Forty members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, have responded to a leaked European Union strategy document which detailed how the organization seeks to further its hostile activities toward Israel. In a letter to European Union officials, the Israeli lawmakers highlighted “the one-sidedness and animosity of the EU towards the State of Israel and the Jewish people,” drawing attention to fact that the EU and member states provide “ongoing and continuous contribution, both direct and indirect, to campaigns designed to tarnish Israel’s name, from blood libels regarding alleged violence on the part of settlers, through unfounded accusations that Israel deliberately harms children, to specious comparisons of the policies of the government of the State of Israel to those of the Apartheid regime in South Africa of yesteryear.”

The letter also cites the fact that the EU “completely ignores our people’s historical affinity to our homeland, completely ignores the political agreements and the status of the State of Israel in Area C and seeks to establish the 1949 borders as Israel’s final-status permanent borders – in complete disregard of the Jewish communities in the area.” Area C is a section of Judea and Samaria mistakenly but commonly referred to as “the West Bank,” that is under Israeli jurisdiction. The 1949 armistice lines are frequently, but also incorrectly, called “the 1967 borders,” describing Israel’s boundaries prior to the 1967 defensive war in which Israel prevailed over multiple Arab armies sworn to her destruction. Israeli statesman Abba Eban once described the 1949 map as “for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”

Zionist Organization of America National President Morton A. Klein stated, “The continent of Europe, which is soaked in the blood of millions of Jews, has no business intruding in the affairs of, let alone undermining, the Jewish state of Israel. Since the sacking of Jerusalem and the expulsion of many of the Jews of Judea by the Roman empire, Jews have been subject to the whims of Europeans for thousands of years. Since the establishment of the modern state of Israel, which democratically elects its leaders who set national policy, that can and must no longer be the case. The EU and member states have no right nor reason to interfere with Israeli sovereignty. As the child of Holocaust survivors and having lost most of my family to the antisemitism of Europe, I can hardly find any activity more outrageous.”