Israel would cease to exist if it listened to European advice, Czech official says
“Prague is really still one of the European cities where Jews, even with a kippah, can feel safe and go around in the streets,” Tomáš Pojar said.
Prague is really still one of the European
cities where Jews, even with a kippah, can feel safe and go around in
the streets
Introducing his conversation on Thursday with Tomáš Pojar, the national security adviser to the Czech prime minister and government, Michael Makovsky, the president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, referred to the Czech Republic as “probably Israel’s closest ally in Europe.”
“Not probably,” Pojar said, waving his finger for emphasis. “The closest.”
Pojar, whose grandfather was Jewish, shared his concern about the rampant rise in antisemitism across Western cities.
“Prague is really still one of the European cities where Jews, even with a kippah, can feel safe and go around in the streets,” he said. “It’s one of those cities where Israelis speak openly in Hebrew, and it’s safe.”
The former Czech ambassador to Israel attributes this increasingly rare sense of tolerance toward Jews to the nation’s agnosticism and non-religiosity, having “never experienced the source or the magnitude of Catholic or Protestant antisemitism.”
“Over the centuries, the level of antisemitism in Czech society was always lower than the level of antisemitism of our neighbors in Central Europe and, I would say, in Europe,” he said.
For the most part, Jews were “very much assimilated and blended into the population,” according to Pojar.
‘Not-so-distant experience with totalitarianism’
That era of pluralism came to a screeching halt during World War II, when 90% of Czech Jews were “slaughtered, killed and murdered” during the Holocaust, he said. The country later proved instrumental in providing the fledgling Jewish state with the military equipment that it required to establish itself on the world stage in 1948.
That crucial support has extended to the present day, according to Pojar. The Czech foreign affairs minister arrived in Israel just two days after Oct. 7, and the prime minister came shortly thereafter.
Central and Eastern European powers backing Israel are a product of their “not-so-distant experience with totalitarianism,” and their “more rational worldview” than the more idealistic Western half of the continent, according to Pojar.
“I strongly believe that if Israel listened to mainstream European advice, it would already cease to exist,” he told JNS.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t Jew-hatred in Pojar’s country. “This disease coming from Western universities has also reached the Czech Republic,” he said.
Outbreaks of violence and physical attacks on Jews are far less common in Prague than elsewhere, Pojar said, and Czechs have dealt with “demonstrations and disturbances at some events by these groups of protesters.”
“After Oct. 7, you had the attacks on Israeli students and on Jewish students elsewhere. It has never happened in Prague,” he said. “We are still keeping this a safe place. There are no threats to Israelis, no threats to Jewish students.”
Pojar said the International Criminal Court—a stand-alone body in The Hague that is not part of the United Nations—thoroughly “discredited itself” when its prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
The court “will never be like before” and “cannot come back,” Pojar told JNS, accusing the court of a “relativization of good and evil.”
He made it a point to add that the Israeli-Czech alliance “is a sign of true friendship.”
No comments:
Post a Comment