By Tommy Hansson

Sweden
April 23, 2009

In early March, Sweden and Israel met in a Davis Cup match in tennis. The match was held in Malmo, Sweden´s third largest city, in the southernmost part of the country. The chairman of the city council, Social Democrat Ilmar Reepalu, warned that this match might attract violent demonstrators and decided, with the support of other left-wing politicians, to hold the event behind closed doors. This, however, didn´t stop about 6000 Swedes and Arabs from staging a demonstration outside the Baltic Hall arena, where Reepalu himself was a speaker.

Among the protesters was a group of some 200 hardcore Israel-haters, who attacked members of the 1000 men strong police force, protecting the event, and some police vehicles. These protesters were not members of the official Stop the Match campaign, which staged the demonstration, but loose cannons with mainly anarchist leanings.

The Israelis won the game with 3 – 2 and were clearly relieved after the match, but they were obviously shaken due to the reception in Sweden. For one young player it was the first time he had to face vehemently anti-Israeli and/or anti-Semitic sentiments. This may have to do with the fact that among the population of Malmo, with 250 000 inhabitants, there is a significant group of Muslim immigrants of which many support the Hamas movement which holds Gaza in an iron grip; Malmo is, by the way, sometimes half-jokingly referred to as “Sweden´s Gaza.”

Many Swedes have grown so used to anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish manifestations like the one outside the Baltic Hall in Malmo, that they hardly reacted at all on the protesters´violent methods. In Israel, however, the Davis Cup game in Malmo caused considerable attention.

In an article in the Jerusalem Post on March 3, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, both associated with Simon Wiesenthal Center, accused Sweden of having an “anti-Israel apartheid policy” including not just sport. The writers point out that Sweden has a “mixed World War II legacy”. On one hand Sweden supplied the Third Reich with iron ore and ball bearings and allowed the German Wehrmacht to use the Swedish railway system to transport soldiers to the Russian front. On the other hand the Swedish government accepted some 6000 Danish Jews, marked for mass murder by the Nazis, as refugees.

“Ultimately”, Cooper and Brackman write, “the good name of Sweden was redeemed by the unparalleled heroics of one of its own – Raoul Wallenberg…For decades, no Swedish government had the courage to demand his return from the jaws of the neighboring Russian bear.”

The situation in 2009 is another matter. For, Cooper and Brackman claim, “…it is brutally clear that Jews and especially those uppity ones from Israel are of little concern to Swedish authorities, as their policies become more reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa or Berlin in the 1930s that the 21st century Scandinavian democracy.” “International sports strive to be free of politics and prejudice”, the authors write. “But here they provide real-time proof of the poisoning of Swedish public life by biases that have echoes in Nazi Europe´s anti-Semitism.”

So the Socialist majority in Malmo decided, with the words of Cooper and Brackman, “to quarantine Israelis and Jews behind an apartheid police cordon to protest Israel´s actions in the recent Gaza war.” It was not just the Israeli tennis players who fared ill when they arrived in Sweden. A taekwondo delegation of 45 athletes and coaches en route to Trelleborg in the south of Sweden to participate in the open Swedish championship was told to stay home due to Muslim threats. “None of this is about sports”,Cooper/Brackman argue: “It´s about Jews.”

It is not hard to find examples of statements from various politicians bordering on the anti-Semitic, albeit masked as criticism of Israel. Ingalill Bjarten, vice chair for the Social Democratic Women´s Association in southern Sweden, has been quoted as saying: “Israel is and apartheid state. I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto…I´m surprised that Israel can do the exact same things as the Nazis did.” Such sentiments are regularly echoed from the rostrum in the Swedish parliament, especially from the left-wing opposition (Social Democrats, former Communists, and Environmentalists).

The so called bourgeoisie Swedish government has more or less continued the pro-Arabic, pro-Palestinian Middle East foreign policy that characterized the former Social Democratic government. After the Gaza war, for example, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt charged Israel with intentionally targeting the economic infrastructure and call the Israeli policies “neither morally nor politically defensible.”

In 2005, Cooper and Brackman point out, “a US State Department report documented that anti-Semitic incidents against Sweden´s tiny Jewish community spilled to over 100 a year after 2000, with attacks on Jewish shopkeepers and members of the Jewish Burial Society in Malmo, arson and vandalism of a Jewish cemetery…” Further, a poll conducted in 2006 showed that 30 procent of all Swedes harbored moderate to strong anti-Semitic attitudes.

All is not bad from an Israeli or Jewish point of view, though. Israel´s ambassador in Stockholm, Benny Dagan, says he has confidence in the Swedish government´s attitude toward Israel at the prospect of Sweden´s upcoming chairmanship of the European Union: “Our discussions with Sweden started half a year ago, and several Swedish cabinet ministers as well as officials from the Foreign Department have visited Israel. Among other things we have discussed the important Iran issue.”

Ambassador Dagan is also happy about Sweden´s behavior during the so called Durban II conferenence about racism in Genčva recently, when the Swedish delegate, Ambassador Hans Dahlgren, along with delegates from other nations walked out of the conference hall in the midst of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejads Israel-bashing speech on April 20.

Civil rights activists and pro-Jewish people in Sweden are worried that the anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli feelings sooner or later may lead to an intolerable situation. One constructive initiative in this context is the Swedish involvement in a project to restore an old Jewish cemetery in the Polish town of Bodzentyn in Kielce province. This project started after Dr. Leszek Sikorski, a Catholic priest, visited Yad Vashem Holucaust museum in Israel and has the full support of the authorities in Bodzentyn,whose Jewish Ghetto was demolished 70 years ago. The Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism has conducted a fund collection in order to ensure the restauration of this cemetery.

In August, a week including various events and workshops will be held in Bodzentyn in order to remember and honor the once numerous Jewish population in this town. Max Safir, a Polish Jew and former Bodzentyn dweller who survived Holocaust, says that the arrangers of the Swedish participation in this unique initiative hope that members of parliament from as many parties as possible will travel to Bodzentyn in August.