Political tremors are starting to be felt across Europe.
In Britain, we see the rise of an emerging independent
party, UKIP, which is Eurosceptic and takes a corrective line on the UK’s
unbridled open-door immigration policy.
In France, the Socialist Hollande looks likely to be
replaced by the center-right Sarkozy.
The left-wing Swedish government barely lasted three month
before being forced to abandon a failed leadership. This gave them sufficient
time to rush through a ‘Palestine’
vote which may be overturned by an incoming center-right government.
Polls show that center-right parties win the popular vote in
Norway and Denmark.
Across Europe, voters are objecting to poor economic and
immigration policies. They are offended by the rise of crime perpetrated by
immigrants they had welcomed into their once decent countries. Cultural changes
are making their countries unrecognizable to the indigenous population, and not
to their pleasing.
The political swing reflects a desire to return to long lost
national values, lost in the mire of uncontrolled immigration.
The recent outbreak of symbolic parliamentary voting for an
ill-defined Palestinian state in many European nations is seen by many as
politicians catering to a rising constituency against which their grassroots
citizenry are rebelling, unhappy with faulty policies that makes them feel
isolated and ignored.
Changes are coming, but will these changes come in time to
save a sinking Europe from misguided decisions being taken by a largely left-wing
fractured continent?
One nation that is suffering from European misguided decisions
is Israel.
Parliamentary votes that work to bring about a Palestinian
state while ignoring the recent incitement, violence, terrorism and the
anti-Semitic platforms of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are deeply
troubling to an Israel that will be the only state faced with having to cope
with European willful blindness.
Indeed, a clear expression of this blindness was a European
Court of Justice denial that Hamas is a terrorist organization. This despite
their blatant daily practices of terrorism, added to the two month terror war
against we experienced last summer with terrorists emerging out of the ground
near Israeli villages and farms and thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli
civilian centers. Is this wasn't terrorism, what is?
Former Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, reminded Europe that
Hamas is “an extreme Islamic religious terrorist organization that must be
fought with all force.”
The European blindness to Hamas being a terrorist
organization is both a diplomatic and moral failure of epic proportion.
The Europeans would be better advised to pressure the
Palestinian to honor their Oslo commitment, namely to put an end to terror. A
European Court waving its pen simply does not make Palestinian terror
disappear.
Europe is committed by virtue of their signature to the Oslo
Accords not to change the political status of the Israel-Palestinian dispute
pending the outcome of a permanent settlement which can only result by direct
talks between the parties involved.
External unilateral moves can only endanger such an outcome.
This could be seen as a victory by the Palestinians, but Israel may treat it as
a basic breach of Oslo and a violation of signed agreements. And this would be
a disaster.
The Europeans would serve peace more effectively by forcing
the Palestinians back to the original “two states for two peoples”
solution which has been totally rejected by them. This meant a Palestinian Arab
state and a Jewish state as specified in UN Resolution 181, also known as the
Partition Plan. Europe seems to have ignored this. Why? It was supposed to be
the cornerstone of a permanent peace deal. In fact, they question the need for
Israel to insist on this condition.
Israel’s Prime Minister summed up the feeling of all
Israelis and Jews when Benjamin Netanyahu responded, “It seems that too many
in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned
nothing. But we in Israel, we've learned. We’ll continue to defend our people
and our state against the forces of terror and tyranny and hypocrisy.”
The hypocrisy was aimed squarely at a Europe that fails to
support the only liberal democracy in the region, but bends over backwards to
establish a state that will, in all likelihood, be headed by an Islamic terror
group or by a rejectionist body with a shared motivation to remove Israel as
part of a ‘liberating Palestine’ agenda.
European parliaments fall, one by one, to a ‘Palestine’
vote, and its court cannot understand what constitutes a terrorist organization
if it is cloaked in Palestinian clothes. The result of this shocking political
aberration brought the Israeli parliament into a rare unison.
Wall to wall condemnation was heard across Israel’s
divergent political spectrum against the European Court of Justice and European
parliaments whose decisions demonstrate the loss of a moral path to a bemused
Israel.
Clearly, Europe today does not have the stomach, or the
political will, to fight Islamic terror with all its force, if at all.
As Knesset Speaker, Yuli Edelstein, said, the European Union
“must have lost its mind!”
This is clearly the case. It’s a question of whether the
winds of political change in Europe will arrive in time to save itself, and
Israel, from the damaging tsunami of current political anti-Israel decisions.
Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the
Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com
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