European Nations and Israel Must Demand That the EU Change Its Tune toward the Jewish State

A recently leaked internal European Union document details a plan to help facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state by building settlements on the part of the West Bank controlled by Israel, in contravention of Israeli law. As Alan Baker explains, such construction violates the Oslo Accords, to which the EU is a witness and signatory; moreover the document itself displays a misunderstanding of the Accords while making various false claims about Jerusalem’s behavior. Baker tries to answer the question of why Brussels is so intent on undermining the Jewish state—as made clear both by this policy and others:

It would appear that the EU’s extreme and illogical fixation with Israel is not necessarily shared by state members of the EU. It seems to represent and echo the long-held personal aversion and hostility to Israel that the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy Josep Borrell has displayed long before taking up his EU post.

Regrettably, this aversion to Israel is faithfully implemented by the EU External Action Service whose major purpose and staff seem to be devoted to undermining and seeking to delegitimize Israel. So much so that it is patently clear that the tail appears to be wagging the dog, rather than the opposite.

It is high time that the state members of the EU play a greater role in determining EU policies regarding the Middle East peace process, rather than allowing the biased, partisan, and fixated EU External Action Service to dictate policy regarding Israel and the territories.

By the same token, it is high time that Israel’s government take a far more assertive role in clarifying to the EU and its member states that the anti-Israel fixation of its staff and its actions in undermining Israel’s legitimate authority and jurisdiction in Area C [of the West Bank] will no longer be tolerated and must cease.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Europe and Israel, European Union, Oslo Accords, West Bank

Universities Are in Thrall to a Constituency That Sees Israel as an Affront to Its Identity

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, University