http://www.jidaily.com/09d4f?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=28801e9a1e-Insider&utm_medium=email
I felt like cheering last week when Avigdor Lieberman told his unelected EU counterpart, Catherine Ashton, to mind her own business.
Irked by the latest Brussels demand on settlements, Israel’s foreign minister pointedly suggested that the EU focus on its own growing problems before lecturing others.
You can see why Eurocrats are happier hectoring Israel than dealing with the euro. But being rude about the Jewish state isn’t simply a displacement activity. Almost every European Parliament session brings a condemnatory resolution, a proposal to restrict trade, or a demand for differential labelling for exports from “occupied Palestine”. Israel sometimes deserves criticism; like all countries, it makes mistakes. But that doesn’t explain the disproportionate focus on a state that is one 30th of the size of the UK.
Some blame antisemitism, some anti-Americanism, some an over-sensitivity to the imagined prejudices of Muslim voters in Europe. There might be a smidgen of truth in these explanations. Yet they all miss the main point. The reason most Euro-enthusiasts resent Israel is that it is the supreme embodiment of the national principle – that is, of the desire of every people to form their own state. For 2,000 years, Jews were scattered and stateless, yet never lost the aspiration for an independent homeland: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Then one day, against all the odds – providentially, even – they fulfilled it.
Eurocrats hate Israel’s success as a nation