PRAGUE — As governments, Jewish communities and Israeli embassies across Europe prepare to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday, a cadre of Israel critics is making a push to be heard.
Muslim organizations across Europe are expected to mark the day as the anniversary of the Nakba — the Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” commonly used to refer to Israel’s independence and subsequent displacement of Palestinian Arabs.
“We expect some kind of demonstration in every European capital,” said Majed Bamya, the assistant to the director of the PA mission to the European Union in Brussels.
Jewish groups critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian-populated territories and treatment of the Palestinians also are planning public events to promote their viewpoints.
“We are definitely going to see more events for Israel at 60 by our supporters,” said Max Wieselmann, a Dutch board member of the anti-occupation group European Jews for a Just Peace.
Despite such activity, pro-Israel celebrations still will dominate in Europe on the anniversary of the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
Aside from state-sponsored tributes to Israel by top government leaders, Jewish groups are organizing a host of gala events.
They include parades in London and Manchester in June, an open-air concert in Paris and numerous communal celebrations in Germany.
“The vast majority of Jewish events in Germany this year are celebrating the birthday of the State of Israel — more than 95%,” said Stephan Kramer, the secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Observers do not expect this year’s anniversary to galvanize larger than usual pro-Palestinian protests for Israel’s Independence Day, and certainly not larger protests than those that surrounded last year’s 40th anniversary of Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, event organizers said.
But the Israel 60 celebrations are prompting some groups to organize alternative ways to mark Israel’s Independence Day for those with more ambivalent feelings about the nation.
“The majority of Jews in Europe who think about Israel want to participate in events that celebrate this anniversary,” said Tony Lehrman, the director of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, but “there is a far more significant sector now than before that feels there is nothing to celebrate.”
In Holland, the group, A Different Jewish Voice, is marking the anniversary by inviting eight Israeli peace activists to a May 7 forum in Amsterdam and a speaking tour of the country. Its website says the group “tries to broaden the public debate in the Netherlands about the Middle East conflict and its still one-sided pro-Israel approach.”
The invited activists include Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a founder of the International Committee on Education and Occupation who lost her daughter in a suicide bombing; Esther Goldenberg of Zochrot, which educates the Israeli public about the 1948 Palestinian exodus; and representatives of Combatants for Peace, ex-Israeli soldiers and ex-Palestinian combatants seeking nonviolent solutions to the conflict.
In Germany, Israel’s strongest European ally, Jewish groups critical of the country’s support for Israel joined with Muslim and Christian protesters outside the Federal Chancellery on the eve of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Jerusalem last month. About 80 protesters turned up.
Organizers for a similar event planned for May 15 include supporters of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace and a German Palestinian group.
Palestinians also expect to hold a Nakba demonstration May 14 at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, which could attract thousands.
In Britain, a coalition of pro-Palestinian organizations led by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a “Free Palestine” event May 10 in Trafalgar Square. Last year the same coalition organized a rally that drew thousands to the square for a protest of 40 years of Israeli occupation since 1967.
Organizations supporting the demonstration include British trade unions, anti-war groups, Islamists and a Jewish-Marxist association.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission is putting on a conference at the Islamic Centre of England, a group closely associated with the Iranian government, on “Human Rights and Israel.”
A description of the May 6 conference reads: “2008 sees the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of Israel. This conference discusses the conflicting paths of these projects.”
Calls for boycotts — one of the most widely practiced forms of protest in Europe against Israeli policies — have become a rallying cry at Israel 60 events in Paris and Turin, Italy.
Arab writers led by the Swiss-Egyptian academic Tariq Ramadan launched a boycott last month of the Paris book fair, which honored Israel and was opened by its president, Shimon Peres.
Arab intellectuals and pro-Palestinian Italians from the political left and right have called for a boycott of the Turin Book Fair, where Israel is the featured country.
Among the top Israeli authors scheduled to attend the May 7-12 event are A.B. Yehoshua, Meir Shalev, Sami Michael and Aharon Appelfeld, who will present the keynote address opening the fair.
In France, several groups will descend upon the Parc des Expositions in Paris May 17 for Peace Like Palestine — an event consisting of debates, films and exhibits focusing on 60 years of the Palestinian experience.
Left-wing Jewish groups are among the event’s sponsors.
The Union of French Jews for Peace held a seminar series last month devoted to Israel’s 60th called “Memory or Amnesia?”
