The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. I have loved you, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob…(Malachi 1:1-2)
All of Europe and all throughout Russia were places which once teemed with communities of Jews. Moses predicted that the Jews would be scattered to the very ends of the earth, because of their national sins, but most of world Jewry spent their long exile (70 AD – 1948 AD) in Europe. Jewish life continued its precarious existence in spite of frequent pograms, persecutions, confinements to ghettos, humiliations and national expulsions.
There were periods of limited and localized European favor for Jewry, there were even several Jewish renaissances in different times and places, such as in Spain, and in Britain when Disraeli was prime minister, and in Napoleanic France,Italy and the Netherlands where Jewish intellectuals flourished and exerted an inordinate degree of influence on European society.
But always underneath the European surface was the constant specter of sudden shifts of public opinion, the outbreak of blood libels, antisemitic pograms and demonstrations which could occur at any time.These outbreaks occurred especially in the Catholic countries such as Poland and Italy, and in Eastern Europe and Czarist Russia.
These tensions came to their fullest expression in the holocaust inflicted on Jewry by the Nazis and aided much by their allies in Eastern Europe. Even many places (such as in Poland)which the Nazis conquered, voluntarily offered up their own Jewish population to Nazi exterminators, and participated directly in sending millions of Jews to their deaths.
It was as though the gates of hell broke open,and all of the centuries long Anti-Semitic passions rose to the surface in the crucible of World Wars 1 & 2. Thus, there was a very credible effort to wipe out all of World Jewry , using modern technology, media propaganda and German efficiency!
The rest of Europe and America also didn’t prove to be any more sympathetic to the Jewish people, with some notable exceptions,( such as the people of Denmark, and heroes like the Ten-Booms of Holland and Raoul Wallenberg).
The United States and England were both fully made aware of the horrors that the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jews but chose to ignore until very late in the war.
This Western diffidence to the plight of the Jews is underscored by the episode of the ocean liner, The ST Louis, which was a chartered ship bearing more than 900 Jewish refugees, headed for Cuba to escape the holocaust in early May, 1939. By the time the Ship arrived in Cuba, Nazi agents had stirred up antisemitic suspicion and the cuban government refused to allow the ship to disembark.
The St Louis headed north hoping to disembark on the shores of America, but was turned away. Finally agreements were made to allow minuscule numbers of Jews to disembark in France, Belgium, Holland and England. Three of those nations would be occupied by Germans within months, and most of the refugees perished in death camps.
The Jewish Virtual Library recounts
Through miraculous negotiations, the JDC was able to find several countries that would take portions of the refugees. 181 could go to Holland, 224 to France, 228 to Great Britain, and 214 to Belgium.The passengers disembarked from the S.S. St. Louis from June 16 to June 20. Other ships were transformed to carry the passengers to their locations.Having crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice, the passengers’ original hopes of freedom in Cuba and the U.S. turned into a forlorn effort to escape sure death upon their return to Germany. Feeling alone and rejected by the world, the passengers returned to Europe in June 1939.
There were lame gatherings such as the Evian conference, 32 nations hosted by Roosevelt held by the Allies to discuss what to do about the reports of the horrors suffered by the Jews at the Nazi death camps. But nothing significant came of it, for not one of the western nations began a significant effort to rescue the Jews.
When Hitler heard of the conference, he contemptuously retorted;
“I can only hope that the other world which has such deep sympathy for these criminals(Jews) will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We on our part are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships”.
At one point in the war, desperate for cash, Hitler even offered to sell Jews destined for death camps, for two dollars a piece! Millions of Jews could have been rescued, but the west couldn’t be bothered.
It took allied soldiers marching across Europe and happening across the extermination camps to bring the plight of Jews to the forefront. The leaders of the West may have been callous and indifferent to Jews, but when GI’s from Kansas,Iowa and New York kicked down the gates and were greeted by the skeleton survivors, the horror of Nazi and European antisemitism came to the fore-front.
