As Edelstein rightly says, the European attitude “violate[s] basic norms, increase[s] tensions between Europe and Israel, and [makes] Israelis weary of outside policy recommendations.” His conclusion is unpleasant: “European colonialism in the region ended after the Second World War but in Israel, it remains to this day.”
When we ask why Europe is behaving in such an appaling, condescending manner with regard to Israel, this author, a non-Jewish European, can only draw an equally unpleasant, but unavoidable, conclusion: many Europeans are still under the sway of the same anti-Semitism — couched as moral self-regard — that brought about their homicidal complicity in the Dreyfus Trial and in handing over Jews to be murdered by Hitler’s Third Reich.