Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
French for liberty, equality and fraternity, these three words are the national motto of France.
Unless, it seems, you are a Jewish French citizen.
But it’s not just France. We would be kidding ourselves if we didn’t mention England and Germany as well.
Let’s start with France, with Europe’s largest Jewish population of 500,000. That number is dropping, with tens of thousands of French Jews moving to Israel, the United States or elsewhere. And yes, there is a correlation with Muslim hate crimes against Jews, some of them deadly, as the Muslim demographic group has grown to almost 10 million.
Those crimes have included the murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old who survived the Holocaust, only to be killed by a Muslim assailant in her own Paris apartment.
The anti-Semitic acts have risen in direct correlation with Muslim population growth. There is no shortage of media comments regarding the Jews who don’t wear something as simple as a kippah in public because it risks their safety.
Also, these acts seem to correspond with spikes in Middle East tension between Arabs and Jews.
But it’s not just as a result of the Middle East, nor is it just in France. It seems with more frequency we hear about assaults such as the 10 Syrian migrants who attacked a Jewish German citizen. And then there’s the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitic remarks in Great Britain.
No, it’s not 1933, and there’s not someone named Hitler gaining German nationalistic popularity. We learned from the Holocaust that we should take all signs of anti-Semitism seriously and not shrug our shoulders as if hatred will go away by itself.
These serious signs are all the more reason why Israel needs to be the Jewish state, and why it has the right, like any other nation, to declare its status as such.
We wish the Jewish nation state had been there in the 1930s and beyond. It wasn’t, and our community paid the price. Still, it’s important now as well. It’s important to know that Israel (and, thank God, the U.S. as well) is still there for Jews who might realize that their futures in Europe aren’t ever going to be secure.
Anti-Semitism is no longer just percolating beneath the surface in modern Europe.
We say shame on a society that knowingly endangers any of its people. But France has seen and done this before to its Jewish citizens.
God help Europe if the Jews continue to leave.
But thank God, this time they have welcome places to go.
A Jewish nation state.
And a nation of states welcoming to Jews.
