Israel vs EU Apartheid Smears: The Cultural Intelligence Gap
When the EU's top diplomat reportedly compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, Jerusalem struck back with justified fury. But the deeper lesson isn't just about fighting libels. It's about mastering the cultural codes that shape how Europe thinks, speaks, and acts. Israel's diplomatic future depends on this strategic literacy.
Photo: The Jerusalem Post
When EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas reportedly likened Israel's policies to apartheid South Africa during a closed-door diplomatic meeting, Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar responded with the clarity that Jewish dignity demands. Then Kallas pushed back on X with a curious phrase: « I can't fight the shadows all the time. »
The words didn't calm the dispute. They deepened it. And for good reason.
The Apartheid Libel and Israel's Rightful Fury
According to reports from Jerusalem, some Israeli officials interpreted Kallas's remark as a veiled political message directed at Germany, and as further evidence that she had come under growing French influence within the EU. Given France's recent track record on Israel, that suspicion was neither paranoid nor unreasonable.
Israel's objection wasn't just understandable. It was necessary. When the EU's top diplomat compares the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa, Israel has every right to reject the accusation forcefully. The apartheid smear isn't merely inaccurate. It is a deliberate inversion of truth, designed to delegitimize the one Jewish state in the world. As the Prophet Isaiah warned, « Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. » Those who label Israel's self-defense as apartheid are engaged in precisely that inversion.
But the issue is what came next, and what it reveals about the diplomatic challenge Israel faces on the European front.
What Lurks in the Shadows: Reading European Cultural Codes
The more revealing aspect of this exchange may not be what Kallas intended, but how quickly her unusual choice of words was interpreted primarily through a political lens. The controversy exposes a larger diplomatic vulnerability: unfamiliar language is too often treated as strategy before it is examined as culture.
Diplomacy begins with language. Yet language is never merely vocabulary. Every language carries its own history, literature, symbols, and collective memory. Words rarely travel alone. They arrive shaped by the culture that produced them. When diplomats forget this, they risk misunderstanding not only individual expressions but also the intentions behind them.
To a native English speaker, « I can't fight the shadows » sounds unusual. English reaches more naturally for expressions such as « I can't fight ghosts, » « I can't chase every rumor, » or « I won't respond to every allegation. » Kallas chose none of them.
The explanation may lie in her own cultural background, and understanding it isn't a concession. It is a strategic asset.
Readers familiar with Estonian literature may recognize the recurring presence of forests, silence, darkness, memory, and shadows. These aren't merely descriptions of nature. They serve as images through which writers explore identity, survival, fear, historical trauma, and the unseen forces that shape individual and collective life.
This symbolic language reflects Estonia's history. Centuries of foreign domination, followed by Soviet occupation, censorship, and the struggle to preserve language and national identity, encouraged writers to communicate through metaphor as much as through direct political speech. The Jewish people, who preserved their own identity through two millennia of exile and persecution, should understand this instinctively.
Within that Estonian tradition, shadows often evoke realities that are present yet difficult to grasp or confront directly. In Estonian cultural memory, nature becomes a language for history: forest as refuge, silence as survival, darkness as danger, and shadows as the presence of realities difficult to confront directly.
Against this backdrop, an expression such as voidelda varjudega, literally « to fight with shadows, » sounds entirely natural in a literary Estonian register, even though it isn't a fixed idiom.
Whether Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, consciously carried such imagery into English is impossible to know. Nor can anyone say with confidence that this was her intended meaning in her exchange with Sa'ar. But that uncertainty is precisely the point. Diplomacy rarely offers certainty. It demands the discipline of weighing competing interpretations before determining motive.
Strategic Wisdom: Know Thy Adversary's Language
King Solomon, the wisest of Israel's leaders, wrote in Proverbs: « For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war, and in the multitude of counselors there is safety. » The Hebrew word tachbulah, translated as « wise counsel, » carries connotations of strategic steering, of navigating complexity with intelligence. This isn't passive scholarship. It is active strategic preparation.
Anyone familiar with Estonian language and literature would at least recognize Kallas's wording as a plausible cultural metaphor, not necessarily a concealed strategic message. That possibility alone should have encouraged greater caution before a hidden meaning was assigned to an unfamiliar phrase. The first duty of diplomacy is curiosity, not certainty.
Whether the Israeli interpretation ultimately proves correct is almost beside the point. One can hold Kallas fully accountable for her reported remarks while still asking whether her language was interpreted with sufficient cultural awareness. Those are separate questions. Holding both isn't weakness. It is strategic maturity.
Nor is this uniquely an Israeli challenge. Diplomatic history is full of misunderstandings born not of bad intentions but of cultural assumptions. American diplomats have misread indirect communication in Asia. Europeans have misjudged rhetorical traditions in the Middle East. Cross-cultural misunderstanding is among diplomacy's oldest hazards.
