January 18, 2015
'What are you doing to my Jews?'
That was the querulous question Winston Churchill barked at Colonial Secretary George Lloyd in the depths of World War II. It would be hard to imagine any other statesman asking such a question, speaking so paternally of the Jewish people. But weighed down with the burdens of fighting Hitler and the Japanese, Churchill nonetheless took time to bitterly accost his own cabinet member and upbraid him for trying to block immigration of desperate Jews into Palestine, then a British Mandate.
We certainly cannot imagine even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking such a question. Netanyahu recently flew, uninvited and not entirely welcome, to Paris. There, he exchanged brief frosty words with France’s Socialist president, François Hollande. They met outside the Grand Synagogue. Netanyahu was surely aware that even before the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo’s editorial offices and the kosher market, France’s climate of anti-Semitism had led 7,000 Jews to...(Read Full Article)