Europe’s Disgrace

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 08, 2024

 

Today, the world’s sole Jewish state is the recipient of the civilized world’s gratitude.

 

European Union president Ursula von der Leyen is “outraged by last night’s vile attacks targeting Israeli citizens in Amsterdam.” The conscience of the Netherlands’ King Willem-Alexander is similarly shocked: “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.” French president Emmanuel Macron lamented that “the violence against Israeli citizens in Amsterdam recalls history’s darkest hours,” and he promised to “continue to fight against heinous antisemitism.”

 

The humiliation on display was mitigated only by Israeli efforts to spare Europe from presiding helplessly over an even greater atrocity. The clearly organized and pre-planned pogrom against Israeli soccer fans in town to see Maccabi Tel Aviv play Ajax Amsterdam was already a violent and terrifying atrocity when Jerusalem dispatched rescue planes to the Netherlands to save the imperiled Israelis that Dutch police either could not or would not protect.

 

While Dutch authorities dithered, Jews were physically attacked, forced to deny their religious identity to escape a threatened beating, and made to mouth anti-Zionist slogans. Between 20 and 30 people were injured in the mêlée, five of whom were hospitalized. Sixty-two individuals were arrested in connection with the violence.

 

Europe’s disgrace is a sobering reminder of why Israel exists in the first place, but the supposed appreciation the continent has mustered for Israel’s intervention rings hollow. What do Europe’s Brahmins think Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran but executing the very same imperative?

 

Much as it scrambled to protect its citizens last night, Israel was forced to defend its people at a time and place that was not of its choosing when Hamas’s genocidaires and pogromists cascaded over Gaza’s border last year. The ancient ethnic hatred that played out on Amsterdam’s streets — a spectacle apparently perpetrated by non-native Middle Eastern transplants to the Netherlands — is the same that yielded the unspeakable barbarities that unfolded on October 7, 2023.

 

Israel gets a hearty pat on the back from Europe when it is saving them from having to confront their own laxity, but it is subject to withering scorn when it saves Jews from the ravages of the terrorists in league with Iran. But the distinctions that allow Eurocrats to praise Israel on one hand and scold it on the other are so fine they can only be sustained by motivated reasoning.

 

Israel’s mission is to save the Jews from the irrational hatreds that have hounded them from antiquity. Europe sees more virtue in the passive airlifting of victimized Jews than it does in the active neutralization of the terrorists who would torture and slaughter them in the Middle East, but that is another species of antisemitism. It is an outlook that has sympathy for Jews as victims but objects when Jews take command of their own destiny.

 

Europe’s anguished mea culpas should fall on deaf ears. The leaders of Europe created the conditions that led to this stain on the continent’s character, and they observe a double standard that emboldens the antisemitic conspirators who call it home. Spare us your apologies.