It was like a mini–United Nations.
But when S.F.-based diplomats from Israel and three European countries gathered for a Feb. 17 roundtable discussion about anti-Semitism, the tone was a bit lighter than a U.N. Security Council meeting — though it wasn’t all smiles and harmony among the panel members.
One of the major topics was exploring reasons for the majority of anti-Semitic violence in Europe, with consuls general from France, Germany and the U.K. pinning much of the blame on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The mood got a little tense as Akiva Tor, Israel’s consul general for the Pacific Northwest, challenged that notion.
“If we have a situation where Israeli officials cannot travel without the threat of violence, where Israeli academics are being boycotted from institutions, where Jews cannot speak at the University of Edinburgh, then for all practical purposes, we have a problem of anti-Semitism within the society,” Tor told a packed room of 80 at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. “It’s a form of pathology.”
Billed as a discussion on European anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of the Israel, the panel was sponsored by the San Francisco office of the American Jewish Committee.
Tor insisted that anti-Semitism was a more deep-seated problem in Europe than his fellow diplomats wanted to admit. He referred to a BBC poll of 28 countries around the world that showed only Iran, Pakistan and North Korea were viewed in a more negative light than Israel.
Over the course of the almost two-hour discussion, no one on the panel attempted to downplay the growth of anti-Semitic attacks in many European nations over the past few years.
But French Consul General Romain Serman, in particular, argued that spikes in such violence correlated with major violent incidents in the Middle East. For example, there were 700 anti-Semitic incidents reported in France in 2009, much higher than the year before (397) and last year (412); Serman said Israel’s war in Gaza in 2009 was clearly connected to the spike in violence.
He also indicated that the country’s growing Muslim population also meant a growing number of Islamic extremists — a question of “importing” anti-Semitism.
“Take a hypothetical, recent immigrant from Algeria,” said Serman. “He’s unemployed, uneducated, doesn’t feel like part of society … he’s going to empathize with Palestine.”
Serman emphasized the strides France has made to clamp down on anti-Semitic violence at a judicial level, citing a 1,200-person police task force dedicated to such attacks, “zero-tolerance” policies that carry a threat of life imprisonment, and a new electronic system that screens for hate speech on the Internet.
“Still,” he said, “we need to do better.”
Consul General Peter Rothen of Germany focused his comments on the need to separate anti-Semitism from criticism of Israel as a political entity.
“There is a tendency to decry each critical comment on every Israeli action as anti-Semitism, and I think it’s important to make a distinction,” he said.
Rothen did acknowledge the growing strength of the country’s xenophobic, far-right parties, lamenting that Germany’s Jewish population suffers from being too scattered to form strong political or social groups that could fight back. “It’s not like it is here [in the Bay Area],” he said. “We don’t have this community.”
On the question of what could be done to improve what panelists referred to as Israel’s “image problem,” Consul General Julian Evans of England spoke most bluntly about what he called the belief of most Britons that “Palestinians have been made to suffer unnecessarily.” He also theorized that Israel is an easy target for criticism because of its successes.
“It’s a young state, and it’s contributed so much to the world community, has gotten so much support from the U.S. … There has always been jealousy about the Jewish community,” he said. “That’s the root of anti-Semitism.”
In closing, Tor addressed a question from the audience about whether or not Israel receives an unfair amount of criticism from European media and political institutions.
“Look, these are our friends,” he said, indicating the countries represented at the table next to him. “They don’t get better than this. But, yes, I agree with the question.”