EU Attitudes to Israel
One of the most peculiar aspects of the Kerry mediation mission was the behavior of the Europeans. The head of the EU’s foreign policy team, Catherine Ashton would pop up on television every once in a while, admonish Israel, and then disappear again. Her appearances at conferences and before the television cameras appeared to be haphazard at best; and the words she spoke were simply clichés, strung together aimlessly—bereft of any signs that she or her advisors had a sophisticated understanding of Middle Eastern culture and political behaviour.
I would have thought that her performance throughout this period would have been the subject of considerable discussion in the European press because it was almost a classic case study of all the problems that the Europeans have had in formulating a joint foreign policy. But that aspect of her work was largely ignored…maybe because it was old hat and merely just another representative example of the internal philosophical and political turmoil that the Europeans have been undergoing.
Clearly, the Europeans could have played a significant role in the peace effort had they chosen to. Europe has any number of levers it can use to influence both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Europe is Israel’s primary export/import market, and the Europeans, as a bloc, are the biggest donors to the Palestinian Authority. Israeli exports to Europe last year totaled 15.2 billion dollars—or 32 percent of all exports. And, all told, Europe has provided half the aid given to the Palestinian side since the Oslo Accords were implemented in 1994—about 7.7 billion dollars.
It is therefore remarkable that the Europeans’ participation in the process was almost entirely restricted to complaining, in ever more strident and even screechy tones, about “the occupation.”
It is worth examining, therefore, why the Europeans wanted to have such a strong presence in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating arena in the first place, and even more so, why they have been unwilling to use the leverage at their disposal to support the American attempts at mediation.
These are not airy-fairy subjects because, over the years, the Europeans have had an influence on other nations’ attitudes to Israel, the Arabs, and the peace process itself.
The attitudes—and I emphasize the plural here—of the Europeans did not simply come out of the blue. They have to be understood in the context of the traumas and upheavals Europe has been going through for a hundred years. People tend to forget that this year marks the hundredth anniversary of World War I…that cataclysmic exercise in self-destruction that undid hundreds of years of European civilization-building.
While some Israelis and many Jews tend to focus on Europe’s long history of anti-Semitism, the European’s approach to Israel and the Middle East is the product of a great many other factors, many of which deserve particular mention.
First, a brief overview.
During the last century, Europe underwent, among other traumas, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and what might be called the dereligiizing and secularization of the continent. By secularization, I am also including the virtual collapse of Marxism, which had as deep and as profound a hold on many Europeans as any religion did.
Over the past fourteen years, the continent has had to cope with the impact of the legal and illegal immigration to European countries of masses of desperate Moslems who do not want to become culturally European; and a financial crisis that has shattered many of the presumptions on which the EU’s common economic policy was based. The evidence that the economic crisis is still growing in intensity was highlighted recently when the European Central Bank decided to impose a negative interest rate on savings in a desperate attempt to get Europeans to spend more and thus boost GDP.
Even more striking, though, is the fact that, even in the face of these threats, Europe has failed to create a new social contract in place of the old ones that have been discarded. And that may also be the key reason for its inability to create a coherent foreign policy. For, in most cases foreign policies are designed either to serve and strengthen a nation’s domestic social contract or to serve as a means for exporting the values on which that contract is based.
The origins of modern European attitudes to anything and everything can be traced to the period between 1955 and 1957. 1955 saw the reemergence of Germany as a country that could be welcomed back into the family of nations after two bloody wars and the Holocaust. 1956 witnessed the Suez invasion and the last gasp of colonialism by Britain and France. And in 1957, the treaty of Rome was signed. It established the framework for what became known as the EEC, or the European Economic Community, the precursor of today’s EU, or European Union.
Each of these events created a considerable amount of political turbulence. When the effects of that disorder are corralled into a single portrait of a continent, the picture that emerges is one of a huge body of people in the midst of intellectual, political, social, economic…and no less importantly, religious…chaos.
In other words, one must always keep in mind that, since the Treaty of Rome was signed, Europe’s problems in forging a single, agreed foreign policy are but one of a whole series of difficulties that the continent has had to face but has failed to resolve.
