With Friends Like These . . .

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

With Friends Like These . . .
By FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER
January 6, 2007; Page A7

An Israeli gal like me cannot afford to be too picky about her friends, certainly not in Europe. Recent European polls proclaimed Israel the single most dangerous country on earth, the guiltiest monger of global conflict, and, to crown it all, the least desirable place to live. Most Israelis, busy with their thriving economy under a warm Mediterranean sun, tend to forgive such pronouncements coming from dismal Düsseldorf and snowbound Stockholm. But a new challenge has now cropped up. We seem to have gained new European friends, and not quite for the right reasons.

These new pro-Israel voices base a love of Jews upon the hatred of Muslims. Last September the European Coalition for Israel convened in Brussels, its most prominent speakers lamenting the loss of European Jewry alongside the rise of European Islam. The tone was belligerent, the linkage crude: "The enemies of Israel are also a threat to Europe," delegates were told. And also: "In only two generations, most parts of Europe will be under Islamic law." Other self-declared friends grimly speak of Londonistan and augur the coming of the European Caliphate. Such statements may reflect genuine concern, but are disconcerting when made on European soil.

Unlike the late Oriana Fallaci, whose commitment to the Jews stemmed from her heroic anti-Fascist youth, and whose harsh critique of Islam came from an enraged liberal soul, many of these new friends are Muslim-bashers first and Israel-backers second. Their blanket condemnation of Muslim communities on their continent rings eerily familiar. Their sweeping verdict against a whole civilization has that strange déjà-vu feel. And their rather sudden nostalgia for Europe's lost Jews is, I'm sorry to say, far too late and somewhat suspect.

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I, for one Israeli, would be grateful to my newfound buddies if their sympathy for me did not rely on the trashing of another religion. Unlike them, I'm touched by the sight of young Muslim women in European university campuses. They remind my of my own grandmother, a student in Prague who had to flee after the Nazi rise to power, and of all the other young and hopeful Jews whose dreams and lives were shattered by the European culture they so admired.

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Ms. Oz-Salzberger is director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought and senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law and School of History at the University of Haifa.

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