Speakers included Amira Hass, the Ramallah-based journalist for Ha’aretz, as well as the revisionist Zionist historian Avi Shlaim.
Ruth Fruchtman, a Jewish Berliner who plans to participate in events criticizing Israel for its human rights record, said she began openly criticizing Israel in 1982 when Israeli officials were found to have enabled a massacre of Palestinians by Christian troops in Lebanon.
“Since then, their treatment of the Palestinians has become barbaric,” Fruchtman said of the Israelis. “I have lost most of my sympathy for Israel; I would like to see it change its behavior.”
Wieselmann, of European Jews for a Just Peace, said it’s important for Jews outside of the mainstream supporters of Israel to express their viewpoints on the Jewish state.
“We are still a minority,” he said, “although a vocal one.”
RETURN TO
THE TOP
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.
RETURN TO THE TOP
Munich: face to face
with evil . . . but never blinking
By CHRIS LEPPEK
IJN Assistant Editor
Sixty-one years ago, in the ruins of a war-ravaged city, Dr. Donald Seldin came literally face-to-face with evil, and didn’t blink.
The year was 1947.
The place was Munich.
The evil was personified in the form of a Nazi physician who had conducted dozens of liver biopsies on healthy prisoners in the infamous Dachau death camp, killing many of them in the process.
Seldin, although still a young man of 27, had been called as an expert witness in the Munich tribunal of Nazi doctors.
At the time a US Army captain in the Medical Corps, holding the position of chief of medical service at the Munich-based 98th General Hospital, he was cross-examined by the Nazi doctor himself, who acted as his own lawyer.
The defendant-lawyer tried to establish that there were legitimate medical reasons for conducting the lethal biopsies at Dachau; that they were somehow elevated above the monstrous examples of Nazi quack science which other Reich doctors had conducted.
Cool, calm and already professionally knowledgeable about the human liver and the contemporaneous science associated with it, Seldin answered every question put to him by the Nazi.
In answer after answer, he told the court that there was no possible therapeutic value associated with such procedures — that they constituted war crimes of the worst order.
The court was convinced by Seldin. The Nazi lost the case and was, as Seldin would say years later, “appropriately punished.”
Seldin, who went on to a brilliant medical career, including a decades-long tenure at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School (where four of his students would earn Nobel Prizes), considers the Munich trial a pivotal point in his life.
It reinforced, he told the IJN last week, a personal interest in biomedical ethics that had already started before WW II, and strengthened and clarified that interest throughout his long and illustrious career.
His lifelong interest and expertise in the subject was well illustrated in Denver last week, as Seldin conducted the inaugural lecture and led a panel discussion for the Holocaust in contemporary bioethics program at CU’s Center for Bioethics & Humanities.
Speaking to the IJN after the presentations, Seldin indicated that while knowing the difference between right and wrong is crucial for the entire human race, it is even more critical — and considerably more complex — for doctors, who are entrusted with the ultimate power of life and death.
Nothing showed that more clearly, and horrifically, than the Holocaust.
Seldin, who served in Germany from 1946-48, knew well before going to Europe what had happened at Dachau and the other death camps, including the often fatal experiments and questionable procedures carried out by Nazi doctors.
He is modest now in describing his role as an expert witness at Munich, claiming that most American doctors had already returned to the States by 1947, resulting in his appearance in court, despite his age.
Still, he had already done extensive work in internal medicine and was prepared when the defendant Nazi led him through a series of tough questions on liver procedures.
“I was able to answer his questions,” Seldin says 61 years later, “because I had a good background.”
The testimony during that portion of the trial was highly technical, about medical procedures, and didn’t delve into the ethical dimensions of what the Nazi doctor had done, since the court had already established parameters, Seldin says.
If the work of the Dachau physician had any medical value or hope for therapeutic result, then murder charges against the physician would be dropped. If no such medical value could be established, the murder charges would stand.
Seldin’s testimony that liver biopsies on healthy persons had no such practical value was instrumental in the court’s ultimate decision to convict the Nazi physician of multiple murders.
There is a bit of irony in the nature of his testimony, Seldin reflects. Although he had been interested in philosophy and medical ethics before joining the Army, his testimony in Munich — arguably, one of the last century’s most crucial examinations of medical ethics — was limited to the hard science of medical knowledge.
