Recently, the European Jewish Union's CEO, Tomer Orni, said that "anti-Semitism is part of Europe’s DNA”.
He could have said more: anti-Semitism is Europe's new religion.
Any visitor to Central Europe cannot fail to note how successful the Nazis were in the war against the Jews.
Now, an impressive wave of anti-Semitism is plaguing, once again, Western Europe. In Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, kippah-wearing Jews are attacked in the streets and Israelis are unwelcome in the universities.
Europe one day might become like Prague, a center for Jewish tourism and, as Hitler himself planned, a museum for the exterminated people.
Thank G-d for America. But iIs America still really different? What does the crisis between Israel and the US on Iran tell us?
Assimilation is just another name for anti-Semitism, hatred for Judaism, and in America it has proven to be very successful.
Paradoxically, America - the place that has given the Jews the greatest security in the history of the Diaspora - is the place where Jews are dying out, demographically. Even more than in Europe. By the end of the '80s, America's completely assimilated Jews numbered over a million. And this terrible trend goes on.
Is it possible that one day American Jews will be made unwelcome and be forced to come to Israel?
When there are financial difficulties it's the Jews who pay, in spite of their assimilation - and because of their assimilation. In America the Jews are reaching the height of their visibility, but that doesn't mean they are being accepted. Like in Germany before the war, it could mean just the opposite.
The Jerusalem-Washington alliance rests on many pillars: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; the State of the Jews arose from the ashes of the Holocaust and America is in some way obligated to the existence of a home for its survivors; the Jewish pioneering endeavor of making the desert bloom and of settlement are anchored in the American pioneering and entrepeneurial psyche and elicit admiration; the Bible is the common heritage of both peoples.
But what is termed "American aid to Israel" is a central axis of a political ransom which explains why the US treats Israel as if it is a banana republic (this is the place to recall Henri Kissinger's remark to Adm. Zumwalt, explaining why he was delaying arms shipments in the Yom Kippur War: "His intention," Zumwalt reported, "was to see Israel bleed just enough to soften it up for the postwar diplomacy").
The fear of harm befalling the granting of aid is a nightmare depriving Israeli leadership of sleep and binding its hands, silencing Israel's will and driving her rapidly to the point of harming her existential interests. It's the "client-patron relationship". The US also used its aid to Israel indirectly to subsidize its own industries, by requiring that most of it be spent on American defense products.
If it were not for the US, Israel would not have engaged in a preventive war in 1967 and in 1982, would not have bombed the Iraqi reactor, would not have annexed Jerusalem and the Golan, would not have settled Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Yet it is America which pressed Israel to embrace the explosive booby-trap of a Palestinian state.
The US' establishment is imbued with anti-Semitism. That's why America is burying Jonathan Pollard alive. Pollard’s room is so small that when he sits on the bed and stretches his arms he touches both walls. His kippa was thrown to the ground. He was spread-eagled against the wall and his testicles squeezed. His phylacteries were split open by overzealous guards.
America will release Pollard only in a coffin. Pollard is being watched like a hawk. Actually, for no reason. What the Justice Department and the Pentagon are doing is keeping anti-Semitism alive. Those US Jews who are embarrassed by Pollard should remember he was sentenced as a Jew just like Alfred Dreyfus.
America humiliated the Jews with fear of being accused of dual loyalties. That's why today countless Jewish organizations are supporting the Palestinian agenda and most of them preach the transfer of 350.000 Jews from Judea and Samaria. The conspiracy threat as well as traditional anxieties about being accused of "dual loyalty," frightened US Jews into silence on the Pollard case.
The fate of American Jewry today stands on a kind of blackmail: the more they attack the Israelis, the more they prove that they are not defined by being Jewish.
That's why the most anti-Israel president in US history, Barack Obama, is also surrounded by many Jews and treated as a guru by a plethora of Jewish journalists.
The freeze of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, which first took place under Bush senior (the late Israeli general MK Rehavam Ze’evi dismissed Bush as being “anti-Semitic), is the consequence of US pressure, strengthening the Arabs' contention that the Jewish presence in the land can be rolled back by force.
By ordering a freeze on settlement, the US stopped Israel from exercising Jewish rights to live throughout Israel - and sent both its enemies and friends the message that this is a right which the Jews are willing to waive under pressure, whether pressure of violence or pressure of funding. And to send such a message is to invite more pressure.
America is trying to create an Israel with the border at Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate, Ben-Gurion's airport covered by missiles deployed in the ruins of Beit Aryeh, a Palestinian corridor that would cut the Negev into two and Arabs who will move into the apartments of Israelis who will leave the country once terror resumes.
This has been the official US policy for the past twenty years: Bill Clinton gave Israel the Second Intifada, George W. Bush fomented a war on dozens of outposts, while Obama works to truncate Israel and make it undefensible.
America humiliated Israel with the extortionist demand of "land for money". It's the exchange of the heart of Jewish patrimony, the Land of the Bible, for billions in bank guarantees.
If Israel's birth in 1948 had depended on American support, the Jewish state would not have been reborn then. Truman maintained a US embargo against arms sales to the Israeli and Arabs, which was effective only against the Jews. In 1956, it was US pressure which forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai where Israeli forces were pursuing the Egyptians. Under the Eisenhower/Dulles administration, US grants to Israel ended. Following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Reagan administration delayed the delivery of 75 F-16 warplanes.
Now, for the first time since the "reassessment" of US interests in the Middle East during the Ford-Kissinger administration, the US is not concealing its view that on Iran today, there exists a disparity of interests between Washington and Jerusalem. Sooner or later, America will might forsake the Jewish State.
If reelected, Obama mightl put the Jews in constant, mortal danger.
In 2004, Mr. Obama criticized the fence that eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that took 2,000 lives in Israel.
As president, Obama thought that the best way to head off the possibility of a new Holocaust was by entering into talks with Iran “without preconditions”.
Then for the first time in US history, a President fomented a diplomatic war on Israel’s right to live beyond the pre-1967 lines, which are simply Armistice lines of 1949 and not existentially viable. Just as the cowardly British diplomats of Chamberlain's time sold out the brave Czech democracy to “Herr Hitler", Obama bowed to Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khamenei.
From Oslo to Iran, America often served the Israelis to their enemies on a silver platter. Today the US Jews remind us, unfortunately, of those who refused to identify the danger until they were at the gates of Auschwitz. But then it was too late.
Now, again, we read that number: 6.000.000 Jews living in Israel. History must not repeat itself.