked in Israel's favor. But in the postcolonial spirit of the '60s, the balance of guilt
switched to the Arab side: It was they who were being oppressed; and it was Europe that, with its
previous support for Israel, had helped inflict the oppression. So Europe pressures Israel to withdraw
from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, heedless of the dire security consequences that such
withdrawal would entail. That Israel has so far refused to accede to this pressure stands as an
infuriating rebuke to modern Europe's fundamental conception of itself as the virtuous defeated, free
to pass judgment while absolved of the moral responsibilities of wielding actual power.
Whatever the case, a foreign policy based on a combination of left-wing disillusionment, French
opportunism and all-around cravenness cannot yield good results. With the U.S. State Department
increasingly leaning toward the European line on Israel, it's well that the basis of that policy be
properly understood."
Mr. Stephens is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe. |
