Why The European Union--By It's Nature--Just Doesn't Get Israel [Updated]

George Will touches upon what it is that makes Israel so intelligible to Europe--and to the European Union:

The European Union was born from the flight of Europe's elites from what terrifies them -- Europeans. The first Thirty Years' War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ratified the system of nation-states. The second Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1945, convinced European elites that the continent's nearly fatal disease was nationalism, the cure for which must be the steady attenuation of nationalities. Hence the high value placed on "pooling" sovereignty, never mind the cost in diminished self-government.


Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit. It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves -- with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel United Nations and Russia -- as part of the "quartet" that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians. [emphasis added]

This idea--that Israel is the very antithesis of what the European Union is all about--is touched discussed more thoroughly by Yoram Hazony in an essay that examines Israel Through European Eyes:

It is a little-discussed fact that the Jews are not the only ones for whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of World War II. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the opposite of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of humanity, which is national particularism. On this view, the death camps provide the ultimate proof of the evil that results from permitting nations to decide for themselves how to dispose of the military power in their possession. The obvious conclusion is that it was wrong to give the German nation this power of life and death. If such evil is to be prevented from happening again and again, the answer must be in the dismantling of Germany and the other national states of Europe, and the yoking together of all the European peoples under a single international government. Eliminate the national state once and for all—Ecrasez l’infame!—and you have sealed off that dark road to Auschwitz.

Notice that according to this view, it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union: A united Europe will make it impossible for Germany, or any other European nation, to rise up and persecute others once again. In this sense, it is European Union that stands as the guarantor of the future peace of the Jews, and indeed, of all humanity.[emphasis added]

The Arab world, on the other hand--at least as it exists today as a collection of states--is a result of politics and agreements between the Great Britain in particular and the Arabs. Those agreements by the Arabs to help the British against Germany were of course notoriously left unfulfilled, especially in light of their active relationship with Nazi Germany.

As far as George Will's article goes, his main point--as Joshuapundit discusses--is: Netanyahu, The Anti-Obama.

UPDATE: On the issue of Kant, mentioned by Hazony, actually hated Jews bitterly, despite his famed universalism. Check out Eliott L. Green's Reason, Science and Progress:
Modern Pretexts for Judeophobia, Left & Right

Technorati Tag: Obama and Netanyahu.