At first glance, there could not possibly be a connection between the International Court of Justice’s ruling in the Hague last Friday that Israel’s West Bank security fence is illegal and Sunday’s incident on a Parisian commuter train in which a woman with a baby was anti-Semitically attacked, abused, and had swastikas drawn on her belly while a carload of passengers looked indifferently on.

But there is.

In the past year, the French government has, so it would seem, done all the right things to combat the mounting tide of anti-Semitism in France. It has sponsored conferences, issued declarations, repeatedly stated that anti-Semitism will not be tolerated. The day before the Paris train attack, Prime Minister Chirac traveled to the south of France to speak at a ceremony honoring local villagers who saved Jews during World War II.

Many other countries in Europe have followed suit. In 2003 and 2004,the European Union sponsored three different “Round Tables” on the subject of anti-Semitism, culminating in an all-European conference last April that passed a closing resolution declaring, “Anti-Semitism must be fought not only by the Jewish people, but also by Muslims, Christians, and those of other faiths.”

Jews, one might think, should feel encouraged by such concern. And yet anti-Semitism in France and Europe keeps getting worse. In France alone, it was announced this week, there has been an average, in the first six months of 2004,of close to three reported incidents of anti-Semitic violence each day. One must assume there have been many more unreported incidents – twice the frequency of 2003.

A paradox? Not really.

The French and European governmental positions on anti-Semitism are sanctimonious nonsense. They are not really against anti-Semitism at all, because they refuse to acknowledge a simple fact: Anti-Semitism in Europe today is indistinguishable from extreme hostility to Israel, by which it is nourished and from which it cannot be separated. And hostility to Israel characterizes the foreign policies of most European governments.

This is something that no European government wants to admit. A Europe that seeks close commercial and diplomatic ties with the Arab and Islamic world is a Europe eager to maintain the fiction that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are two entirely different things.

You can, this fiction holds, hate the Jewish state but have nothing against the Jews. You can sincerely deplore violence against the Jews of Europe while enthusiastically embracing, as the European Union did last week, the Hague court’s decision that the Jews of Israel are permissible targets of violence, it being impermissible for them to do anything effective to prevent it.

Of course, this is not what the court explicitly said. Its 55-page decision actually did contain a sentence mentioning Israel’s “right to self-defense.” And by the same token, Javier Solana, the E.U.’s secretary-general, also spoke of this right while condemning the security fence for causing “incalculable harm” to the Palestinians.

Yet what exactly is Israel’s “right to self-defense” supposed to consist of? Of sending soldiers into Palestinian cities to eliminate terrorists by killing or arresting them? When Israel does this, Europe accuses it of committing a “massacre,” as happened in the case of Jenin.

Of targeting Palestinian terrorist leaders so that they alone are killed? Europe calls this carrying out “illegal assassinations.”

Of deterring terrorists by blowing up the homes of their families? This is “immoral collective punishment.”

Now, building an anti-terror fence is forbidden, too. Presumably, self-defense should be limited to shouting “Go away” every time a suicide bomber blows himself up.

It has been argued, of course, by the Hague court among others, that if Israel wanted a security fence, it should have built one along its 1967 border. But this is absurd for the simple reason that an Israeli return to this border, which no Arab state ever recognized while it existed, would mean prior Israeli acceptance of the Palestinian position that peace depends on a withdrawal to it.

In other words, it is perfectly legitimate for Israel to defend itself against terror as long as it first yields to terror’s demands.

And from here back to our Paris commuter train. Is there really no connection between the belief that Europe really approves of attacking Israeli Jews, since it forbids Israel to protect them, and the belief that Europe really condones attacking European Jews and will do nothing to protect them either? Is this really such a farfetched association?

No one would contend that the six men of reported North African appearance who attacked the woman on the train were inspired to do so by the Hague court’s decision, even though this decision, which depicted Israel as a brutal trampler on human rights, received widespread press coverage and was handed down in the name of a supposedly impartial international tribunal.

In actual fact, all of the 15 judges, including the one dissenter, the American Thomas Buergenthal, were simply voting the foreign policy of the governments that had appointed them to the court. Quite possibly, they did not even know about it.

Yet neither can any serious-minded person contend that anti-Semitism in Europe today, with its strong Arab and Muslim component, has nothing to do with the anti-Israel feeling that has been created by Europe’s anti-Israel press and anti-Israel governments.

Anyone doubting the truth of this might reflect on the fact that several million Americans of Arab extraction, who live in a country where the prevailing mood is not against Israel, have not indulged in anti-Semitic violence at all. There is only one way of effectively fighting anti-Semitism in Europe, which is precisely the way Europe refuses to adopt: To first change its hostile attitudes toward Israel.