Before instruments and appointments, the premise. Jews are not guests at the edge of Christian Europe. They are among its co-founders, and they have been the yeast — the ferment — that has perpetuated its history, its culture, its science, its economy and its banks across centuries of expulsion, return, and rebuilding. Without that ferment, the Europe that now fears for its churches and its public square would not recognize itself.

Call them what they are: the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe. Not a slogan for campaign posters, and not a claim that Judaism and Christianity are the same. A historical fact: biblical literacy, moral law, the dignity of the person, the refusal of idolatrous power, and the shared memory of Sinai and Calvary shaped the civilization that built cathedrals and universities — and Jews were present as co-authors of that civilization from its Iberian and Italian foundations onward, not as late arrivals asking for a visa.

The record is concrete, not sentimental. Portugal was founded by a Christian king — Afonso Henriques — counselled by the rabbi-soldier Yaish ibn Yahya, a Jew of al-Andalus (Iberian Spain) who carried sh learning and arms into the infant kingdom as first chief rabbi of the realm, tax steward, and military partner in the reconquest that made Portugal a Christian state on the Atlantic. That is co-foundation in the hard sense: sword, counsel, and administration at the birth of a nation — and it is Spanish Jewry, not a footnote, inside Portugal’s founding.

The first Jew in Rome - Jason ben Eleazar - was an ambassador there 2022 years before the Kingdom of Italy was founded. Rome hosts Europe’s oldest continuous Jewish community— documented from 161 BCE, when Maccabean envoys already found Jews in the city — more than two millennia before modern nation-states. Italian Jews are thus not latecomers to Christian Europe; they predate it. In the papal centuries they were historically the Jews of the Pope— living under papal rule, yet woven into the peninsula’s civic and commercial life. In the nineteenth century they numbered among the builders of modern Italy in the Risorgimento: emancipation and unification travelled together.

When today’s UCEI president Livia Ottolenghi names the Catholic relationship — and therefore the Vatican urbi et orbi — as a priority, she is not inventing a lobby. She is naming a co-authorship older than the Republic.

The Low Countries complete the same map. In the Netherlands, seven centuries of Jewish life are now set down as a public canon from the Jodenstraat in Maastricht to the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam, whose credit, print and trade helped make a maritime republic. In Belgium, Jewish houses of Antwerp and Brussels — diamonds, banking, industry, emancipation after 1831 — entered the central register of a new kingdom, not its margins. The ferment is economic and scientific as well as liturgical.

Sephardic bankers and industrialists such as the Pereire brothers financed French railways and the Crédit Mobilier, remaking continental credit. In the late twentieth century Roland Moreno, Egyptian-born French Jew, invented the carte à puce (1974) — the chip that became bank smart cards, the télécarte, and the mobile SIM: the quiet infrastructure of digital Europe’s payments and identity shaping the way to AI.

From medieval courts to modern banks, from biblical literacy shared with Christianity to laboratories and ledgers, Jewish presence has been a multiplier of European capacity — not a side chapel. That is why antisemitism is never only a Jewish problem.

A communist suicide

To drive out the ferment is to starve the loaf. A Christian Europe that forgets Jewish co-foundation will not long defend Christians in the Middle East, Jews in European cities, or the plural non-jihadist order both need. What follows is therefore not branding but strategy: the creation of a specific Israeli diplomacy toward Christendom and toward minorities in Europe, and the patient explanation — to Arabic-speaking migrant populations in particular — that Israel is the best model of minority integration and coexistence. That argument rests on the historical fact just stated.

Remodeling the bond under demographic and cultural pressure

Christian Europe is not debating Israel in a vacuum. It is debating its own tomorrow — birth rates, migration, Islamist pressure, emptied churches, and a public square where Jewish safety is again the early warning. The Europe that once assumed continuity now fears succession — a demographic and security debate about fertility, migration and Islamist pressure, not a conspiracy theory of ethnic plot. That fear is exploited by jihadists, by parts of the far left, and by antisemitic entrepreneurs of every stripe. Israel cannot ignore it. Nor can Israel outsource its European strategy to security briefings alone.

The question for Jerusalem is therefore sharper than another talking-points memo. How should Israel remodel its relationship with Christian Europe — the Europe of churches, Christian-democratic memory, and Diaspora Jewish partners — when that Europe no longer feels demographically or culturally secure?

Two appointments in 2026 sketch the answer. They are not a “diversity” brochure. They are instruments for a continent that still listens to faces more than to press releases. The instruments: Captain Ella to the Arab world, Ambassador George Deek to the Christian world.

