Go4Europe: Winning the Battle of the Israeli image in Europe
This is Fiamma Nirenstein' speech during the annual Go4Europe conference, Tel Aviv, March 15, 2010.
Organized by Cukierman Investment House Ltd. and Catalyst Fund, Go4Europe is one of the most prestigious conferences in Israel bringing together more than 700 people & organizations coming from the business and investment community focusing on Europe. Traditionally, Go4Europe is addressing the current issues of establishing strategic alliances and raising funds in Europe.
When I try to describe to myself how I see Israel perceived in Europe, two completely contradictory images come to mind.
On one hand, I see the huge square table where I attended the Conference of Coordination and Development of Italy and Israel relations at the end of November, in preparation for our bilateral meetings from the 1st to the 3rd of February. That was when Berlusconi visited Israel and when we signed many bi-lateral agreements.
The Italian delegation included many representatives of ministers, regional representatives, and senior members of Italy’s economic and financial establishment. The Italian delegation was deeply impressed by willingness of the Israelis to collaborate in so much areas of mutual interest. The Israelis included important members of the Israeli scientific and technological facilities, ENEL new relationships with MATIMOP (renewable energies), CNR with Tel Aviv University collaboration on neuroscience, Lens with Weitzmann on spectroscopy.
In the discussions, the Italian representatives of the businessmen reported that they decided to establish a fixed platform that will work with the help of banks on agricultural, business, and environmental issues.
Let me turn to the impressions the Israelis made on the Italians. A member of Italy’s Space Organization that builds satellites with Israel, explained to me that Israel has a unique problem in launching space satellites: given how the world turns on its axis, we naturally launch satellites towards the east. But Israel cannot do this because the Arab countries – i.e., Israel’s neighbors to the east – don’t want Israel to use its skies. So Israel had to figure out a way to launch satellites backwards – no easy task. The Italian woman then smiled and added that Israelis see problems as challenges and march full speed ahead. It is such a pleasure to work with the Israeli because of their skill and enthusiasm, she said.
On the other hand, I see myself at the Council of Europe Assembly listening to Greeks, French, British, and Turkish representatives spewing forth hate and prejudice regarding Israel’s actions during the Gaza war. They call the Jewish state apartheid state, they said the attack to Gaza was “collective punishment” conducted with unrelenting and willing ferociousness toward women and children, they spoke of war crimes.
Now, though it seems impossible to believe, I hear that the European Union has endorsed the Goldstone report, and that the Conference of the Foreign Ministers of the EU meeting in Finland has blamed Israel for almost everything imaginable. (For example, the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said that it’s now up for Israel to demonstrate its desire for peace, but that at the moment he is very pessimist about it.) Moreover, the visit of the new Foreign Minsiter Minister of the EU Mrs Ashton starting on Wednesday is already a rebuke in itself, and even a threat, if Israel doesn’t comply with the international expectations.
There is a huge gap between these two attitudes towards Israel. Unfortunately the latter negative one is the one which permeates the European media and declarations by politicians. Their view is shared by important clerics, trade union leaders, university professors, journalists, commentators, Nobel laureates like Saramago and Dario Fo, and by representatives of the world of culture and art.
European politicians have gone out of their way to parade their “anti-Israeliness”. For example, during Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006, Italy’s then Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema marched in solidarity with Hezbollah in the streets of Beirut. Afterwords, during the war of Gaza, he kept up his anti-Israel diatribe, talking about Israel’s so-called “massacre of children,” Israel’s “punitive expedition,” etc. etc.. But he is no longer Italy’s Foreign Minister and our country has abandoned that unjust approach to Israel.
