The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has made the Jews once again the target of attacks and calumny throughout the world.
The signs are now evident throughout the world - the old and terrible wound of anti-Semitism, usually unequivocal, but often dissimulated and even unconscious, has once again been reopend, and the West tends to shut both eyes before this phenomenon. Many justify this burst of hostility towards the Jews by referring to the Arab-Israeli conflict and Jerusalem’s presumed prevarications towards the Palestinians without realizing that in this manner they echo the furious anti-Semitic propaganda which – peace-talks or not – has always involved the Middle East press, publishers and television networks. But there is worse: Sharon’s harsh suppression of the Intifada has become the pretext to give free reign to suppressed resentments and hatreds, as in the case of that eminent university professor, siding with the Catholics, who refused to participate at a conference on the difficulties faced by Israeli teachers, victims of racial laws. And again, the Nobel Prize Samarago, on the sole basis of what he had read in some newspapers, did not hesitate to compare Israel’s actions in Ramallah and Gaza to what the Germans did in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Another shameful demonstration of mass anti-Semitism took place in Rome on Saturday 9 March, when thousands of representatives of the Italian left-wing, including some leaders who sit in Parliament, marched around the Ghetto burning blue and white flags with the star of David, while some groups sang in chorus “Palestine/we want everything/the State of Israel/must be destroyed”. The participants defended themselves by stating that they were not demonstrating against the Jews as such, but only against Sharon and his government. In other words they accentuated the difference between the Jews and the Israelis and between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, as if in 2002 such quibbles meant anything at all. In any case, the excuse does not hold, seeing the demonstrators questioned the very right of the Jewish people to have a homeland. The truth is that it is becoming “politically correct” in this wicked game, in many circles, to try Israel for the occupation of the territories, compare suicidal Palestinian terrorism with its dozens of innocent victims every week to Resistance fighting, and even portray the Jews as criminals, a fact which sixty years ago tragically lead to the Holocaust. It is obvious that the Arabs must be forgiven everything and the Israelis nothing at all. Let us remember that when Mediaset TV channels filmed and broadcasted the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, the RAI correspondent hurriedly informed the Palestinians that he had nothing to do with them. In such a poisoned atmosphere, not even the revelations held in a series of new instant books on the complicity of the Catholic Church in the Shoah have given rise to any particular scandal. When a reliable historian such as Giovanni Belardelli writes in the Corriere della Sera: “the belated, weak initiatives taken by the Vatican towards Hitler should be blamed especially on the Church’s and Catholic world’s rooted anti-Jewish tendency, which had long since identified the Jews as the main cause of the evils of modernity and thus of the de-Christianization process which threatened the contemporary world. Hence they considered it lawful that a society should defend itself from the danger of Jews even by means of discriminating measures”, it should in theory give rise to a debate; instead, the article passed in silence, as if the Italian left-wing intelligentia, which always judged him a sinister reactionary, thought that on this point Pius XII was right after all. On the other hand John Paul II, who even asked the Jews’ forgiveness and visited the Museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, did not consider it convenient to comment when, during his recent journey to Syria, he literally heard president Bashar Assad say during a ceremony in Quneitra: “The Jews and the Israelis try to kill all the principles of faith with the same mentality with which they betrayed and tortured Jesus Christ, and in the same manner they have tried to betray prophet Mohammed”. Even if we limit our study to the past six months, that is to the period following the September 11 attacks which should have, if at all, accentuated distrust towards Muslims, the variety of anti- Semitic demonstrations is dismaying. The stage in which a limited intellectual group denied – in the midst of general reprobation - the existence of the Holocaust, or at least its extent, seems past history. Now they go beyond that - Israel is openly accused of having speculated over Hitler’s persecution to obtain compensation and financing, which have enabled it to build the powerful army with which the Palestinians are now oppressed. The World Jewish Congress states that in these past six months more synagogues were burnt in the world than in any other period, since the famous Night of Broken Glass in Germany. In France, attacks against the symbols of Hebraism, not only against synagogues, but against schools and cemeteries too, have reached peaks that recall the Vichy period. The Elysée even presented as a great personal victory the fact that the Lebanese Hezbollahs, probably Israel’s most ruthless enemies, were not included in the European list of terroristic organizations. During a top class dinner in London, the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, said, referring to Israel: “we will not permit that little sh***t nation to lead us all into World War III”, and he was not even reprimanded by his government when the matter was referred by a columnist (an Israeli) of the Daily Telegraph. Daniel Pearl, a correspondent of the Wall Street Journal in Pakistan, was kidnapped and his throat was slit by an organization of Muslim Fundamentalists not because he was an American, but because he was a Jew. Alexei Sayle, well known journalist of the London Independent was not ashamed to comment one of the Palestinian human-bomb explosions in Jerusalem with these absurd words: “If a vivisectionist has his car burnt, or a right-wing Israeli is shot or Ben Elton’s musical closes early because of poor ticket sales, I can’t say I can find it within myself to care very much”. In Germany, where many citizens still feel they are to blame for the Shoah, Augstein, the director of Der Spiegel, deplored the fact that in his country one cannot run down the Jews as in France. Fiamma Nirenstein, author of a devastating denunciation of the West’s betrayal of the Jews (“L’abbandono”, Rizzoli, March 2002) wrote last January in La Stampa “In Italy many intellectual and business circles wonder (and naturally the information is disgustingly untrue) why there were no Jews in the Twin Towers when they were destroyed. The abominable rumours that the Jews would have withdrawn their money from the market on the eve of September 11 are repeated and some cunningly conclude that the real