A central problem the Europeans face is that, in their effort to create a coherent foreign policy, the Europeans have had to confront a whole gamut of special issues found nowhere else in the world.
Guilt, and a desire to escape from feelings of guilt play an oversized role in foreign policy-making. Two outstanding cases were Western Europe’s impotence when Soviet tanks moved into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. That refusal to support neighbouring people who were seeking freedom has been explained away by the argument that there was a no less important need to prevent a nuclear war with the Soviets.
Nonetheless, the grainy newsreels of young men holding flowers as they clambered onto Soviet tanks, which are occasionally rebroadcast in documentaries, remain part of the continents’ collective unconscious.
Two other more-openly-discussed events are the Holocaust and the Western European countries’ history of colonialism. The former produced a desire to find a means for expiating the sins committed against Jews in Europe, while the other produced a desire to expiate sins committed elsewhere in the world.
Today, because of the Holocaust, verbal and physical attacks on European Jews have become unfashionable in polite Western European society. In many ways, however, the place resident Jews have had in European discourse has been taken by those former Eastern European, politically entrepreneurial Jews—and their progeny—who had founded their own state and made it successful…the Israelis.
Two mass studies provide what I believe is conclusive evidence for this contention.
The recently-published Anti-Defamation League survey of world anti-Semitism showed that today there are remarkably low levels of anti-Semitism in most Western European countries—and they would have been even lower had the survey not included the newly-arrived Moslem migrants.
However, some of you may also recall the results of the poll taken by the EU and published in 2002 that found Europeans as a whole had come to believe that Israel was the greatest threat to world peace. Israelis were perceived to be a greater threat than Iran, al Qaeda, or North Korea. Incidentally, so embarrassed were the civil servants in Brussels by the results of that poll that they have never taken a follow-up survey.
Many modern, native-born Europeans have adopted a fascinating way of coping with their often confused feelings of guilt. There has been an attempt by some members of the younger generation in Europe to try to lift the burden of guilt created by the Holocaust by claiming, accurately, that the Holocaust was the product of failings and lapses of their fathers and grandfathers that do not apply to them. Others, though, go even further. By focusing on what they perceive to be Jewish Israel’s faults, they seem to feel that they can transfer their feelings of guilt onto the Israelis, and in so doing, they can somehow lift the weight of the memory of the Holocaust and the weight of responsibility it bequeathed to future generations.
For example, a common technique was been to transfer feelings of guilt about colonialism and endemic anti-Semitism into allegations that it is the Israelis who are the new colonialists and the Israelis should therefore be forbidden to do to the Palestinians what the Dutch did to the East Asians, the French did to the central and northern Africans, the Belgians did to the Congolese and the British did almost everywhere else.
The Israelis, of course, are not the only subjects of this kind of behavior. When it was perceived that many of Europe’s historical sins could not be atoned for, there was a natural tendency to do what might be termed “comparative shopping”…to seek out and then focus on any individuals or groups who could be labelled “worse than us.” The United States, for example, is often dragooned into playing just such a role.
Of course, these feelings of culpability have not been uniform across Europe. For example, Austrians, to this day continue to believe that they were victims of Hitler, rather than the welcoming partners of the Nazis that all objective histories have shown them to be.
It is no wonder, therefore, that because of all the factors I have mentioned—and many more that I have no time to discuss—the effort in Europe to create a single, coherent foreign policy has turned into a shambles.
Fortunately or unfortunately for the Europeans, they have had the Middle East to use as a stage where they can play act and vent their discomfiture. For example, during the last century, just as the EEC was in the midst of a search for a formula to ease its member’s embarrassment, the Arab Gulf Sheikhs handed the European politicians what the Europeans then hoped would be an “out” for their predicament…something that they could peddle to their people as a need to exercise realpolitik.
In the wake of the 1973 war, the oil sheikhs had imposed a selective oil embargo on those states that had supported Israel. By stretching all the way back to Metternich and Talleyrand, the masters of realpolitik, the Europeans were able to come up with the first joint foreign policy statement the EEC had ever been able to cobble together.
For the record, I choose to define realpolitik as “hypocrisy in the service of perceived national interests.”
