Cause for Grief?

On the level of generalities, little in Michel Gurfinkiel’s “You Only Live Twice” will come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the growth of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe in recent decades. To have the evidence so clearly and systematically laid out before one, however, is depressing and alarming even for those familiar with much of it.

As a theoretical exercise, one could debate the chicken-or-egg question of which came first. Did European hostility toward Israel, which has increased slowly but steadily with continued Israeli control of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967, awaken a traditional anti-Semitism that had lain dormant since the end of World War II? Or did, on the contrary, this dormant anti-Semitism fuel hostility toward Israel as a way of venting anti-Semitic feelings whose direct expression was made taboo by the Holocaust?

This is not, though, a very useful way of posing the problem. In reality, we are dealing with a process of mutual reinforcement. Without Israel, widespread anti-Semitism in post-Holocaust Europe would most likely not have awakened from its dormancy; had it not been there to be awakened, criticism of Israel would never have reached the pathologically ferocious levels that it has. In the language of the rabbis, tsvat b’tsvat asuya—the smith’s tongs make each other. Each cause has caused the cause that caused it.