Europe
It is becoming more and more apparent that Europe will finally achieve the goal the Third Reich had set for itself and the countries it captured.
More than eighty years ago plans were laid by Hitler and his followers to “cleanse” Europe of its Jews. That hatred was not born in a vacuum. The hatred that led to the extermination, the murder of millions of my people, some of them my blood relatives, was a hatred nurtured over centuries by ignorance and a number of European religious institutions.
The Inquisition is but one of many such examples of the hatred of the Jewish people. Hitler and his followers also murdered the intellectually challenged, the gay, the Roma, the physically challenged, and so many more. When the second World War ended, Europeans had had their fill of war. Entire cities were destroyed. Lives were lost, and those who survived had to rebuild. It is understandable that Europeans abhorred war.
For a short while, some Europeans also felt guilty and bad that so much murder of innocents had taken place. For a while, those Europeans willing to come to terms with the murder of millions under a fascist regime and a complicit population felt even more guilty. They supported the UN resolution that would partition Palestine, and later supported the small new country created for that remnant of the Jewish people not obliterated by Hitler and his maniacal followers.
That guilt, however, began to wear off soon after 1967, when Israel won a brilliant and decisive war in six days. Further erosion of those feelings of guilt came soon after when pressure from the oil producing nations, mostly Arab nations, caused fuel and oil prices to rise. Economies were affected. Support of the only democracy in the Middle East was seen through the narrow lens of Arab oil embargoes and sanctions against those nations who dared trade with Israel. And then, the “Freedom Fighter” emerged. That romantic, dashingly handsome kaffyeh clad freedom fighter, perceived not as a murderer of innocent school children in Ma’alot. Not as the murderer of innocents slaughtered in the airport arrivals hall of then Lod airport. Not the hijacker of airplanes. Do we even remember Entebbe?
Over the past forty years, as my small country, no bigger than the small state of New Jersey in the USA, defended itself against such wanton murder, the guilt Europe felt about that evil chapter in its past completely vanished, and what had once been seen as a small nation fighting for its very existence became a monster, blamed for every possible crime against humanity.
While other nations gassed their own people (do you remember Saddam Hussein murdering his Kurdish citizens?), and while other nations turned entire cities and their inhabitants into parking lots (do you remember Hafez Assad and the town of Hama?) and when his son began to follow in his father’s footsteps (do you recall Bashir Assad and the murder of thousands of his own people creating a refugee crisis rare in its proportions in human history?) the people of Europe turned a blind eye. Nary a condemnation from the United Nations. Silence for the most part from the European Union Parliament.
Yes, Europe will have its wish fulfilled. Those Jewish people left in France, in Hungary, in Ireland and other countries, will soon realize that they are really not welcomed there. Witness the pogroms in Paris. See the massive anti Israel demonstrations in European cities. The writing is on the wall, isn’t it?
It saddens me. I had hoped for better from Europe. That hope is gone.