A joint statement by the governing body of the EEC on 6 November 1973 for the first time condemned Israel’s acquisition of land through force and included the requirement that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian population be taken into consideration. This declaration then set a pattern that has continued ever since. Conveniently, no mention was made in that document of previous Arab aggression that had led to the land acquisition.
By 1980, after two oil boycotts, these states became totally craven. At that time, they crafted the so-called Venice Declaration. Although it was couched in wording that called for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, it was actually composed with the aim of denouncing the Israelis and the Egyptians for having had the gall to made peace without taking Europe’s interests into consideration. Specifically, it was written under heavy pressure from the Arab oil states as an indirect criticism of the Israelis and the Egyptians for not having made the Palestinian issue the centerpiece of their bilateral peace negotiations.
This time, the wording went beyond calling for the right of self-determination to state that the EEC “would not accept any unilateral initiative designed to change the status of Jerusalem,” and maintained that “settlements as well as modifications in population and property in the occupied Arab territories, are illegal under international law.”
It is interesting that the declaration was quite specific on what Israel should not do, but vague on what the Palestinians could do to encourage a peace process.
These statements actually should not have come as any surprise. A signpost of what was to come had already occurred almost immediately after the end of World War II—long before the Treaty of Rome was signed. One of the primary reasons why Europe has been so relatively peaceful since World War II is that, immediately after the war, the Allies carried out one of the largest population transfers in human history. Among other things, ethnic Germans were deported in huge numbers from Poland and the Sudetenland. As a result, most European countries, until the mass legal and illegal immigration of Third World Moslems to the continent, had become more culturally and ethnically homogeneous than they had been for centuries.
Nonetheless, the Europeans then became prime sponsors of the 1949 Geneva Convention barring such population transfers.
Even though the sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied territories is in dispute, the Europeans also supported a 1999 amendment to the convention stating that the convention applies to the Israeli settlements that have been built in the occupied territories.
No less interesting in this regard is that, while the drumbeat of criticism of Israel continues unabated, more recent moral lapses by European decision-makers are given relatively short shrift. The Europeans’ almost total inability and even unwillingness to deal with the Darfur crisis and the slaughter in Rwanda are cases in point.
To be fair, there was a bit of breast-beating over these highly-publicized inactions. But other failures, each in its way no less important to peace, have been totally ignored. For example, the Europeans made up a significant number of the observers assigned to the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and the monitoring station at the Gaza-Egyptian border crossing point at Rafah that was set up in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
In Lebanon the European force failed totally to fulfill its UN mandate to halt the massive rearmament of Hizbollah forces in the south of that country. And in Gaza, the observers at Rafah left their posts under pressure from Hamas, thus allowing the free transfer into Gaza of al Qaeda terrorists, Iranian military advisors and other sundry evil-doers.
The Europeans’ erratic behavior seems to have been highly influenced by one very simple factor. A fascinating comparison can be made between those situations where there was extensive media coverage and those where the press was largely absent. Most of the European cop-outs occurred in places where journalists were largely absent, while the most shrill policy statements invariably referred to places, such as Israel and the West Bank, where the press is well represented.
Clearly, then, policies are also being driven by whether there is popular support or popular pressure to undertake one particular action or another. By carefully playing to the media, the EU can and does create widely-publicized images of seemingly being deeply involved in events, even if that appearance of involvement did not arise out of an actual, comprehensive policy of engagement.
And now I come to what I think is one of the most fascinating developments in European policy-making.
As I keep repeating over and over again, much of any country’s approach to foreign affairs is invariably influenced by that country’s history and the history of the evolution of its political culture. It is not unusual for countries undergoing a massive upheaval or trauma, such occurred in Europe in the mid-20th century, to look back into the history of their cultural development to find anchors to help them ride out the emotional storms they are encountering. And this is precisely what the Europeans have done.
During the mid-to-late 20th century the holes in Marxist ideology, which had formed the basis for social policy in most European countries, were beginning to show. The advent of the Thatcher government in Britain and an increasing concern about how Europe could cope with growing economic globalism were also putting even moderate, traditional social democracy on the defensive.
