Don't abandon the fight for Europe, It needs us now more than ever
Halfway through the March 2012 siege on the Toulouse apartment of Mohammed Merah – the killer of four Jews and three French soldiers in southern France – I took a break in the local café with a couple of colleagues. To our surprise, the patroness who served us our drinks addressed us in heavily accented Hebrew. For 10 years Monique had lived in the southeastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, on Ha’anafa Street – which, for the first year of the second intifada in 2000, had been under nightly fire from Beit Jala across the valley.
She came back to Toulouse after failing to find suitable long-term employment in Israel. No hard feelings, that’s 21st century emigration – you try your luck in a new country, it doesn’t always work. She didn’t seem overly concerned that the perpetrator of the worst anti-Semitic attack in Europe in a generation lived just down the road. “There’s a few Muslim families in this neighborhood,” she said, “all very nice and not at all extreme.” Her son Elchanan, who had recently embraced religion but didn’t seem to mind sitting with his black kippa and beard in the café while his mother served obviously non-Kosher steak frites, was less sanguine. “There hasn’t been any bad violence for many years, but there’s anti-Semitism no one wants to talk about. Curses and nasty things shouted at Jews on the street. There’s a lot of that, even if there’s no violence.”
I thought about Monique and Elchanan a lot this week. I thought about them and other typical European Jews, living their lives between the continent and Israel, between secularism and religion, when mobs in Paris tried to storm synagogues and kosher groceries; when crowds in Berlin called to send the Jews to gas chambers; when a former European parliamentary member for the British Liberal Democrats tweeted that the official representative body of British Jewry is “a frightful bag of disputatious Jews.”
The rights and wrongs of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and the responsibility for death and suffering in Gaza, are totally immaterial to this outburst of Europe’s oldest hatred and shouldn’t be debated in the same context. Anyone who attempts to deal with both issues in the same breath is trivializing and excusing hatred of Jews. There is no justification whatsoever in holding a protest, even a peaceful one, over events in the Middle East outside a synagogue. A few of Palestine’s advocates have rightly spoken out against this, while many who have remained silent (one despicable American website tried to blame French Jews) have shamed themselves as apologists for anti-Semitism and shamed those who honorably stand up for the Palestinians without being tainted with racism.
more: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/jerusalem-babylon/.premium-1.607109
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to Behind the Aegis (Original post)
