http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/08/israel-leper-or-light-unto-the-nations-part-6-europe-loves-jews-just-hates-judaism-and-israel/
See the previous installments of P. David Hornik’s fascinating series:
Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 1: The Whole World Against Us
Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 2: That Bird Could Be a Mossad Agent!
Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 3: From Woodstock to the Promised Land
Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 4: Why Is Israel So Lousy at Making Its Case?
Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 5: Whichever It Is, I’ve Married It
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This summer a total of about 800 Jewish immigrants from France are expected to arrive in Israel. They’re part of a total of about 2500 who are expected to make their way here from France over the course of the year—an increase of 40 percent over last year.
As Sabrina Kozirov, arriving in August with her husband and two teenage daughters, told Israel’s Ynetnews:
The situation in France had become unbearable. There is a large Muslim community and harsh political criticism of Israel. Therefore we preferred to leave.
Her words dovetail with a report by an Israeli institute on the bleak situation of France’s Jews and Europe’s generally, and with a much-read article by French Jewish intellectual Michel Gurfinkiel on the same theme.
Along with the problems Sabrina Kozirov alludes to—the animosity (not infrequently violent) of Muslim populations and an intense anti-Israeli atmosphere generally—many of the European countries have been banning or trying to ban kosher slaughter and even circumcision, a Jewish practice going back to Abraham’s time in the Book of Genesis.
The attempt to “rebuild Jewish life” in post-Holocaust Europe was, of course, problematic from the start. A continent that could have produced the Holocaust could not, realistically, have been expected to make an abrupt about-face and become Jew-friendly. But the form European antisemitism now takes—particularly the animus against Israel—is not without some striking ironies.
The Zionist ideology that produced the state of Israel took a dim view of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky warned that the Jews of Europe were in grave danger and should get out before it was too late. Zionism also embraced the doctrine of shlilat ha-Golah—negation of the Diaspora, positing that even in countries that were Jew-friendly, Jews would disappear quietly through assimilation.
But while Zionism was all too right about the dangers of antisemitism, it was not necessarily right in its diagnosis of it.
As many Zionist thinkers saw it, the Jewish state in the Land of Israel would not only be a refuge from antisemitism, but the solution for it. Antisemitism, in this view, arose from the anomaly of Jewish life in the Exile, dispersed among other peoples. Once Jews became a “normal” people in their own state, antisemitism would wither on the vine.