In the past, when turmoil of this sort had increased significantly, the Europeans had turned to traditional sources such as religious teachings or the writings of the great political philosophers for guidance. But, since the 1960s, most of the churches have been going through their own upheavals and have been losing their popular license to preach morality. And the words of Hobbes and Rousseau seemed horribly out of date to the more secular 20th century political activists.
At that point, a quite extraordinary phenomenon occurred. As the European politicians and diplomats floundered about, transnational non-governmental organizations, such as Oxfam and Greenpeace, and domestic groups such as leftists in search of a cause, rightists who disliked and distrusted foreigners in any form, and cranks of every hue imaginable began to try to take an ever-growing public role in the search for a new agenda and a new set of rules for policy-making in general and foreign policy-making in particular. The end result of their efforts bore a remarkable resemblance to a similar event that had taken place almost 1700 years before.
In 312 Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. In practical terms, this was a boon to the early church fathers because it enabled them to evangelize freely for the first time. However, it also put them into a bit of a bind. For the first time they had to reconcile their concern with spiritual purity with their need to confront the Roman Empire’s need for political expediency. In other words, they had to decide what should be the relationship between church and state. Matthew had admonished: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God’s.”
But that had been little in the way of practical advice.
Eusebius, the 4th century Caesaria historian and church activist tried to resolve the problem by suggesting that Constantine should and could take on a role similar to the one later formally adopted by the Moslems…that the emperor could and should be the final arbiter of both church and secular law.
That idea went nowhere, though, mainly because the church fathers had other, more immediate institutional issues to deal with. To begin with, the Christian leaders of that time had difficulty in agreeing on what Christianity really stood for. There were dozens of offshoots and cults, each claiming to be practicing the revealed truth. That scenario was not too unlike the one in which those who have been trying to influence modern European foreign policy have also been finding themselves.
As well, the early church leaders also had major problems reconciling what was slowly becoming church law and what was established Roman law. For example, Rome depended upon booty taken in border wars and taxation to pay for its massive army. Christianity, at that time, though, had had a largely pacifist outlook. Not only that, much of Rome’s tax revenue was collected by what have come to be known as “tax farmers,”—individuals licensed to collect revenue on behalf of the state. This system had led, among other things, to huge, endemic corruption and predation on defenseless peasants.
One way the church had of reconciling Roman imperial policy was by promising that the world to come would be an infinitely better place for those who were suffering in this world. Another was by massively altering the attitude of the church toward the Jews. While, previously, the church had tried to attract Jewish converts, the church now turned the Jews into the church’s foils in place of the Roman state apparatus.
The focus of the early bishops’ teachings was shifted from the iniquities of Roman law to the supposed iniquities of Jewish law. Henceforth, the Jews would be heavily criticized for strictly upholding Biblical law, while Christ would be hallowed for his belief that man should be driven by the spirit, not Biblical law. St. Augustine depicted the Jews as what might be termed in modern lingo “dead men walking.” To him, the Jews had survived in the flesh, but had been destroyed spiritually.
Very soon, church leaders began using the term “judaizing” as an epithet that they often hurled at each other. The Jews quickly became the “other.”
The Gospel of St. John, believed to have been written about that time, is a particularly nasty example of the kind of anti-Jewish dogma that was becoming ever more common theological currency. To John, the Jews were obstinate, stiff-necked and murderous.
If one substitutes the word “Zionist” for Jew and the word “Zionism” for judaizing, there is a striking similarity between was said by these early church fathers and what is coming out of the left in Europe today.
In other words, the early church fathers created an extraordinarily-successful intellectual format that could and subsequently has been used by later generations for dealing with any group that could be labeled “the Other”…whether that “Other” lived close-by or far away.
For example, people today forget that in the 1990s virtually the entire world where Christianity was the predominant religion, was in the midst of a, apocalyptic fear that Japan—yet another “Other” was about to take control of the world economy.
When viewed in that light, the statements about Israel emerging from Oxfam, among other human rights groups, can be seen for what they are: sanitized, secularized versions of early Christian teachings.
This then provides at least a partial answer to those Israeli supporters who question why Israel is subject to so much criticism when worse human rights abuses are being perpetrated elsewhere in the world.
