If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem, Let My Right Hand Forget Her Cunning. - Psalm 137:5.
Despite US assurances to the Palestinians that Israel would freeze certain settlement activity in the eastern sector for the next two years, top Israeli officials have denied the existence of any such commitment.
"There is no agreement about freezing building in east Jerusalem and normal life in Jerusalem will continue as in every other city in Israel," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told journalists during a visit to Tokyo.
The hatred of Israel in Europe is the best example Bruckner produces. Hardly anyone mentions that the Arab and Iranian dictatorships find anti-Semitism as useful a method for distracting their subject people from examining their worthless regimes as the tsars and the Nazis did.
For Europeans, criticism of sagging Arab nationalist states and resurgent theocracy would mean accepting the existence of alternative sources of sin outside the West and confronting the racial prejudices in Europe's Muslim minorities. Better to blame Israel as a source of danger to Europe for its failure to behave as true penitent.
Bewildered outsiders look on a continent where Holocaust commemoration is a civic religion and wonder how guilt for an anti-Semitic past can coexist with rising anti-Semitism and the singling out for perpetual attack of the world's only Jewish state. Bruckner's convincing answer is that because Israel stands up to its enemies it is in European eyes the root cause of the rage against it. Europe copes with the guilt of the Holocaust by transferring it to Israel, which involves the recycling of the revolting trope that Jews are now Nazis.