Before Europe casts us off completely, perhaps we should separate first. It’s time, I maintain, to say goodbye.
This week, on Yom Hashoa, a friend told me a story I had never heard—how her father as a young Jew in Libya during World War II was arrested by the Italians and later, after the Nazis occupied Italy, marked for transport to Bergen-Belsen. An hour after hearing this story, while participating in a TV panel on the Holocaust, I learned that Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was halting her country’s defense agreement with Israel.
Coming from one of Israel’s best and—after the electoral defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán—last friends in Europe, Meloni’s announcement dealt a coup de grâce to Israel’s relations with the continent. It followed years of anti-Israel measures by most European governments, including the suspension of arms sales, expelling Israel from defense industry fairs, and the recognition of a Palestinian state. In virtually every European country, antisemitism has skyrocketed.
Meloni’s announcement reinforced my long-held belief that the paths of Israel and Europe would eventually part. From an historical perspective, close relations between what was once called Christendom and the tiny Jewish State situated in the Holy Land were always an anomaly—and with the fading of the Holocaust’s memory, an aberration. Before Europe casts us off completely, perhaps we should separate first. It’s time, I maintain, to say goodbye.