Other European countries have unfortunately continued D’Alema’s anti-Israel policies. Belgium, for example, enacted a law regarding universal jurisdiction aimed primarily at Israel. The law covers the so-called war crimes, the targeting of civilians, the wall Israel built to keep its population safe, extra judicial killings, and Israel’s policy regarding settlements… Some time ago with a Youtube video widely circulated (the net is one of the most effective antisraeli media), Hermann Diekers, the chairman of the Left Party in Duisburg, a city in North Westfalia with 500thousand inhabitants, termed Israel right to exist as petty, justified Palestinians attacks against civilians and played down the severity of the Holocaust. I quote him because its’ quite common in Europe to hear this kind of statements in local councils, trade unions, and connecting the right of Israel to exist with doubts about the Shoah. It became fashionable after Ahmadinejad made it a public discourse through the UN assemblies where he spoke and was applauded.
The basis of general condemn is the refusal of putting each the antisraeli issues in their historical contest. The European have refused to recognize that most of the contemporary problems in the conflict are born in the Arab culture of hatred that generated so many wars, in the violent attacks against the Jewish state, the Arab willingness to use civilians – especially little children - as human shields. The Europeans refuse to recognize that this is an asymmetric war, the same that puts terrible questions to all the armies of the western world.
A powerful media campaign to deny the legitimate existence of the state of Israel takes place everyday in Europe, and because it’s sponsored by the most important subject, the VIP, in Europe and world wide, it’s extremely influent.
But the last “apartheid week” in the universities would not have mattered to me so much had I not met personally with Mrs. Pillay, the High Commissioner of the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council. She told me that the reason 27 of the HRC’s 31 resolutions condemned Israel since it started its work in 2006, is clear: “We had two main problems, she said, South Africa used to be an Apartheid State. Israel is an Occupier State. South Africa abandoned apartheid, is therefore no longer is condemned by the “International Council.” When Israel stops being an “Occupier State,” it too will no longer be condemned. Implicit here, is that, with a patently false analogy, she identifies the sins of apartheid South Africa with those of Israel, a patently false analogy. They bare no relationship to the reality on the ground.
Here we came to the main point: reality is what identifies the relations inside the scientific and business community, ideology is the trade mark of the political and cultural community.
The malevolent statements have become mantras. These European use words such as “disproportionate, apartheid, and apartheid wall, have become favorite jabs. They enter the mind of simple people just because of the authority of their origin.
A few days ago I heard someone of the radio say that he didn’t understand why there was such a fuss about Iran, because we do not know for sure that Iran is building an atomic bomb, and that the Iranian government threats to wipe Israel off the maps are only meaningless words. What we do know, he said, is that the Israelis kill a huge number of Palestinians, particularly children.
All of these baseless accusations share a common intention – delegitimization of the state of Israel. No other country is talked about in such terms that delegitimize its mere existence. But this happens only in Europe and in the third world, not in the US. This is because the aggressive anti-Israel discourse resonates in the mainstream in the western European media. It does not, for the most part, resonate in the US or in the former Communist eastern European countries.
Why does Europe dislike Israel so much? Because Europe has a sense of guilt vis-à-vis the Jews because of the Holocaust. So by finding reasons to blame Israel, it believes it can assuage its guilt. After all, if Israel is an occupier that wants to dominate its neighbors, if it kills Palestinians, then it is no better than those forces which were part of us which inflicted the worst evil on the Jews 60-65 years ago.
Also, we Europeans have a sense of guilt because of European colonialism. By helping the poor Palestinians, so the logic goes, we rid ourselves of that guilt as well.
Moreover, we Europeans have difficulty accepting war as a means of defending western values. Are we even prepared to defend Western values against those forces hostile to us? For example, Europeans were asked whether there was ever a good reason to wage war: In France only, 33% said yes; in Spain 25%, Italy 35%, Britain 69%. Contrast this with the US – 82%.
In European eyes, all this makes Israel an unnecessary danger to Europe’s well-being. As a former French ambassador to the UK said at a dinner party in London, “This shitty little country – i.e., Israel - will bring us all to war.”
Ignorance is a shield against responsability. On another front, we have seen both Prodi and Solana trying to stop the diffusion of European studies and polls about anti-Semitism. And as it doesn’t want to know about antisemitism, that is nowadays again a very serious danger in Europe, Europe doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know about the reality, the context and the development of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It does not what to hear about the Arab refusal, since 1948, to recognize Israel as a Jewish State, or to accept any type of territorial solution.