When the World War ended in an allied victory and the rubble was cleared and Europe was being rebuilt, there was great guilt and angst over the near genocide of the Jews. The strongly worded slogan was “Never Again” and the Jews of Europe enjoyed a respite from the near constant hatred and suspicion they had endured for centuries.
Yes there were exceptions to this rule, The Royal navy rammed a ship full of European Jews seeking to enter their ancient homeland, called at the time “Palestine”. The ship was aptly called, The Exodus, but there would be no Exodus under the English mandate in 1946, the passengers , who had escaped death in the Nazi death camps were forcibly repatriated, and as if to humiliate these survivors, they were sent to internment camps in post war Germany!
But for the next several decades the watch word in Europe and the civilized West was “Never Again” . The shame of Europe over her collaboration with Satan himself in the slaughter of the Jews has disfigured and marked the European psyche to this day.
It was not until the 1970’s that the ground began to be laid for the modern version of European Anti-Semitism.
In 1948 something occurred which is a bill-board sized sign that the prophecies have been fulfilled and that Jesus was coming, for Israel cane back into existence as a nation in May, 1948. The Christian world considers it a miracle but the Muslim world calls it “Al Naqba”, the disaster.
When the combined, massive Arab armies failed five times over to “wipe out the name of Israel”, in spite of overwhelming numbers, weapons and the element of surprise, they turned to the use of oil as leverage.
The French, which had been greatly reduced during the two world wars and eager to have a countering influence on the world, to the two “Superpowers”, the USA and the Soviets, were open to agreements with the Arab world especially after the “Six Day War” of 1967.
Bat Yeor writes about the seeds off the European Arab dialogue in an article entitled “The Euro-Arab dialogue and the birth of Eurabia”;
After the 1967 Six-Days war, France became the instigator of a European anti-Israel policy. She did not readily forgive Israel for its lightning victory over a coalition comprising Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians – and supported by the entire Arab world. At international forums France voted in favour of Arab anti-Israel resolutions and backed a unilateral boycott of arms sales to the Jewish state (1969). At the European level, French diplomacy supported Arab interests, setting out to bend European policy in a pro-Arab, anti-Israel direction. In this context, France examined the concept of a Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) with Libya. (1)
The joint Egyptian-Syrian war against Israel in 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, utilized as a weapon of world pressure, favored French schemes. Mortified by the Arab defeat after a successful beginning, the Arab oil-producing countries met in Kuwait (October 16-17 ), where they decided unilaterally to quadrupled the price of oil, to reduce gradually by 5% each month their production of crude oil until the withdrawal of Israel from the territories the Arab had lost in their war of 1967 and failed to recover in their 1973 war. They imposed an embargo on deliveries destined to the countries considered friendly to Israel: the United States, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The consuming countries were classified as friendly, neutral, or enemy countries.
Every agreement for affordable and free flowing oil, between France and the Arab world, then between the wider European Economic Community, involved demands controlling European policy towards Israel, the insistence upon the establishment of a Palestinian state, and of course loosening of restrictions upon mass Arab immigration.
These Arab demands went even further, demanding Arab influence in all levels of education in Europe, and Islamic influence on European foreign policies.
As Muslim immigrants poured in, Anti-Semitism flowed in also. To accommodate the Muslims, many European schools conceded to not teach the holocaust , and large parts of European cities became Muslim enclaves. As each decade since the 1970s has passed, Jewish life has become much more uncertain, to the point where in places such as France, Jewish people are saying it feels like 1936 all over again.
As Jacob( Israel) is forced to leave Europe, Esau is flowing in and overwhelming it. I wonder if any in Europe now wish for the days when Jacob could live there comfortably. Jacob has certainly contributed far more to civilization than Esau ever did.
Europe is transforming before our very eyes.Whatever it once was, it is rapidly changing.
Many of us believe that the Roman Empire must be revived, and that the time of the ten Kings and the iron mixed with clay is nigh. Most importantly, we are at the time of the coming of the Rock not formed by human hands , destined to shatter the proud, humanistic enterprise to powder and for the dawning of the Kingdom of God on earth under Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Maranatha!