Emanuele Ottolenghi, a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, writing in the December issue of COMMENTARY, recounts this incident:
One evening last spring, the UK branch of Peace Now hosted a debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Taking the Israeli side, ironically enough, was Benny Morris, the pioneer New Historian. . . . Opposing him was Ahmed Khalidi, a Western-educated scion of Palestinian aristocracy and a “moderate” who is willing to negotiate Israel’s demise diplomatically rather than advocating its destruction through violence.
During the question-and-answer period, a frail student stood up to make an impassioned plea. “I want to express my gratitude to you, Dr. Khalidi,” said this young woman, “for your willingness to share Palestine with the Jews as a common patrimony” [as part of Khalidi’s one-state solution].
Such conspicuous, large-hearted charity, the student went on . . . stood in sharp contrast to the miserly approach of Benny Morris, who had insisted on Israel’s right to continue its national existence. “As a Jew,” she concluded her address to Khalidi, “I feel ashamed that your land was taken away from you in my name and that of my ancestors. It is my duty as a Jew to stand up for justice.”
If indeed she stood up in shame, she sat down to thunderous applause.
Ottolengthi writes that European pressure on Jews to renounce identification with, or support for, a Jewish national entity — even the only pluralistic democracy in the region — is part of “an age-old form of anti-Semitism, and one that has always called forth a typical pattern of response on the part of the Jews under scrutiny.”
For most, the choices are to lie low in hopes that the trouble will pass, to pick up and seek life elsewhere, or to resist and oppose to the extent they can. . .
Some, however, take a different route, finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate themselves to whatever is required of them, including to the point of publicly dissociating themselves from their people’s history and fate. As ever with such maneuvers, exculpatory rationalizations must be found, and are readily at hand.
Readers of Kenneth Levin’s monumental new study, “The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege,” will recognize the psychological factors at work, as well as the long trail of historical precedents.
Europe today is a post-Christian society, governed by a self-congratulatory secular humanism that makes universalist human rights demands on all the countries in the Middle East, except those ruled by Islamic or Arabic governments. Unable to defend itself or its civilization, Europe is tough on those on whom it can be.