By DOVID BEN-MEIR
The first time the Jewish nation met Europeans was about 2,330 years ago. Our high priest, Shimon the Righteous, came from Jerusalem and met a Macedonian king on his chariot, leading an army coming from Europe. Alexander jumped off his chariot to bow before the high priest. His actions caused amazement: "Why would a great king like you bow down before this Jew?" He answered: "The night before a battle I see him in my dreams, telling me that I will win the battle". Now, seeing the high priest in real life – how could he not bow in acknowledgement and gratitude?The fact that this story – favorable to the Jewish nation – isn't regarded by Hellenic histories, is the first hint that the attitudes and actions of Europe to the Jewish nation would be less than truthful and just, throughout the generations.The first 140 years of Hellenist occupation in our homeland was reasonable enough. There was a degree of cultural exchange; Alexander was even adopted as a Jewish name. Then a new Seleucid emperor tried to force assimilation on the Jews. We fought for our spiritual independence, regaining political independence in the process.That independence, that gave us our holiday of Chanukah, was short-lived. New European imperialists came: the Romans, who were supposedly our allies by treaty, but that didn't deter them from conquering our land and subjugating us. We rebelled twice in our homeland against a cruel and rapacious foreign yoke that forced itself on us. Imperialist Rome destroyed our Holy Temple and Jerusalem, erased our Holy City by building a Roman city over the ruins, expelled us from Jerusalem, the Coliseum was built with loot from Jerusalem, the price of slaves in the empire plunged because of the surge of Jewish slaves put on the market, decreed against our religion and persecuted us in myriad ways.We survived. The Roman Empire didn't.Some of us became exiles in Europe. Over time we became excluded from most trades, professions and from owning land. We were forced into ghettos, made to wear special, demeaning clothes, periodically expelled with our possessions confiscated, libeled, our holy books burned, our people killed and our children kidnapped from us. When Christianity began its long and gradual process of decay in Europe – new reasons to hate Jews were invented and the persecutions continued. They culminated in the Holocaust that a supposedly civilized European culture executed while the rest either cheered, looked on, or in the case of Sweden and Switzerland – even assisted, by providing iron ore and banking facilities, respectively. Only some few thousand brave souls acted morally and courageously to save Jews during Europe's renewed descent into barbarity.Meanwhile, what transpired here in our homeland? We had started to return in growing numbers, buy land, reclaim wastelands, drain malarial swamps, re-built ancient towns and built entirely new cities where only sand had been for millennia (Tel Aviv).The British, more Europeans, wasted little time in discarding their international obligations to the League of Nations mandate. Instead of encouraging intense Jewish settlement of the land they closed large areas to Jews, forbidding us to purchase land, and curtailed Jewish return to the land at the same time that the Nazi war machine was warming up.Europeans once accosted Jews yelling at us: "Go to Palestina!" (the European name for the Land of Israel). Jews from all over the world, including the survivors of two thousand years of European persecutions, have finally returned home and re-established independence. Yet Europe still insists on pursuing us in our homeland, giving succor and support to the intolerant, intransigent party who deny the justice of our right to renewed self-determination in our homeland and who have instigated wars and terrorism against us, bringing much suffering to them and to us.Out of 200 regional conflicts, a decaying Europe, suffering low birth-rates and an inundation of non-assimilating immigrants, concentrates on pressuring Israel, wishing to punish us for living in our land, just as they once persecuted us for living in their land.Europe supports Turkish settlement in occupied Cyprus, Moroccan fisheries in occupied West Sahara, but condemns Jewish communities situated in the heartland of the land of Israel.Why am I not surprised?