Editorial: Friends and their cars

Issue of February 19, 2010/ 6 Adar 5770

As is the case in so many areas of life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

It’s true about mutual funds and it’s true about various nations’ historical and modern-day relationships with the Jews and, by extension, the State of Israel.

For six million good reasons, many Jewish people refuse to drive German cars or use German products in general. The memories of our families and friends, the victims of Germany’s industrial age murder plot, should never and will never be forgotten. Yet, an equally inescapable fact is that modern-day Germany is one of the best friends Israel has in all the world. Sure, it’s ironic, but it happens to be the case, nonetheless.

Conversely, during World War Two, more than 25,000 Jews were allowed to use Spain as an escape route to safety, and Sweden made room for virtually the entire Jewish population of Denmark — 8,000 souls saved from the Nazi furnace.

Yet, Spain didn’t formally establish diplomatic relations with Israel until 1986 and today its leaders are reliably among Israel’s harshest critics. So are the leaders of Sweden who, recently, even proposed a delusional plan for the European Union to unilaterally recognize East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. (For those paying attention, that would be the capital of a Palestinian state that doesn’t formally exist, at least not yet). The bizarre plan was voted down by the European Union, but Sweden tried nonetheless.

And, it was a Swedish newspaper that published the utterly discredited story about Israeli troops harvesting Palestinian organs for transplant into ailing Israelis — utterly discredited, but persisting nonetheless as a modern day blood libel.

Germany, Spain and Sweden do have in common uniformly poor treatment of Jews long ago. Jews were massacred wholesale in Germany during the Crusades — read an English translation of the Kinnot of Tisha B’Av to learn more about that — and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at Tisha B’Av in 1492 is well known. In Sweden Jews were restricted to three areas and subject to various restrictions until the 1780’s, despite Jewish money financially propping up the Swedish monarchy. The rules didn’t truly loosen until the late 1800’s and Jews in Sweden were not granted equality until 1910.

While the Holocaust will never be forgotten, why can’t we seem to bring our friends and enemies lists up to date?

That is to say, given all of this historical information, one might be forgiven for wondering why, in 2010, so many Jews still would never consider buying a Mercedes or a BMW, but driving a Volvo seems to pose no problem at all.

Just wondering.