France: Prominent Jewish lefty says "Israel is the end of the Jews" (Daniel Cohn-Bendit)

French-German Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a revolutionary who first came to proeminence as a student agitator at the Paris barricades in 1968 and former Member of the European Parliament for the Greens, is very popular in France (more so than in Germany) and is a commentator on the Europe 1 radio station.

He never misses an opportunity to bash Israel and did so yet again when interviewed last week by the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Cohn-Bendit confided that for a long time he had considered himself to be a Jew as defined by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, i.e. that his Jewish identity was imposed on him by "the other".  

He then boasted: "But that's wrong...  I am a disapora Jew.  My citizenship is universal and knows no borders.  This explains my position as a European.  Israel changes the nature of the Jews.  For me, Israel is the end of the Jews.  A Jew, as I understand it, is a diaspora Jew".

His inspiration?

"Marek Edelman, the last survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising - he remained in Poland, and he did not become an Israeli".