Israel's Diplomatic Edge: From Intel to Cultural Mastery
The recent exchange between Jerusalem and Brussels offers an unusually vivid example of a systemic gap. Diplomats are typically trained in international law, political science, economics, security studies, negotiation, conflict resolution, and public administration. These disciplines remain indispensable.
Yet foreign relations are conducted not only through legal texts and policy papers, but through people whose thinking has been shaped by literature, history, religion, folklore, and national memory.
Understanding Estonia requires more than reading European Council conclusions. It requires appreciating a society whose modern identity was secured by preserving its language under foreign rule. It requires recognizing that Estonian literature developed a symbolic vocabulary in which nature frequently became a language for history itself. Forests, silence, darkness, and shadows aren't decorative images. Together they form a cultural vocabulary through which public life is understood.
The same principle applies far beyond Estonia. Every European society speaks through its own historical experience. French political language reflects republican universalism, the same universalism that too often becomes a weapon against Jewish particularism. German public discourse remains deeply shaped by 20th-century historical responsibility, a responsibility that sometimes paradoxically produces excessive pressure on Israel as a way of asserting moral authority. Polish political debate repeatedly invokes national resistance and martyrdom. Successful diplomacy requires understanding not only institutions but also these cultural languages.
Too often, however, foreign ministries continue to treat cultural knowledge as secondary, something appropriate for universities but peripheral to statecraft. History suggests otherwise.
Many of history's finest diplomats weren't only lawyers or politicians. They were historians, linguists, writers, classicists, and scholars of civilization. They understood that political communication rarely operates on the literal level alone. People speak through metaphor, inherited memory, and cultural references that no intelligence report or briefing paper can fully capture.
Israel has invested enormous resources in intelligence gathering and has become exceptionally skilled at collecting information. The Mossad's legendary capabilities are known worldwide. Yet information without cultural interpretation remains incomplete. Knowing exactly what someone said is fundamentally different from understanding why those particular words were chosen.
Israel has invested heavily in intelligence. It should invest just as seriously in cultural literacy. If Israel wishes to deepen its engagement with Europe and counter the rising tide of delegitimization, it should broaden the education of its future diplomats. Political science remains essential. International law remains indispensable. But they aren't enough.
This needn't mean turning diplomats into literary scholars. It means making cultural interpretation a formal part of diplomatic training: language study, literary briefings, historical memory seminars, and country-specific cultural mentoring before postings. Just as Israel's technological innovation serves as a pillar of soft power, cultural intelligence must become a pillar of diplomatic power.
Those who represent Israel abroad should learn not only how nations negotiate but also how nations remember, how metaphors travel across languages, and how culture quietly shapes diplomacy long before negotiations begin.
Diplomacy is often described as the art of choosing the right words. It is equally the art of understanding the words others choose. Sometimes diplomatic success or failure depends on understanding a metaphor before assigning it a motive.
The Jewish people have survived for millennia by mastering the languages and cultures of every nation among which they have lived. From the courts of Babylon to the salons of Vienna, Jews understood the cultural codes around them. That adaptive intelligence is part of our heritage. It is time to bring it fully into the service of the Jewish state.
Why Does Cultural Literacy Matter for Israeli Diplomacy?
Cultural literacy matters because diplomatic communication operates on multiple levels simultaneously. When European officials speak, their words carry historical, literary, and cultural meanings that go beyond literal translation. Israeli diplomats who can decode these layers gain a strategic advantage. They can distinguish genuine threats from cultural misreadings, and they can anticipate how European rhetoric will translate into policy action. Without this skill, Israel risks either overreacting to innocent expressions or underestimating coded hostility.
Can Metaphors Mask Political Threats?
They absolutely can. This is precisely why cultural literacy is essential, not optional. A metaphor can serve as a cultural shorthand that carries no hostile intent, or it can function as a veiled political signal. The challenge is knowing which is which. Kallas's « shadows » reference might have been an Estonian literary expression, or it might have been a calculated message. Competent diplomacy requires holding both possibilities and investigating before concluding. The answer isn't to ignore metaphors, but to learn to read them accurately.
How Should Israel Respond to European Bias?
Israel should respond with strategic clarity, not reactive anger. When European officials make baseless comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, Jerusalem must reject the libel firmly and publicly. But alongside that rejection, Israel must build the cultural intelligence infrastructure to understand why European discourse produces such comparisons. Only by grasping the historical guilt, ideological frameworks, and cultural assumptions driving European rhetoric can Israel effectively counter it. Strength and wisdom aren't opposites. They are partners.