The availability of ancient, extensive, textual references to Jewish residents of what the Romans labeled “Palestine,” Jewish property holding in the Levant and the Jewish Talmudic approach to morality that can be dredged up from even secular Europeans’ collective unconscious helps explain why the Europeans feel more comfortable actively criticizing Israel and Israelis rather than the predations of China in Tibet or al Qaeda’s bloody operations in Yemen.
The more the ancient and modern attitudes are compared, the more striking are the parallels.
Just, like the anti-Zionist political activists today, the early church fathers needed simple focal points in their belief structure that could then be used to attract the masses. One was the emphasis on the need to confess and then repent for one’s sins. An increasing amount of modern anti-Zionist rhetoric uses this very same approach. Israelis, the current anti-Zionist line goes, must confess and then repent for what they have done to the Palestinians
But by far the most striking similarity has been the emphasis both the ancients and the modern European anti-Zionist ideologues have put on the concept of “compassion.” Oxfam today demands compassion for the poor in the third world, while Greenpeace campaigns for compassion for whales.
Compassion is one of the most fundamental of human emotions, and one of the primary glues that is used to keep societies together. However, when it is used by advocates for one agenda or another to create a foreign policy, it too often becomes a form of snake oil that is peddled as a cure-all for any and all geopolitical ills.
Compassion is one of those airy concepts that can be interpreted in many ways depending on the political stance one wants to adopt. For example, it can be interpreted as call for sympathy for the downtrodden—which really involves no permanent commitment to solving social problems. Or, it can also be taken as a cry to exercise empathy, a much more difficult and energy and time-consuming endeavor that requires people to first understand the history and motivations of the party or parties involved.
Invariably, international NGOs today go for sympathy rather than empathy.
For example, I used to get press release after press release from Oxfam decrying the intolerable water and sewage situation in which Gazans were finding themselves. In every release, the Israelis were blamed for the situation that existed in the Strip. In particular, the Israelis were blamed for the fact that only about ten percent of Gazans get potable water. They were also heavily criticized for not supplying cement so that a sewage treatment plant could be built and for not supplying cheap fuel to the local electrical power plant so that the sewage could be piped in for treatment.
The intent of these press releases was to elicit sympathy for the poor Gazans and therefore to raise funds for Oxfam. All the facts that Oxfam presented were true. However, they created only a partial picture of the reality as a whole. Had the organization presented all the relevant data that the use of empathy would have demanded, the reality those facts would have portrayed, and the conclusion that Israel was to blame for the situation, would have been quite different.
Gaza is totally dependent for drinking water on the coastal aquifer. The aquifer is a closed system that is totally dependent on rainfall. Rapid population growth had long ago stressed the aquifer. Israel, while it was in control of Gaza, limited the number of wells that could be drilled into the aquifer. When Yassir Araft arrived, though, he ignored the advice of all the hydrologists and allowed wildcat water drilling. The number of wells tripled. The additional pumping enabled seawater to creep into the aquifer, permanently salinating the system. Ergo, in Gaza today, there is a greater demand for water, but much less potable water available for use than ever before.
Israel has also limited the import of cement into Gaza because, in the past, cement that was supposed to be used for public works projects was diverted by the Hamas government to build bunkers and tunnels.
There has been a lack of fuel oil to run the local electrical generator because Egypt has halted the delivery of subsidized fuel. That fuel now has to be imported from the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah. Hamas refused to pay the higher price for fuel levied by the PA. Fuel prices are based on the Oslo accords. They include high levels of taxation. However, unknown to most people, 57 percent of the PA’s entire budget, including the fuel taxes from both the West Bank and Gaza goes to Gaza. This is a quite different reality than the one Oxfam sought to portray.
The belief that compassion should be used as the primary tool for making public policy is but one of many other similarities between the approach adopted by the early Christian propagandists such as Eusebius, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom in the 4th century and those used by anti-Zionists today. For example, because they had rejected Christ’s emphasis on spirituality, the prelates preached, the Jews were deserving of having had their state destroyed, deserving of having been dispersed and deserving of having been sent into exile. To St. Augustine, the Jews were like Cain, permanently alienated from the world—a belief that an ardent secular atheist, Karl Marx, later wholeheartedly agreed with. This is not unlike the belief by many modern anti-Zionist critics who hold that Israel has no inherent legitimacy and that Israel is ignoring and even thwarting the teachings of more “progressive” people such as themselves.
