OPINION:
In the 19th century, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr coined a saying about the continuity of history: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” (The more things change, the more they remain the same.)
The recent issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague has brought this French epigram to mind as it has evoked powerful echoes of some of history’s most unsavory moments.
Throughout the two millennia since the beginning of the common era, Jews have systematically been the pariahs of much of the known world with forceful attempts to convert them, ostracize them or eliminate them.
This anti-Jewish furor rose to a fever pitch during the Crusades as European armies seeking to liberate the Holy Land from Muslims slaughtered thousands of Jews who were in the way as the armies marched east. The slaughters were indiscriminate, with women and children tortured and killed without mercy in the name of Christian charity.
Without much respite, Jews remained targets of oppression and exclusion across much of Europe. England expelled its Jews in 1290, and France expelled its Jews in 1182, 1305, 1322 and 1394. In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish community, then the largest such community in Europe.
Unable to defend themselves, these Jewish communities had to suffer endless dramatic dislocations or worse. And when Jews were allowed to live in Western nations from time to time, they were nonetheless relegated to pariah status. Ranging from accusations that they were guilty of ritual murder (the false accusation that Jews use Christian blood to bake the unleavened bread eaten at Passover), that they were vile moneylenders (when most other occupations were forbidden to them) and that they were disloyal to their countries of residence (even though they would die in great numbers defending those nations), endless depredations were carried out against Jews.
With frequency, even in modern times, discrimination and persecution continue. There was the unjustified espionage prosecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in late 19th-century France, primarily because he was a Jew and deemed likely to be a traitor to France. Anti-Jewish feelings resonated across France. Ultimately, Dreyfus was exonerated, but not before he was made to suffer indignities and vile imprisonment on Devil’s Island.
As late as 1912, the czarist regime in Russia permitted the prosecution of a Jew on a charge of ritual murder. And of course, the Nazi Holocaust in the 20th century, which resulted in the industrialized killing of 6 million Jews, with the complicity of many European nations, was the apex of violence against Jews.
All of this establishes an unenviable pattern for Western nations. This pattern was allegedly broken in the aftermath of World War II, with the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust and its mass destruction of the European Jewish community. It might have been expected that civilized nations sufficiently awakened to the consequences of Jew-hatred would have turned away from the vile isolation and persecution of Jews.
Yet just days ago, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the British lawyer Karim Khan, seemed to fall right into a pattern as he decided to issue a warrant for the arrest of two representatives of the Jewish people on unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes.
The war in question continues as Israeli leaders attempt to retrieve civilian hostages taken following an unprovoked and horrific attack by Hamas militants and as they seek to put an end to the unceasing launching of missiles by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israeli civilians. The charges filed by Mr. Khan are, on their face, simply anti-Israel and, if we do not mince words, anti-Jewish. Even worse, a number of European nations have announced that they are prepared to enforce these warrants (although France seems to have decided otherwise, at least temporarily).
Israel, as the world’s only Jewish state, is the ultimate symbolic Jewish community within the world community. Joining in an attack on the leaders of that state needs to be characterized for what it is: anti-Jewish.
The echo of past anti-Jewish actions is inescapable. As has happened so often in the past, Jews are being attacked for actions that have never caused and would never cause others to be prosecuted.
Nations have always fought ferociously against those who seek to destroy them. Ask the French, the British, the Dutch, the Czechs, the Poles and our fellow Americans. This has been an unbroken tradition that remains in force, as manifested most recently by the assistance given to Ukraine as that nation defends itself (including by offensive actions) against Russia.
Yet when Israel, overtly threatened with destruction by Iran and its proxies, seeks to eliminate that threat and to free its captives, its leaders are deemed guilty of war crimes. Jews are again being treated differently from every other group. With the ICC becoming an instrument of anti-Jewish prejudice, the pattern of anti-Jewish conduct seems alive and well.
There is another French expression that has persisted for centuries. It was said of the Bourbon kings by that great cynic Talleyrand that “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublie.” [They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.] That statement seems apt in the current situation.
Sophisticated nations assuredly remember the systemic persecution of Jews over the course of thousands of years, but it does not appear that they have learned much. Antisemitism appears to be thriving yet again.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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