European Union cancels ‘Europe Day’ Diplomatic Reception to Avoid Extremist Racist Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Chosen Representative

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Le Monde reports that a European Union diplomatic delegation to Tel Aviv announced Monday that it was canceling the diplomatic reception for Europe Day there because the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had selected far-right extremist Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir to represent it.

The site of the French ambassador to the United Nations, Nicolas de Rivière, explains that the European Union chose May 9 to commemorate a major speech of then French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman on May 9, 1950, in which he outlined new forms of cooperation in Europe that would achieve long-term peace. His proposal is now considered the “Birth Act” of the European Union. This year the EU is beginning the Year of Skills, encouraging Europeans to seek lifelong education.

Schuman suggested that France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg create a common market for their coal and steel resources by abolishing tariffs. He made this suggestion in concert with Jean Monnet and while he had established a channel to Konrad Adenauer, working for reconciliation.

In contrast, Ben-Gvir is a notorious racist, having been charged 50 times with incitement to racial violence. He wants to deport from Israel all those Israelis of Palestinian heritage who disagree with his policies– and even such Israeli Jews. “It is time for us to be landlords,” he says. He has defended a group that wants to ban intermarriage as “miscegenation” and that considers churches to be centers of idolatry that should be closed down. He has more than once pulled a gun on Palestinians. He told Palestinian security guards at a parking lot who asked him to move, “I’ll take care of you!” as he pulled his weapon.

He recently said he wanted the Palestinian hamlet of Huwara “shuttered and burned down.”

Like all extremists, Ben-Gvir got on his high horse about this snub, demanding the freedom of speech that he routinely attempts to deny to others, and confusing incitement to violence with free speech. Ben-Gvir tried to take control of Tel Aviv police to force them to take harsher measures against Israeli protesters against the government.

Let us turn to Europe Day’s honoree. From his European Union page and the Schuman project we can gather this about Schuman: He was born in Luxembourg, and lived in Alsace-Lorraine and so came under the influence both of France and Germany. After France regained Alsace-Lorraine he ran for the French parliament from there and was elected. He had devoted himself after his mother’s death to peacemaking, and hoped that the Vichy could find a way to restore peace. But he came to understand that the Nazis could not be reasoned with.

He refused General Petain’s offer of a job under Nazi occupation in France and so was arrested and transported to prison in Germany in 1940. The Nazis tried very hard to recruit him to write for them, threatening him with consignment to a death camp at Auschwitz if he did not comply, but he refused. In 1942, he managed to escape. He went to France.

As long as Vichy was not under direct rule from Berlin, he was able to move about and address audiences, assuring them that Germany had already lost the war and it was only a matter of time until it was defeated. The Nazis put a $100,000 bounty on his head. He was one of the first sources to report, with horror, on the mass killings of Jews in Ukraine, which he probably heard about in prison or from the German officials who tried to recruit him. He also, however, had gained a good idea of the massive losses taken by the German people and military, which was the origin of his conviction that Berlin had already lost.

He had to go into hiding when Germany asserted direct rule, and was in touch with the French Resistance. General De Gaulle attempted to persuade him to come to London, but he preferred to operate covertly in France.

After the war he reentered parliament and then became the French foreign minister. In a major speech at the Court of St. James on May 5, 1949, Schuman said that a new supranational Europe would emerge without anyone giving up their national identity and traditions. It would be sited in France, of which he said

“Our revolutionaries once carried beyond our frontiers the new message of liberty – today this has became the legacy of all mankind. In their zeal they did not always know how to keep themselves within the limit of peaceful methods. We will not suffer the same temptation. Example and persuasion will be the only means available in this enterprise; it will be exclusively peaceful and constructive. We will threaten nobody.”

He warned against selfish nationalism: “We know only too well where the ‘splendid’ and selfish isolation of states can lead us. States, like individuals, were created to get to understand each other and to help each other out.”

Schuman stood against racial animosity, and it was his ability to reach out to Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, that helped lay the foundations for the European Union.

This is the man and the vision that May 9 honors in Europe.

Schuman and Ben-Gvir could not be more different. The EU was correct to cancel the diplomatic reception once Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had the temerity to send the infamous proponent of “Jewish Power” to represent Israel there. The episode shows the ways in which the current government, the most extreme and fascistic in Israeli history, is raising questions about the place of Israel in polite society. Its Apartheid practices should already have done that, but ex-colonial powers in Europe touchy about their own sordid past seem to have difficulty denouncing them. Open Jewish supremacy is another matter.