This strikes me as Jewish purity spiraling. If you want to insist on a purity test before you’ll talk to somebody, you won’t talk to many people.
There are no permanent friends or allies in the world. Different groups have different interests that sometimes align. There are no good guys or bad guys unless you look at things through the lens of faith. Otherwise, there are just different forms of life trying to survive.
Israel seems more pragmatic about these things.
Jews in Europe are voicing increasing consternation about Israel’s budding engagement with surging far-right European parties that have anti-Semitic histories.
In Poland, Austria and the halls of the World Jewish Congress, among other places, Diaspora activists are raising sharp questions about the morality of Jerusalem’s foreign policy.
“We should not abandon our heritage and cut deals with the devil,” said Avi Primor, a veteran diplomat who was Israel’s ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1996 and keeps in close touch with Europe’s Jews. In a phone interview. Primor, who is currently chairman of the European Studies department at Tel Aviv University, added, “I am afraid we are losing our ideals more and more.”
The rising concern is one that Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, shares, as reflected in a December 20 letter he wrote to leaders of Vienna’s Jewish community that was released earlier in January.
“We generations close to the Holocaust must be very clear that no interests of any kind can justify a shameful alliance with groups or individuals who fail to recognize responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust,” Rivlin wrote to Viennese Jewish leaders.
Rivlin warned, too, against Israeli ties with groups that “envisage re-creating such crimes against any foreigner, refugee or migrant who dares to, in their view, ‘contaminate’ their living space.”
The letter appeared to be an implicit rebuke of recent outreach by Israeli officials to far-right parties in Europe. Among them were Austria’s Freedom Party, led by Heinz-Christian Strache.
Rivlin’s letter was also a response to a letter released publicly in November by WJC’s vice president, Ariel Muzicant, and by Oskar Deutsch, head of Vienna’s Jewish community, complaining that “certain politicians in Israel are willing to meet populist parties of the European extreme right,” including Austria’s Freedom Party. The letter beseeched Israeli leaders “to draw a very clear red line between us and those who represent hate, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism.”
In Poland, another Israeli overture to the far right took place September 7, when Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw, Anna Azari, hosted an hour-long meeting with Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, head of Radio Maryja. The station, a Polish radio and television network, was branded by the U.S. State Department in 2008 as “one of Europe’s most blatantly anti-Semitic media venues.” In a 2011 report, Poland’s own Broadcasting Authority condemned the station for disseminating “nationalistic racism.”
According to Israel’s Polish Embassy Facebook page, Azari and Rydzyk talked about building a Polish-Jewish dialogue. Rydzyk is quoted with glowing words about his trips to Israel: “Multiculturalism is beautiful and causes great enrichment and diversity of Israeli society.”
