Israel e "European country"?
Geographically, Israel is a Levantine country, but economically and culturally, it is deeply Western, subsisting thanks to unwavering European support and the generous economic and military subsidies provided by the United States since the State's founding in 1945. Undoubtedly, the people are tenacious and intelligent, having effectively leveraged the advantages made available to them by the West to build a strong, modern, democratic, and developed nation. In many cultural and artistic respects, Israel is effectively a European country, due to geopolitical factors and historical regional isolation within Asia, Israel is a member of various European sports and cultural:
Football: Israel is a full member of UEFA (since 1994), allowing its national team to compete in the European Championship qualifiers and the Nations League, and enabling clubs such as Maccabi Tel Aviv and Maccabi Haifa to participate in the Champions League and the Conference League.
Basketball: The Israel Basketball Association is affiliated with FIBA Europe. Israeli clubs, most notably Maccabi Tel Aviv, compete in the prestigious EuroLeague.
Other sports: In sports such as handball, swimming, and athletics, Israel is also a full member of the corresponding European federations. institutions:
Music: Israel participates in Eurovision and regularly competes in the festival. Although the country is located in the Middle East, its public broadcaster (KAN) is an active member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is the only geographic or institutional requirement for entry into the contest. The nation made its debut in the competition in 1973 and has won first place four times (in 1978, 1979, 1998, and 2018). In recent years, its participation has been marked by significant prominence, but also by intense political tensions and protests that led to boycotts by several European countries.
This arrangement is justified by the fact that Europeans facilitated the colonial occupation of Palestinian lands by European Jews and—seeking to absolve themselves of guilt for centuries of systematic religious persecution that culminated in the horror of the Nazi Holocaust—endorsed the creation of the Jewish State through the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands. This was perhaps viewed as the lesser evil by the politicians of the time, given the centuries of suffering endured by European Jews and the vastness of the Arab world available to shelter displaced Palestinians. They simply forgot to ask the other Arabs if they wanted to take them in! Historically, Jews played a significant role in European economic and cultural life for centuries—despite religious prohibitions and exclusion from Christian trade guilds, and perhaps even because of them. During the Middle Ages, Jews became key providers of credit, financing monarchs, nobles, and European enterprises. They facilitated the exchange of goods between East and West by standardizing commercial practices, played a prominent role in financing the Age of Discovery—including the creation of major trading companies in the Netherlands—and helped lay the foundations for modern capitalism. Ethnically, Ashkenazi Jews—who founded the State of Israel and make up the country's ruling elite—are Europeans with varying degrees of Levantine admixture; genetically, this causes them to overlap with Southern European populations (particularly those from southern Italy) in the PCA plots of genetic studies. Ultimately, all roads lead Israel's Jews to Europe, so it is hardly surprising that they appear alongside European populations on such a graph; this makes more sense than placing them on a graph alongside MENA populations.