European political and intellectuals refuse to recognize reality when it comes to Israel, and this brings to a series of prejudices that become common discourse day after day.
Compare this is with the actual experiences that the above-mentioned Italian “Table of coordination” had with their Israeli counterparts and you get a completely different picture.
How do you “square the circle” here? How do you bridge the gap between the completely different approaches? Reality is the answer: when the European elite understands the contest of the Israeli questions, that could be a starting point for winning the battle of public opinion, at least among people of good will.
First of all Israelis should not mince words when talking about the peace process or about Israel’s enemies. European expectations regarding the peace process including the ability of Israel to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute by giving up territory territories are the source of the constant blame Israel suffers. Israel should also not be shy about mentioned the Islamist demonization of Israel.
Look at the present story of apartments in Jerusalem, in Givat Shlomo. Would the Palestinians accept a partition of Jerusalem if the 1600 units were not built? Would it really change their perception of Jerusalem as an occupied city? History (Arafat with Barak, Abu Mazen with Olmert) teaches us that the solution is at much in Palestinian hands as in Israeli hands. But Europe refuses to accept this. And Israel tries to get away from the painful task of explaining how difficult it is to live in this region. It hesitates talking about the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; it refuses to deal with the Palestinian media which calls on its people to die as martyrs for Jerusalem, and indoctrinates its children to hate Jews.
Israel must not be afraid of speaking the truth; It must not fear describing its hateful and uncompromising enemies as they are. Israelis must be more explicit on the existential threats it faces from Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
Until now, the Italian parliament has been an oasis of good work: We have been undertaken a lot of initiatives, a list of which I will distribute to all of you. What we have attempted to do is to help propagate acceptance of the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and to explain the context of its policies.
It is no coincidence that we in Italy started our work with a conference on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. We continued with a big pro-Israel demonstration with Israeli flags in front of the Italian Parliament, which included the Italian President and a completely bipartisan parliamentary presence. We created institutions, organized conferences and produced days of study inside the parliament to explain and discuss the situation and the different issues. These resulted in the government of Italy both not attending the Durban II conference and voting against the Goldstone report. All the culminated in the marvelous visit of Berlusconi here.
All has been accompanied by an unrelenting work about Iran.
My experience today says that where there is knowledge and good sense, there can be advancement, that there are people from all the political sides that mostly since Iran has practically demonstrates that hate and threat against Israel conjugates with danger and threat for the all the world, there are people that are willing to join Israel, to understand that good relations with Israel is first all good relations with ourselves. I think basically that the ability of Europe to come closer to Israel is its possibility, that is there if we help it to develop, to overcome, as Pope Benedictus the XVI said, its “strange lack of desire for the future” its “ideological exhaustion that Europe is suffering of”.
Europe, either it will admit it or not (doesn’t admit it of course) is the cradle of a hard to die and even growing anti-Semitism…and last but certainly not least is certainly very sensitive by an extremely controversial relationship with a growing muslim presence: this presence, if you look at England, on the Netherland, or Sweden, becomes more and more identified with an extremist Islamist discourse in which the Jewish state is the object of unremitting demonology.
We can also briefly notice that Europe is here and there finally understanding and fighting with lows the return to middle age of the European banlieus, where you can find more and more jihab and burka, sexual mutilation, polygamy and family violence against girls and women, and where shaaria tribunals are raising.
You all know that many other particulars add to the European landscape of harsh reality for Israel and the Jews, far from the ideal world of science, art, music, finance business where you can enjoy and imagine how good the relationshisp with Israel can be if they are simply created on reality an not on ideology.
Overcoming this gap is therefore our task, your task. People that work in the world of reality must come together with the one striving for Israel’s image in the world of ideology. Leave the golden castle, tha Gan Eden and let’s join together. This is for our sake, the sake of Europe, for your sake, the sake of practical relationship, the sake of Israel, and in general, for the sake of a modern and peaceful world.