Where I stand: Israel, Europe, and the moral line - opinion

This is not a travelogue. It is a reflection on proximity, loyalty, and the strange intimacy between a foreign scholar and a country whose existence is, in moral terms, a rebuttal to silence. I did not grow up in Israel, yet since childhood, I have felt something difficult to explain, a gravitational pull toward this place, its people, and its extraordinary defiance in the face of annihilation.

My fascination with Israel long preceded my first visit. As a child, I read Israeli authors with awe. Later, as I turned to economics, it was scholars like Stanley Fischer, Robert Aumann, Elhanan Helpman, and Omer Moav who became my compass, thinkers whose rigor was inseparable from moral seriousness. Their work spoke not just of theory, but of survival. I was raised on stories of the Holocaust, not just as tragedy, but as warning. The names of the camps, the silence of neighbors, the bureaucracies of death: these were not abstractions but moral lessons. Those lessons never left me. I have never fully understood why Israel occupies such intensity in my imagination, only that it does. Perhaps because Israel stands for something elemental: that memory, when forged into law, scholarship, and language, can protect against extinction. Here, history is not a museum exhibit; it is lived, carried, and spoken.

When I returned to Europe, to Ljubljana, I expected questions, perhaps even dialogue. Instead, I found silence. The war had begun, and yet among my academic peers, there was no urgency, no solidarity, not even curiosity. Only a bureaucratic chill, as if standing in Tel Aviv days before missiles struck had made me suspect. In Europe, the coldness took shape. Some colleagues avoided me. Others whispered. A few seemed angry that I had not condemned Israel, as if my silence were betrayal. One confrontation turned to hostility, ideological violence in the name of moral purity.

There were no debates, only judgment; no questions, only distance. Behind the civility lay something corrosive: the expectation that I should apologize. That I should justify giving a seminar in Israel. That I should explain why I stood with a country many in Europe have learned to hate in code.

I offered no apology as there was none to offer. Instead, I offered clarity. In much of Europe today, moral ambiguity has become ritualized. Even after October 7, after children were burned alive and grandmothers paraded in cages, the reflex was not moral clarity but “balance,” “context,” “restraint on both sides.”

The Middle East is indeed complex. But when civilians are massacred, complexity is not the first thing that ought to be said. I spoke not to provoke, but to bear witness. For that, I became a problem to some. Some say geography no longer matters, that principle is what counts. But I no longer believe that. When the sky turns from blue to ash, when silence becomes complicity, where you stand becomes inseparable from what you stand for.

In contrast, Europe feels increasingly abstract. Institutions that claim to uphold universal values too often fail the one test history keeps repeating: the test of Israel. It is easy to theorize justice; it is harder to speak it when it risks invitations, funding, tenure, or friends. I do not condemn those who remain silent. But I will not join them.

Something is breaking in Europe. October 7, 2023, was not a “cycle of violence,” nor a “response to occupation.” It was a pogrom, a calculated, filmed, glorified massacre of civilians, babies, teenagers, peace activists, burned, mutilated, raped, and paraded. And Europe, for the most part, did not weep. It explained. It cautioned against “overreaction.” It lit buildings for Ukraine, but not for Israel.

I watched this from within, from conferences, classrooms, the corridors of polite internationalism. Those who pride themselves on progressive values could not utter the victims’ names because the perpetrators did not fit their script. And when Israel responded, not with vengeance, but with resolve, it was Israel, not Hamas, that Europe demonized.

The government of my own country, Slovenia, joined this chorus, not in nuance but in hostility disguised as diplomacy. It refuses to name Hamas a terror group, yet rushes to indict Israel. It funds anti-Israel NGOs while courting EU grants. This is not foreign policy. It is moral collapse, antisemitism reborn as virtue. It condemns “apartheid,” but means “Jewish self-determination must end.” Such moral inversion cannot endure. A society that builds its virtue on hatred of Israel will not produce justice or peace, only decay, corruption, and blindness. Israel will survive and prosper. Europe may not.

I left Tel Aviv on June 12, a day before the skies closed. My flight was uneventful. But something had changed. In Israel, I spoke plainly. I listened carefully. It was only a seminar, a room, a screen, a discussion on law and institutions. But beneath it all was something older than any curriculum, the quiet certainty that truth still matters, and that some places still defend it without apology.

That is where I stood. That is where I still stand. My hope is not war, but peace, a Middle East where children grow up without sirens, where scholars travel freely, and where memory does not bleed endlessly into the future. I long for a region where Jews, Muslims, and Christians live without fear of erasure, without the suspicion that difference means danger.

But peace is impossible while Iran’s regime pursues death against Israel and the West alike. Its proxies do not seek justice; they seek erasure. Let me be clear: I do not support every decision of Israel’s government. Civilian suffering is not collateral to be managed but tragedy to be prevented. Yet disagreement with a government is not hatred of a nation.

A democracy defending itself from terror cannot be equated with the terror that targets it. Silence in the face of that lie is complicity. We, Europeans and academics, owe Israel more than we admit; we owe it the courage to name evil when it appears.

Because without Israel, the values we claim to cherish – reason, freedom, democracy, and knowledge – would have one fewer defender and one more enemy. Israel does not ask the world for pity. It asks only that we see clearly. If we can still do that  – to see with clarity, stand with courage, and speak with truth – then peace remains possible. Not through surrender, but through the defense of what is right, and the refusal to look away.