Malmö, the city in Sweden, has just hosted the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. The city saw howling mobs against the contestant from Israel, Eden Golan. The mobs gave me a few memories.
In 2009, the Israeli national tennis team played a Davis Cup match in Malmö — against the Swedish team. The match had to be played in an empty arena, however — because of howling mobs. Because of anti-Israel animus.
Go to New Zealand now. For two years in a row, an Israeli tennis player at the ASB Classic was screamed at. Continually screamed at. She was Shahar Pe’er, who was in her early 20s. No other player had to endure such a thing. Just the Israeli.
In both London and Edinburgh, concerts of the Jerusalem Quartet were disrupted. A concert of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC Proms was disrupted. One of the critics in attendance said that the hall “had the atmosphere of a riot.”
I wrote about these things nine years ago, in a piece called “Hung Up on Israel: An explanation for the sincere.” (It was an answer to people who asked, “Why do you care so much about Israel?”) Last September, I wrote a similar piece: “Ukraine: Why the Fuss?” (I wrote it for the same purpose.)
Wherever they go in the world, Israeli athletes and musicians are harassed. Singled out. I don’t like the government of Iran, say, or the government of China — they are vicious, murderous dictatorships. But would you or I ever harass Iranian or Chinese athletes or musicians?
You take my point.
• David Frum said that anti-Israel demonstrations today reminded him of the Hep-Hep riots in the first part of the 19th century. These riots were a reaction against Jewish emancipation in the German lands.
I thought of Gertrude Himmelfarb — who introduced me to George Eliot and her 1878 essay “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” (This was the cry of the Crusaders as they fell upon the Jews: “Hep! Hep! Hep!” The rioters centuries later adopted it.)
Eliot’s essay bears reading, needless to say: here. You may also enjoy an article that Cynthia Ozick wrote for the Guardian in 2012: “My hero: George Eliot.”
• Imagine if you were Israel, having to fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. Israelis don’t have to imagine it: They have to do it. Their enemies place themselves in hospitals and schools — how do you fight such an enemy? This is what Israel has to work out, decade after decade.
Listen to Joe Biden address the subject in 2006:
• A headline from the New York Times: “Hillary Clinton Accuses Protesters of Ignorance of Mideast History.” The former secretary of state said she had had “many conversations” with “a lot of young people over the last many months now.” And? “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
She was being interviewed on Morning Joe. Watch her:
Could the Palestinians have had their state for the past 24 years? I think of something that David Pryce-Jones taught me, long ago: The Palestinians (as they later came to be known) could have had their state starting in 1947, when the (new) United Nations offered its partition. Instead of coexistence — instead of two states — they chose war. As people will tell you, the Arab–Israeli conflict is complicated. But it comes down to something rather simple: Peaceful coexistence or not? Everything hinges on that.