Anti-Semitism still generally adopts the cover of the much more respectable anti-Zionism, but it's there.
Saying that anti-Semites use anti-Zionism as cover is a very different statement from saying all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, even less that criticism of the Sharon government is anti-Semitism. Come on, Seven. You're better than this.
And why should they not? Holocaust guilt gave the Israelis a 25-year free pass from criticism, even from people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust
Why not indeed? Just because they had 200,000 troops massed on their borders with the stated intent to wipe them off the map? Nice timing for the 'Holocaust pass' to run out! Somehow, I think France's considerations were political. As they usually are.
Some may feel that their former support for Israel imposes some obligations. Possibly residual guilt over the Holocaust – which for most was somebody else’s crime – was outweighed by residual guilt over colonialism. Hard to say.
For the French, it was not "somebody else's crime" - at least, not so much as they like to think. Hm, do you think we have found a partial motive here?
Ironies are, of course, abundant. If Israel had been founded 50 years earlier, nobody would have raised an eyebrow: the right of a European population to go where they chose and declare sovereignty over “lesser peoples” was taken for granted then.
Let's see - New Mexico became a state in 1908, didn't it? And Alaska and Hawaii in 1958? And the loud demands to return these stolen lands to the aboriginals are coming from where - ? China out and out conquered Tibet in 1959, and protests seem pretty muted there too. Obviously the Dalai Lama is missing a trick by not sending suicide bombers to blow up the buses of Lhasa! Fourteen million people were displaced during the partition of India, but there are no cries to undo that. Everywhere else, fifty years of reality on the ground settles the issue. Only Israel is different.
Let's face it, post-colonial guilt may play among the Europeans but it's a total red herring to the Arabs. They just hate the Jews and consider it intolerable to have a Jewish state in "Arab/Muslim" land. Full stop. When the Turks imported Circassians, they didn't care much. If the Jews had been Muslims, it would have been tolerable.
The driving assumption behind Zionism -–the belief that Jews can only be secure in a Jewish State – has of course proven to be completely wrong. For the last 50 years, Jews in Western Europe and America have been far more secure than those in Israel.
The Jews have longer memories, and can easily remember back, say, 100 years. |