It is worth noting, though, that when they are given the opportunity to follow their own devices, all too often these so-called non-governmental progressives demonstrate just how ignorant they are of the real world in which most countries, including Israel, have to operate.
For example, 1985 saw the organization of Live Aid, the greatest rock concert in history. Ostensibly its purpose was to collect huge amounts of money to provide aid for Ethiopia, which was undergoing a brutal famine at that time. However, while producer Bob Geldhof was brilliant as an organizer of the concert, he and the other concert organizers’ lack of understanding of how Ethiopia operated under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Meriam, meant that much, if not most of the aid money raised by the concert was actually diverted by the Ethiopian authorities to feed Meriam’s army.
Other cases in point abound. For example, their emphasis on acting based on what feels good also led many European intellectuals to demand that NATO intervene to prevent a potential victory by the forces loyal to Muammar Ghadaffi after the civil war in Libya broke out. But these same activists had made no effort to study the social makeup of that country. This led them to support the proposition that freeing Libyans need not require the presence of foreign troops on Libyan soil—which to them would have been a form of modern-day colonialism. The result has been chaos and civil war as the many tribes and factions in that country now fight for power.
Another factor that may explain why the Europeans act as they do is that, for almost two thousand years, one theme was constant in the history of European thought. Most Europeans, beginning with Constantine and flowing straight through to Marx, whether they were religious or not, and no matter whether they were divided politically, socially or economically, were united by one thing—their ongoing relief that they were not Jews.
Precisely because of that phenomenon, the Jews ended up playing the role of “the canary in the coal mine”—a role that the Europeans resented terribly because it had the very opposite effect intended. What invariably happened was that if a group in Europe could not resolve its internal conflicts, it would vent by turning on the Jews. Attacks on Jews, whenever they broke out, then became an almost perfect warning sign that tensions within the society in which the Jews were living had reached an intolerable level—even if there were no outward signs that that was the case. The whole point of venting on the Jews was to avoid facing those very problems. The fact that Israel today may be forcing the Europeans today to admit to the existence of domestic difficulties they would prefer to ignore may be as frightening to modern Europeans as they were for their forefathers.
In other words, today, Israel may play a very similar role to the one Europe’s resident Jews once did. Israel’s very existence, the issues Israel has to cope with, and the geopolitical environment in which it has to operate may very well trigger negative reactions precisely because they remind Europeans of their own unresolved issues. This, in turn, may be yet another explanation why so many of Israel’s critics tend to hold it to a higher standard than that other countries—even their own. By setting unrealistically high standards of behavior, they ensure that Israel will fail any test that they set. Israel can then become the focus of criticism in place of criticism that might otherwise have been directed inwards to their own society. This then also enables them to enhance their belief in their own self-worth and moral superiority.
When all these factors are taken into consideration one can see why, when I once queried a human rights worker why he was so anti-Israeli and why he did not react with the same sense of urgency towards other situations where human rights were being flaunted, he replied, “You have to start somewhere.” The implication was that Israel was simply the easiest target.
But now we come full circle.
If one were to take all the European leaders’ rhetoric at face value, Israel today would be suffering from far greater European sanctions than is currently the case.
The reason why this is so can once again be found in the Europeans’ approach to realpolitik—or better still, to coin a more apt term, “realeconomik”.
All the pressures on Europe’s politicians to penalize Israel for its actions in the West Bank have been tempered because the Europeans have also come to perceive that they need Israel for economic reasons…maybe not as much as they need Arab oil, but they do perceive that they do need Israel nonetheless.
It is a situation not terribly unlike the one that existed in Europe up to the Industrial Revolution. At that time, the Jews were loathed and scorned, but they were tolerated because they filled an economic vacuum. Under the Talmudic law that the church fathers so derided, Jews were allowed to loan money with interest when Christians were forbidden from doing so.
Today, Europe treats Israel in much the same way. For that reason, Israel’s relationship with Europe is actually drenched in irony.
