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European antisemitism

The number of antisemitic incidents worldwide increased in 2020, but the past year also saw some notable positive developments in the battle against this hatred. The most important resulted from Trump policies, including the stopping of American financing of the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA. The US also announced that it considers the anti-Israel BDS movement antisemitic. Another major development was the publication of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism within the Labour Party.
Fifty former senior European politicians have published a letter against the Trump peace plan in the Guardian. Many signatories can be characterized as veteran anti-Israeli inciters. Some can even be labeled antisemites. All have held positions in countries where antisemitism is endemic. In 2019, even before the Trump plan was published, a similar letter was published by former EU officials.
Tens of millions of European citizens have a demonic view of Israel. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, the most serious of which is comparing Israel’s actions against the Palestinians to those of the Nazis against the Jews. The demonization of Israel leads to antisemitic insults directed against Jews in general. The EU and its member states, but also the Israeli government, have been greatly negligent in dealing with this problem.
The word “appeasement” evokes dark memories of the Munich 1938 agreement, in which Britain and France made far-reaching concessions to the aggressive German Nazi state in order to avoid violent conflict. The betrayed victim was Czechoslovakia, which was not even invited to the conference at which its fate was to be decided. The outbreak of WWII in 1939 showed, of course, that the agreement was a gross error in judgment. Sadly, the West does not appear to have learned much from Neville Chamberlain’s misguided proclamation of “peace in our time”.
For operational and structural reasons, the EU cannot effectively combat antisemitism. The main operational reasons are the absence of an accepted definition of antisemitism and the lack of comparable statistics on incidents among EU member states. Structural reasons are the unwillingness of the EU to admit that antisemitism is part of European culture, and the inability to simultaneously incite against Israel and fight antisemitism. The discrepancy between the words of EU leaders about their intention to fight antisemitism and the need to act against it will thus remain huge.

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