Today, however, he is more than willing to debate some of the ethical implications that were raised by Nazi medical practices.
Seldin is asked whether the data collected by Nazi doctors — without the patients’ consent and very possibly at the cost of patients’ lives — should be used in modern medicine if the medical impact of that data was established to be very valuable.
“We have to be very careful about that,” he replied after giving the question a moment’s thought. “That’s a tricky question.
“In other words, suppose a Nazi doctor had discovered the cure for tuberculosis or cancer and done it in a perfectly illegal, immoral, vicious way. Should the results be used?
“I think that’s benefit analysis. If the thing that he discovered was trivial, I would ignore it. But if it’s of monumental benefit to mankind, I would use it because the benefits outweigh, in a certain sense, the recognition that this discovery was done in perfectly immoral ways.”
From an ethical perspective, therefore, Seldin concludes that it’s quite fortunate that virtually all of the medical research conducted under Nazi authority produced “absolutely worthless” results.
It’s difficult to weigh on an ethical scale the atrocities of Nazi medicine against virtually anything happening in the medical profession today, Seldin acknowledges.
“I don’t think anything unique can be drawn now, that I know of. Informed consent is well in place. Institutional review boards are well in place. Monitoring is well in place.”
But that doesn’t mean that modern medicine cannot learn lessons from the darkest days of Nazi medicine.
Seldin feels that modern physicians — in some ways, like the German physicians of the 1940s — are facing ethical challenges not from within the medical profession but from without.
“The thing that impresses me, and which I tried to get across today, was that there is pressure from outside medicine into medicine,” he says. “All sorts of things. Some of them are quite legitimate, but others begin to constrain the ability of the physician reasonably freely to exercise ethical principles.”
One example cited by Seldin has to do with federal mandates on hospitals, and the lack of support to fulfill such mandates.
“Supposing I say that you have to treat every patient that comes into your emergency room, on pain of going to jail. And then it turns out that the money I give you is totally inadequate to do that. It puts you in an awkward position.
“How can you function with a full panorama of those requirements, and you have to get rid of that patient because you see a lot of patients? In other words, the social system is imposing certain constraints on you, no matter how conscientious you are.”
Taking the question of medical ethics into a broader forum, Seldin is asked whether the modern American health care system can be described as ethical.
Again, he cites influence from outside the realm of medical practitioners.
“A lot of this is in the political domain,” he says.
“I personally feel that the health care system in the United States is a broken system. Not everybody agrees. This is part of the presidential choice we have. It’s very hard in the United States to institute reforms in the health care system that everybody agrees on.”
It is a “social question,” he says, to ask whether the system is ethical.
“Is it ethically justifiable to allow 47 million people to go without health insurance? I would say that’s to be ethically criticized.
“Is it unethical to under-fund emergency rooms all over the place and yet require emergency treatment. I’d say that’s ethically unattractive.
“But these are quasi-social questions,” he says, explaining that issues of medical ethics have to be weighed along with other considerations — how to pay for medical care, for example, and whether increasing insurance or taxes might impact negatively on the very people healthcare reform is meant to help.
“These are complicated questions of social engineering and the American public has not come to any consensus on this.”
Although daunting ethical questions, they do not compare with the black-and-white absolutes characteristic of Nazi medicine. In that case, the influence of the government not only challenged the ethics of the medical profession, it utterly destroyed them.
“The Nazi era says to me that when the government becomes increasingly coercive and threatening, the opportunities for the physician to operate with a full role of medical-ethical principles becomes compromised.”
And that lesson may be needed again, Seldin warns, as medicine moves ever deeper into the complex and largely uncharted territory of genetic research, the drive to eliminate inherited diseases and to “enhance” the human condition through genetic engineering.
New and challenging medical ethical questions have already arisen, and have yet to be settled to the satisfaction of medical practitioners, ethicists and religious leaders:
When does the lack of detectable brain activity justify the withdrawal of life support from a terminally ill patient?
When is it justified to perform an abortion when the presence of a genetic disease has been detected in a fetus still within the uterus?
“It’s very complicated,” Seldin agrees, but hastens to add that he has ultimate trust in the wisdom of humanity, and the medical profession, to arrive at the best ethical conclusions possible on all of these issues.
“We will blunder here and there,” he says, “but I think that there will always be an attempt to get it right.”
“But,” he adds, waving a finger of caution and hard-earned experience, “we should be very careful.”