Germany: Anti-Semitism merely went into remission after Hitler’s fall and was not shamed into extinction

Belgian NGO member dressed as a clown
accuses Israel of drinking Palestinian blood:
"I love blood.  A glass full of blood"
Brussels 2010

Germany has not entirely escaped the shadow of the swastika. After prime minister Yitzhak Rabin visited Sachsenhausen in 1992, neo-Nazis broke into the camp and set fire to the barracks where Jewish prisoners were held 50 years before — just one in a running stream of such attacks on Holocaust memorial sites. One wonders why neo-Nazis would wish to destroy what are also, after all, inadvertent memorials to the murderous racism they idolize.

The central Berlin memorial has been daubed with swastikas; a man was filmed urinating atop one of the slabs last New Year’s Eve. Germany’s own domestic security agency estimated earlier this month that the country has 10,000 potentially militant neo-Nazis.

Germany has certainly tried, but anti-Semitism, it becomes ever clearer, merely went into remission after Hitler’s fall; it was not shamed into extinction. The scourge is again on the rise across Europe, spearheaded by the improbable but familiar coupling of radical right and Islamism. And no matter that Europe is practically bereft of Jews, the communities never having recovered from the Nazis’ horrors (leaving perhaps a million today in the EU countries and a few hundred thousand in Russia). A striking display at the Wannsee Villa reminds us that Jews, the ostensible source of all Germany’s ills, constituted precisely 0.77% of the German population when the Nazis came to power. We barely figure; they hate us just the same.

And so 70 years later, Israel, the historic Jewish state that we lamented had been revived too late to serve as a refuge for the Nazi-hounded Jews of Europe, turns out to be needed as a refuge for European Jews after all. Some Israelis may have chosen to move to Berlin for cheaper pudding. Lots of French Jews are moving to Israel — for all the world as though their lives depend upon it.

The steady return of anti-Semitism is gradually rendering Israel a potentially more vital refuge for European Jewry than at any time since its founding years. But simultaneously, the emboldening of radical Islam, championed by would-be nuclear Iran, finds Israel as existentially challenged as ever in its modern history.

We battle to survive, furthermore, in a climate of mischaracterization that would sometimes do Goebbels proud; the under-internalized, great, big, undeniable fact is that the Israel widely misrepresented abroad as a viciously aggressive empire, murderously scapegoating deprived innocents, would be immediately destroyed if it were to lay down its weapons. As ever, therefore, the Jewish nation needs towering leadership to guide it. (...)

Ahead of the Wannsee Conference, Adolf Eichmann prepared lists of Europe’s Jews by country, separated into two categories: those under Nazi control, those not yet quiescent. His alphabetized accounting totals 11 million European Jews. As of Wannsee, only Estonia could be approvingly marked “judenfrei.”

Progress would be much accelerated in the wake of the meeting. Two months earlier, Hitler had told the visiting Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini that his sole interest in the Arab world was in the annihilation of the Jews there. Make no mistake, they were coming for us everywhere. (...)

But the Jews’ war of survival was not won when Hitler lost. It continues to this day, against enemies with more effective tools of mass murder at their disposal. And we’re easy to find now: Jews constitute 0.5 percent or more of the populace in just six countries on earth: Uruguay (0.5%), France (0.8%), Canada (1.1%), Gibraltar (1.9%), the US (2.1%) … and Israel (75.4%). A trip to Berlin reminds you that the Jewish nation-state dare not be complacent, weak, selfish, foolish, or short-sighted.

More: Times of Israel