To begin with, Israel is needed by the Europeans because Israeli military intelligence has consistently been more accurate when it comes to assessing events in the Middle East than have their European equivalents. In terms of realpolitik, and particularly now with the Arab world in such turmoil, real-time access to those Israeli assessments is too great a political and economic asset for the Europeans to ignore.
But that is not all. Increasingly, the fact that Israel has an outsized reputation as a scientific and technological powerhouse has provided it with a degree of influence in Europe that is totally disproportionate to its size, power and wealth.
A very good example is Israel’s recently signed scientific cooperation agreement with the EU, called Horizon 2020. During the course of the last 5 year agreement, Israel pumped 535 million euros into the fund, but received back 840 million euros in grants. The reason for the largesse is simple. In its own way, what happened is not dissimilar to the idea of paying interest on one’s right to use someone else’s assets. In this case the asset is Israeli entrepreneurship and brainpower.
Israelis and Americans who visit Europe see only the bustling tourist sites. In those places Europe looks healthy, wealthy and wise.
However, as I noted earlier, Europe in undergoing a major economic and social crisis. The most obvious recent sign of the extent of that crisis could be seen in the increase in the vote for the European parliament of xenophobic far-rightist and nationalist parties that are seeking an “Other” to be detested.
Recent studies by McKinsey and Co. and the RAND Corp. have highlighted some of the most acute problems that led to that change in voting patterns. Income inequality is growing. In part, that is because there is a shortage of highly-skilled workers. But twenty percent of those aged 15-24 are in the category of NEET—those not in education, in employment or training.
A major reason for this social crisis is that, with the notable exception of Germany, which continues to thrive economically, while European capitalists have broken the old social democratically-based social contract that was put in place in the years immediately after World War II, they have developed nothing to replace it.
Specifically, according to McKinsey and Co., because of the financiers’ inherent conservatism and blindness to reality, Europe got left behind by the internet revolution. World-wide 21 percent of the growth in GDP has been internet-related. Internet-related businesses create 2.6 jobs for every old job lost. According to McKinsey, almost no European companies have been involved in this transformation.
Like the Chinese recently, the Europeans have come to hope that somehow they can gain access to Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit. In the past, and unlike the Americans and most recently the Chinese, the European investors were insufficiently entrepreneurial and did not think it was worth their while to invest in local high-tech or to buy Israel high-tech start-ups. As a result, the EU political leadership has felt impelled to fill that vacuum by getting access to Israeli inventiveness before the patents become companies that are sold to multinational firms in other countries.
Of course, Israeli inventiveness will not be a panacea for Europe’s ills. But, in a sense, the European courting of Israeli science is yet another example of what the human rights worker had told me: “You have to start somewhere.”
This situation then also explains, in part, why Israel has become so close to the United States but has had such a volatile relationship with Europe.
Israel has always been able to market itself to Americans as a country that shares American values. Because Europe has been unable to formulate a social contract based on a similar European-agreed upon set of values, Israel cannot use common values as a reference point, and so it has to peddle itself to the Europeans in a very different way…by playing to Europe’ ongoing affection for and attachment to the principles of realpolitik.
But that is nothing new. You should remember that Israel’s founders were primarily European-born intellectuals whose entire worldview was shaped by European political and social history. And that founding generation has passed that perception onto its heirs. It is worth always keeping in mind that every Israeli schoolchild is taught that Zionism was born out of the bitter Dreyfus experience, not some abstract attraction to American’s adulation of the rights of the rugged individual.
For that reason, the Israeli leadership has been able to ignore the insults and even the boycotts that have streamed out of Europe over the years because it knows that nothing Israel can do under the present circumstances can change Europe’s interpretation of where its interests lie. In that sense, though, Israel too has playing the game of realpolitik.
So, to rephrase a quip made by Henry Kissinger about Israel, let me conclude with the observation that Europe has no foreign policy to speak of, only domestic interests. Europe’s anti-Zionists succeeded in making Israel into a domestic political European issue and interest by tapping into the continent’s atavism. But that success has now been tempered because access to Israeli high-tech and Israel’s successes as a wealth creator through the use of entrepreneurship in the field of science have become European domestic economic and social issues and interests too.