Geneva, Brussels and Hague: Europe puts Israel under siege
By Giulio Meotti. Source L'espresso February 14, 2020.
The United Nations Human Rights Council lies in Geneva, the diplomatic Versailles. In the lakeside city, the presence of the UN Palais des Nations is massive and imposing in the richness of its great history, the luxury of the sumptuous past, the clamor of public rhetoric and the thousands of officials arriving from five continents who make up a picturesque (and grotesque) crowd.
Thirty meeting rooms, each with materials and decorations from this or that member country. The library houses six hundred thousand volumes. The beautiful twenty-two hectare park was donated by a family of the Geneva patriciate, the Revilliod de la Rive.
In Geneva, Israel has just been indicted by the UN Council. It released a blacklist of more than 100 companies it said are "complicit in violating Palestinian human rights by operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank". It is the first ever attempt by the UN to literally boycott and strangle the economy of a democracy.
Meanwhile in another European city, The Hague, the world's capital of "peace courts", the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will soon launch "a war-crimes investigation into settlement policies". This is the first ever attempt by that failed Court to legally shame and indict the Israeli policies and presence in its Biblical lands. Don't forget that another Hague's Court, the International Court of Justice, already judged as "illegal" the Israeli fence which stopped the stream of Palestinian suicide bombers which killed thousands of Jews.
Last November in another European city, Brussels, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that products made in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria must be specifically labelled as such and may not carry the generic label "Made in Israel".
Europe has become the epicenter of a political and legal war against Israel, because instead of considering Israel's borders like those of the 500 million European citizens, the Jewish State is fighting in the squares of Europe, in the corridors of power in Brussels, in various capitals of Western Europe and the United Nations.
It is not only that. Europe fights Israel also inside the Jewish State by financing many NGOs that call to boycott Israel.
Also, those responsible for the massacre of Israeli citizens are not "terrorists" in the European media, but "militants". The Islamic world uses Europe to wage this war on the Jews.
In Europe's streets – from Paris to Berlin, from Malmö to Amsterdam – Jews are daily attacked and intimidated. Over the past decade, the Old Continent seems having developed a psychological ease in talking about the aggression and the self exile of the Jews. What remains of the Jewish community life in Europe now takes place behind bulletproof doors and barbed wire, and the actual end of the presence of an entire people - whose suffering sinks into a past most terrible in Europe and whose culture is one of the pillars of Europeans - is discussed calmly, almost serenely, certainly with fatalism.
What happened to England to have the first big European politician - Jeremy Corbyn - who questioned Israel's right to exist, who calls Hamas and Hezbollah "friends", laying flower crowns on the graves of the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes in the Olympic Games of Munich? What is happening to Europe? How have are come to believe that Molotov cocktails can be detonated against a synagogue in Gothenburg and Europe stays silent?
Islamic populations in Europe today are encouraged to manifest their anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, legitimated by Europe's journalistic and politician speech which always demonizes Israel, in the name of "human rights". The European Union does not lose an opportunity to manifest in the most insidious and slimy way its enmity towards the State of Israel throughout the international arena. It is definitely alongside the Islamist Ummah and Iran.
After the Second World War, the foundations of Europe had been placed on three fundamental values of Judeo-Christian culture: democracy, human rights and rule of law. These values are also the soul of the modern State of Israel. It is sad to see Europe once again obscured by its ancient hostility towards the Jewish people; now growing again inside it. But this mass anti-Semitic European psychosis has far-reaching symbolic dimensions, which consists in putting Western Europe smack in the face of its biblical origins.
It is a Europe submerged by self-hatred. Its days are numbered.
Giulio Meotti - The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva.