Before the program, Emanuele Ottolenghi, right, converses with Michael Curtis, who was once his teacher and mentor while serving as a visiting professor at the University of Bologna.
Photos by Marilyn Silverstein
July 22, 2008
Europeans feel a sense of unease about the State of Israel, observed the executive director of American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute in Brussels.
“In Europe, there is a steady erosion of legitimacy for Israel and therefore for those who support Israel and those who identify with Israel and those who feel sympathy for Israel,” Emanuele Ottolenghi told New Jersey Jewish News at Greenacres Country Club in Lawrenceville on June 1. He was there to deliver the keynote address at the 2008 annual meeting of AJC’s Central New Jersey Chapter.
“The cacophony is so deafening that you sooner or later will buy into it, or some of it,” Ottolenghi said. “There is a kind of silencing effect, which also has a corrosive effect on the new generation.
“It forces upon you a number of difficult choices,” he said. “Some are opting out. Some are slowly embracing part of the arguments of our opponents. It’s something that is having a very, very pernicious effect, and it’s very pervasive.”
The cornerstone of the AJC event was the presentation of the 2008 Philip Forman Human Relations Award to longtime AJC activists Michael Curtis and Judith Brodsky of Princeton.
Ferne Hassan, AJC’s assistant regional director, said she wanted to bring Ottolenghi in to enlighten people about the importance of having a presence in Brussels, where the European Union meets.
“The Transatlantic Union enables us to invite members of the European Union to hear what they would otherwise not hear,” Hassan said. “I wanted people to understand the reach of American Jewish Committee and also to put a face on the Transatlantic Institute and have them understand what Emanuele is doing on a day-to-day basis.”
As Ottolenghi set about describing that work to the 160 AJC members and guests in attendance, he noted that the view from his window in Brussels is very different from the view from Lawrenceville.
“Europeans look at the Middle East and see problems that they think are caused by Israel’s policies and sometimes by its very existence,” he said. “They judge Israel, America, and the Middle East through the lens of the European past.”
One legacy of that past is that Europeans blame their national tragedies on colonialism and the use of force, according to Ottolenghi, who was born in Italy.
At the AJC event, Judith Brodsky of Princeton was presented with the Philip Forman Human Relations Award.
“Europe’s commitment to the repudiation of force as a legitimate tool in international relations also informs its foreign policy,” he said. “For Europeans, American diplomacy is too one-sided in favor of Israel. This leads Europeans to question coordinating with the United States in confronting the challenges in the region.”
Ottolenghi pointed to ads that recently appeared in The New Statesman and Le Monde that sought to compare the Holocaust with what the Palestinians call “Al-Nakbah” — “the Catastrophe” of the Arab defeat of 1948. Not long ago, he said, an open letter signed by writers, intellectuals, and “the chattering classes” announced that they would not celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary because the Jewish state had been founded on the “terrorism” of dispossessing Palestinians from their land.
“The more this discourse becomes prevalent in Europe, the more the new generation takes it for granted, the harder it will be to make Israel’s case in Europe, and the more pressure there will be in the community to conform to this worldview,” he said.
‘Change the discourse’
However, he added, the good news is that not everyone in Europe is buying into that worldview.
The Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, he said, has mounted “a small, modest effort to change the discourse by creating a safe space for those who disagree with these kinds of prejudices. We need a thousand more like it.”
Expanding on his remarks in an interview, Ottolenghi said that Europeans identify nationalism and religion as the two main reasons for the centuries of war and devastation on their continent.
“They think the tremendous success of the European continent derives from their ability to identify these two evils and renounce them in the name of peace, prosperity, unity, and freedom,” he said. “So the choice they made to forego nationalism and religion as sources of identity explains their unease at looking at Israel, because Israel is a product of nationalism inspired by religion.”
Although Europeans recognize that Israel has a right to defend itself, they believe that the use of force solves nothing, he said.
“Then there is colonialism,” he said. “Europeans look at Israel, and in Israel they see a reflection of the demons of their own past. They look at Israel and think that it is a European white-settler movement that snapped an indigenous population from its land and enslaved them and denied their individual rights and imposed a national and religious ideology.”
Even so, some saner voices are being raised in Europe, where, he said, it is “very tricky to be Jewish,” and many of those voices are making themselves heard through the Transatlantic Institute, which opened in February 2004.
“One of our research projects is learning what the EU can do with Iran to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” he said. “It’s been creative and different from what you hear all the time, and it’s making some progress….
“Sometimes,” he said, “all it takes is to sing from a different score sheet.”
A highlight of the event was the award presentation to Curtis, an author and activist, and Brodsky, a printmaker. “We’re very happy to be involved in the American Jewish Committee and to participate in their activities,” said Curtis, professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and a founder and past president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East.
“I’m thrilled,” said Brodsky, a professor emerita of visual arts at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and founding director of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions there. “This is kind of a culmination of many aspects of my involvement in Judaism and Israel.”
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