Op-Ed: Straight Talk: The World has just Abandoned Israel and the Jews

The Iranian threat to expunge Israel is not a joke to be treated with indulgence.

Share on print Share on email Share on facebook Share on tumblr More Sharing Services 314

Published: Friday, July 17, 2015 9:29 AM

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly...

► More from this writer

The Palais Coburg, the luxurious hotel in Vienna where the West signed the agreement on the nuclear issue of Iran, is located in a particular square. It is named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism.
History has a more developed sense of irony than the Western leaders who capitulated to Tehran. Because a nuclearized Iran would mean the end of Zionism.
We don’t know if Iran will actually manufacture the Islamic nuclear bomb. We don’t know if Israel will use its military power to stop it. But we certainly know that the world has just abandoned the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
The US abandoned it. The US, which didn’t rescue the Jews during the Holocaust and didn’t help the Jews defend themselves during the 1948 war of survival and independence when they were attacked by five Arab armies. Barack Obama showed his real face by preferring Islam to Israel and Western civilization.
The UK abandoned it. The UK, which used the “White Paper” during the Second World War to prevent the Jews from reaching Tel Aviv and saving themselves from the gas chambers.
The European Union abandoned it. The same Europe on whose soil Hitler planned the extermination of one third of the world’s Jewry.
The Western conscience abandoned it.

In their hearts they think that Israel is a burden...
The State of Israel, this Western enclave stuck in the Islamic umma, 900 kilometers of borders without natural protection, has always needed international solidarity. It can not exist, except as a Masada, without the affection of Western civil society.
Now we neither see nor hear in the newspapers and on television voices in favor of Israel, empathy for its anxieties and understanding of its reasoning. Very few are openly saying that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself and that the Iranian threat to expunge it from the family of nations is not a joke to be welcomed with indulgence or indifference.
That has always been the beauty of the testimony in favor of Israel’s right to exist, that it cannot be characterized by instrumentality or the spirit of partisanship and political advantage. Israel was “a non-partisan issue”. But it is not any more.
Today it seems that for many journalists, men of letters and Western politicians, commentators in newspapers and on television, it is much more comfortable to stay in perfect harmony with the emotions and the reasoning of international public opinion, which gloats in satisfaction before this horrible deal. To praise the appeasement of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and to forget Israel.
Europe and America signed this deal to follow their cynical economic interests. Europe wanted to open the Iranian market. The world is interested in money, not in Israel. I will go even farther: in their hearts they think that Israel is a burden and that the Middle East would be much more peaceful without a Jewish State.
The Iranians and the Islamic world will do everything in their power to destroy the Jewish State, and after Vienna they know that many nations will not shed a tear if Israel disappears.