PRAGUE — When Israel asked for European troops, including Germans, to patrol the Israel-Lebanon border area following Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, it was a salient sign of how far European ties with Israel have come in recent years.
“Who would have ever thought that German soldiers would be charged — and trusted — to protect Israelis 65 years after the Holocaust?” observed Oded Eran, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the European Union and now head of the World Jewish Congress office in Jerusalem.
The Germany-Israel bond was further underscored in March when German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset in German and held an unprecedented joint Cabinet meeting with the Israeli government.
Across Europe, similar signs show warming relations with Israel, at least on the political and institutional levels.
Last month, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Israel in what both sides deemed a turning point in bilateral relations.
In October, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was received warmly in Britain when he visited 10 Downing St.
And for the first time in 25 years, France has a president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants to make the country’s foreign policy friendlier toward Israel.
“I cannot recall a time when there has been such a positive flurry of diplomatic exchange between Israel and Europe,” said Arye Mekel, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Many diplomats and analysts say Europe-Israeli relations are in a new era of growing cooperation and understanding following years of mistrust and recrimination.
“Relations have improved and matured substantially in recent years,” said Ran Curiel, Israel’s ambassador to the 27-country European Union in Brussels.
The improvement in ties is a consequence of quietly enhanced economic cooperation, the EU’s expansion to include unabashedly pro-Israel countries from the former Eastern bloc such as Poland and the Czech Republic, and the replacement of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat with the more tractable Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PA.
Still, public opinion across Europe, according to polls and media reports, continues to cast Israel in an unfavorable light. This is evident in the negative media coverage of Israel during the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, stepped-up criticism of Israel by European nongovernmental organizations and British trade union calls for boycotts of Israeli goods and academics.
“The media and church institutions since 2000 have tended to adopt a position which suggests people don’t support Israel’s right to defend itself, which means they don’t support its right to exist,” said Robin Shepherd, a senior fellow at Chatham House, a London think tank.
“What is still missing is to correct the [public’s] image of Israel,” said the secretary-general of the European Jewish Congress, Serge Cwajgenbaum. “The image is still unbalanced.”
On the governmental level, however, ties between Europe and Israel appear to be at a high point.
Some examples: European governments across the continent are holding celebrations for Israel’s 60th birthday.
Israel trusts Europe to train PA security forces and oversee the international funding of the PA.
Germany plays a key role lobbying for European support for Israel. The British government has proven to be a staunch ally of Israel, domestic criticism of its policy notwithstanding.
In recent years, Israel has gained many trade and aid benefits associated with EU membership due to the adoption in 2005 of the union’s European Neighborhood Policy.
One-third of Israeli exports last year went to the EU. Plans call for Israeli cooperation in the European space agency, and the sharing of intelligence is rising.
Such ties once were linked to Israeli progress in the peace process. That’s no longer the case, Curiel says.
“You don’t hear calls for sanctions against Israel anymore every time there is a disagreement about Israeli policy,” he said.
This is a relatively new development. European politicians weaned on the milk of post-WW II rapprochement long have castigated Israeli military operations viewed by Israeli officials as vital to survival.
During the early years of the second intifada, which began in 2000, EU External Affairs Minister Chris Patten consistently harangued Israeli leaders over the country’s targeted assassinations of Palestinian terrorists, the West Bank security fence and Jewish settlement growth.
Europe wasn’t always tilted against Israel. In the early years of the state, when Israel was seen as the underdog, it found friends and arms suppliers in Europe.
That changed following the 1967 Six Day War.
“This is partly ideology, and partly oil, as Arabs were threatening to turn off the spigot,” said Jonathan Rynhold, a professor of political science at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Israeli-European discord worsened when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.
“Whatever is left of the image of plucky little democratic Israel, darling of the left, becomes to some the big bully Israel, the brutal occupying country,” Rynhold said. “The first intifada, starting in 1987, just magnified this negative picture.”
Hope emerged during myriad episodes of negotiations, but the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the second intifada sent Israel-Europe ties to a new low.
In 2004, after the International Court of Justice at The Hague condemned the West Bank security fence, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told then-EU Council Secretary-General Javier Solana that the court must think “Jewish blood is cheap.”
Sharon also called the EU, which had backed the court’s conclusion, biased against Israel.
But the ensuing few years changed the tenor of the relationship significantly.
In 2004 and 2007, the EU extended membership to 11 post-communist countries that are notably more pro-American and pro-Israel than older EU members.
These countries, associating inaction with appeasement and noting their suffering under the Soviets, don’t share Western Europe’s aversion to Israeli military actions.
In Madrid in 2004 and in London the next year, deadly terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists gave European leaders a better sense of what Israel was facing.
Perhaps most important, Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 dispelled the European conception that Israel is unwilling to make sacrifices for peace.
“Israel’s formal acceptance of the two-state solution cemented a new, closer understanding between top-level Israeli and European politicians,” Curiel said.
But many European politicians remain upset about Israeli settlement activity and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, according to the vice president of the European Parliament, Britain’s Edward McMillon Scott.
“If Israel can pull out of Gaza, Israel can pull out of the occupied territories,” he told JTA.
Some other sticking points remain. The EU refuses to label Lebanon’s Hezbollah a terrorist organization, EU funds go to anti-Israel nongovernmental organizations, and Israel wants Europe to do more to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Still, Israeli diplomats say their concerns are at least being heard, if not addressed.
