Why do so many Europeans reject America's view of the Middle

East?

By Michael Elliott, columnist, Time Magazine (Apr. 29, 2002)

As a teenager growing up in Britain, I remember saying prayers at

our church for the safety of Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.

For my friends and me, Israel's great Defense Minister, the oneeyed

Moshe Dayan, was an authentic hero. One night, I remember,

the BBC aired a tribute to Dayan using as a sound track the Who's

I Can See for Miles, which we thought was pretty cool. In the

late '60s spending time on a kibbutz was a fashionable way for

European teens to bridge the gap between school and university.

As far as I could judge as a young man, widespread European

sympathy for Israel--the sense that Israelis were the good guys

in the Middle East--extended through the horrors of the Munich

massacre in 1972 and the October War of 1973.

Yet now the streets of Europe are filled with rallies that

support the Palestinians and condemn Israel. Listening to a radio

broadcast on BBC World last week, I was struck by an anchor's air

of incomprehension at a demonstration in Washington in support of

Israel: Weren't the Americans, she asked a correspondent, really

rather "simple" when it came to the realities of the Middle East?

Many American Jews, not surprisingly, are furious at the European

response. For nations responsible for the Holocaust to ignore the

horrors of suicide attacks on Israeli targets, to shut their ears

to the hate for Jews that spews from the Arab media, seems

unforgivable. American Jews ask why European peace activists go

to Ramallah and Nablus rather than Netanya and Jerusalem. In an

essay in the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum wrote wrenchingly

of a "dynamic" that "suggests that Europeans are willing...to be

complicit in the murder of Jews again."

Why do Americans and Europeans see the tragedy of the Middle East

in such different ways? In one view, the root cause lies in

reactions to the attacks of Sept. 11; Americans have developed a

deep hatred of terrorism and identify the Palestinian suicide

bomber as a species of the same genus as an al-Qaeda mass

murderer. But this tale is deeper and darker than that. In any

event, all five of the largest West European countries--Germany,

Britain, France, Italy and Spain--have good reasons of their own

to detest terrorism.

A possible explanation for European support of the Palestinian

cause is that Europe's media have long been better than their

U.S. counterparts at covering the misery of Palestinians. I would

date the growth of European sympathy for the Palestinian cause to

Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon, and especially to the

massacre by Israel's Lebanese allies of Palestinian refugees in

the camps of Sabra and Shatila--an outrage for which an official

Israeli inquiry held Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Sharon,

ever since, has been a hate figure for the European left.

Europeans who grew up after 1945 have developed a loathing for

those who seek to prosecute political ends by military means.

Sharon's willingness these past weeks to send tanks into refugee

camps--whatever the provocation--touches too many raw nerves.

There's more. To an extent that few Americans understand, modern

Europeans have a deep sense of guilt about their colonial

adventures. (Indeed, they have much to feel guilty about.) Frantz

Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, a chilling catalog of French

atrocities in Algeria and a cry to listen to those denied a

voice, is one of the post-1945 era's most influential European

books. All this has had an effect. It was easy for Europeans to

be on the side of Israel when, as in 1967 and 1973, it seemed to

be fighting a defensive war against those who wished to eliminate

the Jewish state. But as Jewish settlements grew in the West

Bank, Europeans became uneasy. Israel seemed to be adopting a

policy of colonization that to modern European eyes was not just

morally reprehensible but also bound to end in tears.

Clearly, for some Jews these rationalizations are beside the

point. Europeans, they argue, are just plain anti-Semitic. They

naturally "portray Jews as the real villains," says Rosenbaum;

they always have, always will. Well, I just don't believe this

about the post-1945 generations of Europeans, though I suspect

that's because I don't want to. But, undeniably, past European

anti-Semitism has had a bitter effect on present European

attitudes. Put at its crudest, most Europeans know very few Jews;

they killed too many of them. In America there is a thriving

community for whom the survival of Israel is a passionate

commitment; in Europe there isn't. No number of school lessons or

church sermons about the Holocaust can overcome that humdrum

truth.

So why do Europeans and Americans see the Middle East in such

different ways? Above all, because the shadow and shame of the

Holocaust reaches out of the past and lays a cold hand on our

present understanding. All the prayers in the world won't make

that grim truth go away.