By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — It’s a powerful call, but is it helpful?
What are the logical and moral equations attendant to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s now repeated appeal for European Jews to quit their homes in Europe and “come home” to Israel? Certainly, the plea resonates on some levels in terms of the Jewish national memory. But is it true to the blood and anguish in that memory or do Netanyahu’s entreaties represent so much opportunism?
As with most things, the answer is somewhere in between. But it must be noted that neither Israel nor Netanyahu created the dreadful context for this discussion. If all were peaceful in Europe, if Jews were not being gunned down in their delis, synagogues, and around their homes in France, Denmark, Belgium, and elsewhere, there would be no setting for this argument.
The new, heinous, and deeply frightening pattern repeated itself in Copenhagen this weekend: the radical Muslim murder of a free speech advocate committed during a public rally was immediately followed by the shooting death of a Jewish guard protecting a city synagogue. The parallels to the Charlie Hebdo / Jewish deli massacres were obvious and spectral—police openly made the comparison.
It’s only been 70 years since Auschwitz and it takes a long time to bury six million people. We Jews have no apologies for what our nemeses and enemies dismiss as our “paranoia.” This is the most alarming cycle of anti-Semitic violence since Himmler and Hitler and their millions of willing partners were fast-pacing their genocide into a European factory industry.
That said, is the situation equivalent to 1939 and should Israel be openly pushing French, Danish, German, and other European Jewish citizens to abandon their homes, leave their businesses, separate from dear ones, renounce their nationalities and go fleeing to Israel?
I say, why should anyone be put out because the leaders of Israel make the invitation? Is the oratory changing anyone’s situation other than providing European Jewry—the collective victims of 1000 years of torture, barbarism, pogroms, and genocide, a hopeful option? Is it not a form of anti-Semitic contempt to resent the Jews’ ability to even offer an alternative to the status quo predicament of formal, continental racialism?
The question should more aptly be: what would things have been like if there had been an Israel in, say, 1933, when Adolf Hitler and his gang of thug-terrorists took over Germany and openly proclaimed their intensions to cleanse Europe of its Jews? At that time, that dark and now irretrievable nightmare of the 20th century, no leader of any nation made a similar suggestion or offered a comparable fig leaf of faith.
The United States did not—it actually turned away damned refugee ships. Canada was reticent, France cooperated, Denmark equivocated, Belgium was mute, Holland ripped out the pages of Anne Frank’s diary, Russia fought the Nazis while leaving its Jews exposed, and Italy bent under the liturgical, collaborative sins of its resident Pope.
So a few democratically-inspired words from the singular state of Jews in this world should not get as much attention as they do. Israel should invite as many Jews as it can even while the Jews—the vast majority of whom will remain loyal indigenous citizens of Hitler’s former Nazi caliphate—will stay put. But they will have the one thing no other sympathetic nation could ever offer—an option.
*
Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. Your signed comment may be posted in the space provided below or sent to ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com