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Rabbis: Athletes should go; tourists, not
By RON KAMPEAS
JTA
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A large group of rabbis spanning Judaism’s religious movements says it has an answer to the vexing question of how to send China an Olympic-sized message without harming the interests of athletes or Israel.
In an appeal issued April 30 and timed for last week’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah, 185 Jewish leaders — mostly clergy — appealed to Jews not to attend the Beijing Olympics this summer as tourists.
The next day, the Anti-Defamation League rejected the boycott call and said comparisons the clergy statement made to the 1936 Berlin Olympics were inappropriate.
China is the principal power propping up the regime in Sudan, where government-allied militias have murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the civil war in the Darfur region. It is also cracking down harshly on independence movements in Tibet.
Jewish groups have played a disproportionate and lead role in drawing Western attention to the Darfur killings.
Yet deciding whether to confront China, which enjoys thriving trade with Israel, presents a more complicated set of issues than attempting to isolate Sudan, a poor country that does not want relations with the Jewish state.
Also complicating matters is that the US and Israel have recently scored modest successes in getting China to join the effort to isolate Iran until it ends its suspected nuclear weapons program.
The appeal is cast narrowly, organizers said, as a way around such dilemmas that other groups and nations have faced in determining how to confront the Chinese over human rights abuses while not harming athletes and national interests.
“There’s a difference between doing business, which is a necessity, and spending discretionary income on sports, which gives a country legitimacy that’s doing a number of very bad things that Jews should be sensitive to,” said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the head of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue, who was a coordinator of the statement.
Lookstein and another Orthodox organizer of the petition, Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, the former chairman of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, saw an opportunity when they learned that China was preparing a kosher kitchen for the Olympics. The outreach to Jewish religious needs struck a chord.
“Beijing’s authorization of the creation of a kosher kitchen at the Olympics village is apparently intended to help attract Jewish tourists to the games, as part of its broader strategy of improving its image and deflecting attention from its complicity in severe human rights abuses at home and abroad,” the statement said.
“Jews should not be party to the whitewashing of such a regime, kosher kitchen or no kosher kitchen. Regimes that practice or enable oppression, terrorism or genocide are not kosher.”
The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which took part in preparing the statement, noted that Germany used the 1936 Olympics to help create the false impression of secure Jewish communities and thereby diminish American awareness of the impending Nazi threat.
“Having endured the bitter experience of abandonment by our presumed allies during the Holocaust, we feel a particular obligation to speak out against injustice and persecution today,” the statement said.
“We remember all too well that the road to Nazi genocide began in the 1930s with Hitler’s efforts to improve the public image of his evil regime.
“Nazi Germany sought to attract visitors to the 1936 Olympics in order to distract attention from its persecution of the Jews.
“Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, called the 1936 Games ‘a victory for the German cause.’ We dare not permit today’s totalitarian regimes to achieve such victories.”
The ADL statement rejected such parallels.
“We believe that these comparisons are inappropriate,” its statement said. “China is a complicated society that is changing and opening up in many ways, and one simply cannot equate the Beijing Olympics with those games in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.”
Greenberg said the offensive aspect of preparing the kosher kitchen was in using the appeal as a means to subvert opposition to China’s human rights abuses.
“They’re trying to use providing kosher food as a way of building up the Olympics,” he said.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, said the rabbis’ statement is “an appeal to individuals, not an appeal to the government of Israel.”
Yoffie noted that Israel is a small nation that has had to balance geopolitical realities with compelling moral matters.
“This is a moral appeal to Jewish individuals around the world,” he said.
Organizers said they also did not want to harm athletes.
The wholesale US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics is now considered a failure that hampered athletic careers more than it moved the Soviet Union to change its Afghanistan policies.
Appealing to rabbis to sign as individuals circumvented the difficult questions that would arise if Jewish organizations were involved.
The organizers did not approach Jewish groups, although they hoped that some would sign on. The American Jewish Congress has signed.
The ADL in rejecting the boycott call said, “While there is no doubt that China has an extremely poor human rights record and that its actions in Tibet and Sudan are to be condemned, we believe that asking the Jewish community to engage in a boycott of the games could be counterproductive and would not produce any tangible result.”
Greenberg and Lookstein lined up other Orthodox notables to sign on, including Rabbi Norman Lamm, the chancellor of Yeshiva University; Rabbi Dov Linzer, the dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a rabbinical school in New York City, and David Bernstein, the dean of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Israel.
They were joined by the leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, as well as dozens of rabbis across the US and Canada.
Some organizations have gone even further, asking for government action.
Earlier this month at least three groups — the Reform movement; the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an advocacy umbrella organization bringing together national groups and local communities; and the American Jewish World Service, — called on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics, a high-profile step that would not harm athletes.
Bush spokesmen say he plans to attend, although they emphatically do not rule out a change of heart.
Hadar Susskind, the JCPA’s Washington director, welcomed the rabbis’ statement but wondered about its effectiveness.
“I don’t know how useful that is as a real lever to get China to change its practices,” he said.
Rabbi Joel Meyers, the executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, said he hoped the call would resonate beyond Jewish tourists but doubted it would.
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