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With the laudable exception of some prominent European individuals and organizations, Europe’s overall attitude toward Israel can be defined as contradictory at best, problematic at worst. Consider:

• At the dawn of the 20th Century, the British were in favor of establishing a Jewish national home in Eretz Israel (Palestine), thus allowing a Jewish state to reemerge in its ancestral homeland. A few decades later, Great Britain was doing its best to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine; it went so far as to return ships full of Jewish refugees, who ended up in Nazi ovens.
• The French, who in 1956 (together with the British) assisted Israel during the Sinai Campaign, imposed a military embargo on the Jewish state in 1967 at a time when Israel’s national existence was in critical jeopardy.
• Post-World War II Germany did emerge as an unequivocal diplomatic ally of Israel. However, by the early 1990s, it had become such a major supplier of biological weapons to the Arab World that when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles against Tel Aviv, some Israelis noted that — had those missiles carried nerve gas – it would have been the second time in the same century that Jews would had been murdered with German gas.
• The Oslo process was a European (specifically Norwegian) contribution to «peace and stability in the Middle East.» Yet this political program resulted in Israel’s relinquishing strategic land assets, making it more vulnerable geographically and more isolated regionally. Eventually it led to today’s tragic war of attrition.
• Belgium is currently trying to prosecute Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a war criminal for his role in the Lebanon war, which took place almost two decades ago.
• Denmark created a diplomatic scandal recently when it objected to Israel’s designation of Carmi Gillon as ambassador to Copenhagen. (In the end, it accepted him.) Gillon is a former head of Israel’s security services, who publicly has said that he favors using «moderate physical pressure» against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
• Europe funds incitive and outright anti-Semitic textbooks in the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Syria. It holds many «constructive dialogues» with terror-sponsoring states; it confers a red-carpet treatment upon the most brutal of Middle Eastern dictators. It has a vocally anti-Israel intelligentsia (a French newspaper recently likened the Palestinians to a people hanging on a cross, while a British daily questioned the wisdom of the existence of a Jewish state).

When you consider all these facts, you realize that a fundamentally Arabist orientation is a deeply ingrained reality of European politics.

Which leaves us with some difficult questions: Why is Europe so anti-Israel? Why does it almost al- ways side with Israel’s most implacable foes?

One could point to Europe’s 12 million-strong Muslim community, to the fact that the Middle East has half of the world’s oil reserves, and to the continental determination to chart a separate political course from that of the United States (thus «balancing» the perceived pro-Israel American stance).

But in addition to these factors, Francois Zimeray, one of the 10 pro-Israel supporters in the 626-member European Parliament, has suggested a psychological consideration. He argues that Europeans still carry around with them the burden of responsibility for the Holocaust. It is a heavy load to bear, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict brings «an extraordinary opportunity to expiate this responsibility.» Accordingly, he says, many Europeans – often unwittingly – reason that they bear less guilt for what they did to the Jews in the past in light of what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians today. In other words, if yesterday’s victims are today’s aggressors, then the guilty of yesterday feel more innocent in the present. Thus the need to portray the Israelis as consummate victimizers.

There is an even deeper and more-ominous question concerning the problematic nature of European history as it intersects with that of the Jews. Over the centuries, the Europeans have visited upon the Jews massacres, expulsions, book-burnings, inquisitions and gas chambers. Although today’s Europeans are not actively engaged in murdering Jews, they are nonetheless supporting -militarily, economically and diplomatically – the states and entities that can impose a national tragedy on the only Jewish state in the globe.

Evidently, there is something very wrong at the root of European behavior toward Israel. Something that may go beyond political, economic and even psychological considerations. Something that may have to do with a moral disease that has afflicted mankind for millennia. We all know its name.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.