culprit of the attack has to be Mossad. An industrialist friend (not a Jew) told me that the rumour is again spreading that the Jews control the economy and the press, as in the good old days. It is often stated that the Jews have become like the Nazis. Paolo Mieli wrote about the danger of reviving anti-Semitism (drawing more criticism than approval from the readers of the Corriere della Sera– Editor’s note): “In Europe it has become hard for a Jew to move with friends in social circles unless he shows that he is willing to abjure Israel, unless he sides up with those who deny Israel’s offers for a peace settlement and unless he is ready to declare that Sharon is a criminal”. Bruno Carmi, a highly regarded top manager of CGIL, must agree with Ms. Nirenstein if he considered it necessary to resign, creating an uproar, from the Trade Union after the latter had turned a Congress of the Civil Service into a demonstration against Israel, in favour of Arafat. During the same period, Famiglia Cristiana launched a violent anti-Israeli campaign, coming out with topics that had long been buried in the archives of history. And, on the lay front, dailies such as La Repubblica, which collects and interprets all left-wing tendencies, are no better. The hatred expressed by these organs of the press against Sharon and the entire world he represents, that is against the millions of Jews who do not believe in the Arabs’ desire to keep peace, is such that they even forget that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the only western outpost in a world that is becoming deeply hostile, forgetting that Sharon himself – whether we like it or not - was widely acclaimed by the populace. Our consternation increases when we leave Europe behind to move on to the Arab world. Whereas in Europe anti-Semitism has been, even in the past, a movement that spread from fringe groups to the top, Muslim anti-Semitism has followed the opposite course - it has been instilled in the mass by the heads of state with an anti-Israeli purpose, with a hammering campaign that makes use of all the legends and all the slanders invented in the course of the centuries, from the famous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” produced by the Zar’s police (and now even turned into a TV serial by an Arab television network) to the story of unleavened bread kneaded with the blood of children. The past two generations of Arabs have been brought up to hate the Jews, to compare Zionism to Nazism and to feel the need to eliminate the “Zionist entity” from the Middle East. This campaign did not end even when peace seemed to be round the corner after the Oslo agreements, and it persists even in countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which have made peace with Israel and established diplomatic relations with Jerusalem (but without ever really normalizing the relationship). On the contrary, the Egyptian press is the fiercest in slandering the Jews, and the government does not raise a finger to stop it. Al Akhbar, the official government paper, went as far as to write an article in praise of Hitler, regretting that he did not have the time to complete his praiseworthy extermination. In a preordained spiral, the media incite the populace against Israel and the crowds ask that more firmness be used against this nation. The governments satisfy this demand and supply media campaigns with a new bait. The cassette that for months has sold the greatest number of copies in the Arab world contains a second-rate song which begins with the words “I hate Israel”. Between Cairo and Damascus, there have even risen manufacturing plants which produce Israeli flags to be burnt during demonstrations. In Amman, the very same Amman in which in September 1970 late king Hussein ordered the Arab legion to perform a massacre of Palestinians which was far greater than the ones that took place in Sabra and Chatila, the University has recently organized an international conference of experts to deny that the Holocaust ever existed. Arafat is among the most vicious slanderers of Israel when he addresses the people in Arabic. Recently he accused Sharon of making use of nerve gas, of shooting grenades with depleted uranium, of causing an epidemic of foot and mouth disease in the territories and of distributing poisoned chewing-gum to Palestinian children. Textbooks distributed by Palestinian authorities (and entirely paid for by the European Union) use maps in which the Israeli state does not appear, they scrupulously incite children to martyrdom and they also hold a good deal of infamy. To quote Fiamma Nirenstein “Having been erased from all maps, Israel is described as an abstract evil entity. In the imagination of common people, greatly influenced by Arab leaders and intellectuals, Israel has no houses, no hospitals and no schools, just uniforms, guns and tanks; it is not a nation, just a blood-thirsty army…. Every negative connotation is Israel’s: aggressor, usurper, sinner, occupier, corruptor, infidel, murderer and barbarian”. One cannot understand how Arafat, having thus educated his youth, can then make the West believe that he will be ready to coexist peacefully with the Jews if he obtains his independent state. Not content with demonizing the Jews over their media and supported by many non-governmental European organizations (NGOs), last year the Arabs attempted to transform the Durban conference against racism in an occasion to condemn Israel and deny the Shoah. The original NGO document described Israel as a nation in favour of Apartheid, holding this State responsible for all the worst racist crimes. Not Israel alone, but the United States too withdrew in protest - EU governments stayed behind in an attempt (only partly successful) to avoid this disgraceful incident. The fact still remains that during the entire conference the Jewish delegates were threatened, excluded from meetings and roughly silenced. Probably never, in the post-war period, were such tones of long forgotten and heated anti-Semitism heard. But the indignation of the western press was carefully weighed as if – in short – that shameful campaign was in some way justified. The attitude of many “politically correct” journalists does not differ much from this when they relate the developments of the war: human bombs in hotels or streets in Israel which kill and torture hundreds of civilians are not described as terrorists, but as youth sacrificing their lives for the cause of their people. What will all this lead up to? Once again Ms. Nirenstein writes: “If the West does not wake up, Israel and the Jews will risk their lives, because without the West, Israel is a condemned nation which keeps postponing its execution with never ending negotiations”. This journalist, who resides in Gilo, constantly under Palestinian fire in the outskirts of Jerusalem, personally experiences the tragedy of a nation which, for the umpteenth time in its age old history, fears for its very survival. Though we may think that Israel has its faults in the conflict, we cannot ignore this cry of pain.

Translated by Interpres sas