The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly claimed during the funeral of four French Jews killed recently in Paris that “Jews know from the very depth of their hearts that they only have one country which is Israel, the place of their long history and original birth that is always willing to welcome them with open arms as her beloved children”. He said: “Today, I became certain more than any time before that Israel is the only real home for all of us (Jews).” Netanyahu has thus resorted to the factor of ‘extreme fear’, stoking it in the hearts of French Jews to make them leave for Israel for good.
The Zionist state’s President, Reuven Rivlin, was quick to reply to Netanyahu’s claim, contradicting him in a clear message he sent to European leaders, where he said that “the advent of Jews to Israel must not be a result of fear and surrender to terrorism, but as a free choice devoid of any compulsion generated by fear”. On the same issue, Yossi Beilin, an ex-member of the Knesset and a former minister, wrote: “We should only try to facilitate things for immigrants who choose to come to Israel on their own and not try to convince to leave.” He, then, posed the following questions: “Is it wise and prudent now to call upon the French Jews to immigrate to Israel? And is this invitation intended to save them from being killed, as the Director of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, recently declared? And is it right to transform the horror of this terrorist act into a cheap opportunity to plant fear in the hearts of Jews to induce them to immigrate to Israel?”
Statements by other Israeli politicians tried, as have often done, to exploit an outside incident to serve the aims of Zionism that advocate and promote an image of Jews in general, as the prime target and victims of intolerance and racism in our world to entice them to immigrate to Israel to save themselves. On this very point came the angry response of the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, who said that “France is the national home for Jews and without French Jews, there will be no France”. The Grand Rabbi in France, Haim Korsia, fully supported Valls over the Israeli prime minister, declaring that “France is the mother of our language and the country of our dreams and hopes for a better future”.
Israel is trying to generate extreme fear in the hearts of European Jews by pointing, first, that there are more than 14 million Muslims from the Arab Maghreb living in Europe, and second that another five million Muslims from Turkey and more than four million from the Balkan and other Arab and East Asian countries are now citizens of many European countries. Such fear-mongering must be seen in connection with the fact that the racist/colonial Israeli military occupation in Palestine, unleashing a religious war to complete its Judaisation of historical Palestine, which has earned Israel extreme animosity, not only of European Muslims, but the remaining one-and-a-half billion Muslims around the world.
French Jews are the largest Jewish community in Europe that numbers close to half a million. In 2014, France became the biggest “exporter” of Jewish immigrants to Israel from where, more than 7,000 others have left. According to the Jewish Agency, it is expected that the number of French Jews migrating to Israel in 2015 will be more than 10,000 and some predict that it will reach 15,000 as a result of the recent attacks in France. The Jewish Agency estimates that “20 per cent of immigrants return to France from Israel within five years and some of the well-to-do French Jews send their families to Israel while they stay in France conducting their business, but travel to Israel during weekends to visit their families.”
The best comment offered on this subject came from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in the form of a cartoon showing French Jews, who had been induced to migrate to Israel, being greeted by Bennet Naftali, the Right-wing leader of The Jewish Home Party, carrying an automatic weapon. Naftali is standing in front of a big gate of a walled structure that looks like a huge prison with many cannons and rocket batteries on top and with Netanyahu standing near him wearing the prison warden’s uniform. Haaretz truly drew a picture worth more than a thousand words, expressing the true reality of Israel, the so-called “safest country for Jews”. Indeed, Israel, in its present reality, poses the deadliest threat not only against world Jewry, but against international security, as well. It is losing friends and supporters in great numbers in the western world and even among Jews who no longer tolerate the stigma of racism and apartheid attached to them as a result of the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The Zionist state that is being ruled by Right-wing religious (and ultra-nationalist) parties, that blaspheme all other religions and are determined to complete their ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in historical Palestine, has earned Israel the low status of a rogue state that is beyond the ambit of international law — a state that should be shunned and boycotted. Thus, Israel will never be a safe place for any one until it dismantles the apartheid and religious takfiri (those who accuse others of apostasy) regime that is presently ruling it.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
