The fundamental Zionist idea about anti-Semitism was that once a Jewish State was realized, the problem of anti-Semitism in Paris, Berlin and Rome would be solved. Since Jews would have their own homeland, they could no longer be persecuted as religious and national strangers. But this neat packet of reasoning has turned out to be incorrect.
The Belgian Ministry of Education funds an organization, the Committee for Remebrance Education, which provides teachers with materials for their history lessons. One of the materials used is the cartoon “Never Again, Over Again”, which equates the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs by the Israelis today with the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis in the 40s.
“Never Again" means that what happened under Hitler should never happen again. And "Over Again" means that what is happening today is the same as in the past with Hitler, the Belgian school teachers are told. “In the past, the concentration camps were fenced off with barbed wire. Today, the border between Israel and Palestine is marked with barbed wire and a wall”.
Daniel Goldhagen devoted his entire academic research to the analysis of the Nazi genocide. His international fame came with “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, the book-indictment of one hundred thousand “ordinary Germans” who killed millions of Jews. Now it is the turn of Goldhagen's new book titled “The Devil That Never Dies”, published by Little, Brown and Company.
The book is most important as an analysis of “global anti-Semitism” as Goldhagen calls it, but it is also the indictment of Europe’s public opinion which depicts the Jews as “monstrous predators” who crush the Palestinians. Goldhagen enunclates Europe’s new anti-Semitism as follows: “Israel has no right to exist, so it is right and necessary to destroy the Jewish state. Two hundred million Europeans see the Israeli Jews as Nazis”.
That’s why, according to the Jewish People Planning Institute, 40 to 50 percent of European Jews are considering alyah. Because they do not feel safe.
And France is the most explosive example.
Nathan Sharansky just landed in Paris to coordinate the departure of 800 French Jews. “I do not remember such a number of people interested in alyah since the days when Jews stood in line outside the Israeli embassy in Moscow”, Sharanski said from the French capital.
It is a peak of emigration which has not been seen since 2004, when during the Second Intifada Europe’s Jews suffered a wave of anti-Semitism and thousand of French Jews marched through the streets raising signs like “Synagogues brûlées, République en ranger”, i.e. synagogues burned, republic in danger.
At stake is the famous relationship between Jews and France symbolized by the French Air Force jewel created by Marcel Dassault; by the father of the Constitution, Michel Debré; by Simone Veil, first president of the European Parliament; by Pierre Mendes-France, Minister of Economy in 1945, and by the socialist leader Leon Blum.
The Israeli government recently released emigration numbers. France tops the global list after Russia, Ukraine and Ethiopia. It is the “Aliyah Tapis Rouge”, emigration on the red carpet.
In Paris, the Jews are advised to “walk in groups”, never alone. Better if above the kippah they wear a baseball hat. Half of the Jewish families in Villepinte, a proletarian suburb north of the capital, have left and the local synagogue, already burned down in 2011, is no longer able to set up the required 10-man quorum, called a minyan, for prayer.
Joel Mergui, historic leader of the Jews of Paris, has warned: “The mass migration is likely to clear the capital of the community”. It is a drama silenced by the French media: “Of the 600,000 Jews in France, only one third is in contact with the community and educates their children in Jewish schools. A third is about to be assimilated, and a third is on the fence”.