On February 15, 2026, Lt. Col. Ella Waweya — “Captain Ella” — took over from Col. Avichay Adraee as the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson (dover Tsahal for the Arabic arena). A Muslim Arab from Qalansawe, she is the highest-ranking Muslim officer in the IDF. Her channel is the Arabic information war. For Christian and Jewish Europe, she is also something else: living disproof that “Israeli” means an ethno-religious closed shop — without pretending October 7 or Hamas have vanished.

On April 23, 2026, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar named George Deek Israel’s first Special Envoy to the Christian World. An Arab Orthodox Christian from Jaffa, formerly ambassador to Azerbaijan, Deek was appointed as scandals and local incidents strained Christian trust. In a May 2026 Crux interview he put the stake without ornament: “A Middle East with no room for the Jewish state will not have room for Christians.” Preserving the Christian presence, he said, “is a test of the moral future of the Middle East,” and “Christians belong here. Jews belong here. Muslims belong here.”

That is the hinge between Jerusalem and a nervous Christian Europe. If the Middle East can erase Jews, it will erase Christians. If Europe loses the will to defend a plural, non-jihadist public order, Jews will be the early warning — as they already are in attacks in European cities. Deek’s job is not to baptize Israeli policy. It is to tell European Christians that their minority question and Israel’s survival question are linked.

Dover Tsahal and Europe’s Arab migrant audiences

Here the conviction must be stated plainly. The IDF’s Arabic spokesperson — Captain Ella and the dover Tsahal system behind her — should be able to speak directly to Muslim minorities in Europe — including Arabic-speaking migrant communities — not only to audiences in the Middle East. The message is not charity. It is demonstration: Israel is the Western model of minority

integration, and Israel is the country of freedom for the Muslim woman who chooses citizenship, uniform, and voice. Europe’s debates about migration and women’s rights will not be won by sermons from ministries that never field a Muslim lieutenant colonel. They can still be clarified by an Israeli Arab woman who leads the army’s Arabic voice and refuses the scripts written for her in Qatar’s studios.

That does not replace Deek’s work with churches. It complements it. Christian Europe hears that minorities can thrive under Israeli sovereignty; Arab Europe hears that the Jewish state is not the enemy of Muslim dignity — Hamas is.

J50: Jewish Europe hears both voices

At the MFA’s J50 gathering in Jerusalem, according to the forum programme for late August–early September 2026, that link was staged in sequence. On 31 August, Captain Ella gave the keynote at the welcome dinner after Shuli Davidovich (Bureau for World Jewish Affairs and World Religions). On 1 September, Amb. George Deek spoke on “Diplomacy of Faith.”

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar addressed the forum the next morning. The channel built for Diaspora Jewish leadership thus heard an Arab Muslim IDF voice and an Arab Christian envoy — Israel speaking to Jewish Europe through Israelis who are not Jewish, while Christian Europe’s anxiety sat in the same strategic room.

Remodel the relationship — do not outsource it to slogans

1. Speak to Christian Europe under stress, not as a museum. Churches, Christian-democratic networks (EPP families, Patriots/ECR), and Eastern Christians need evidence: holy sites protected, crimes against Christians prosecuted, Christians of the East named as allies. Nostalgia about “Judeo-Christian roots” without acts will fail. The usable frame is colder: religious freedom, public order, demographic honesty, and refusal of jihadist erasure. Israel can and does talk across Europe’s political map, including forces the Brussels consensus dislikes; what it cannot do is let jihadist and far-left narratives monopolize the Arab street in Europe while Jerusalem stays silent.

2. Keep Captain Ella and Ambassador Deek on distinct fronts — then let Ella reach Europe’s Arabic street. His Excellency Deek builds Christian trust. Ella fights Arabic media and, by design, should also address Muslim minorities inside Europe with the integration and women’s-freedom case.

3. Treat Jewish communities as co-authors, not audiences. J50 exists because antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric travel together. The enemies’ sequence is not a metaphor: first Saturday, then Sunday. Israel is the front. Europe is the rear of the same war — a war Europe still prefers to locate somewhere else. The communities that carry the co-foundation set out above are not a communications audience. They are the European half of that front.

Spain, after recognizing Palestine on 28 May 2024, withdrawing its ambassador in March 2026, and clashing with Sa’ar over the CMCC, shows what happens when a European capital treats that front as optional. Italy remains an ally under Vatican and opinion pressure. Livia Ottolenghi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), makes the Catholic relationship — and therefore the Vatican urbi et orbi — a priority because it reaches a Christian world Jerusalem cannot brief from a podium. Portugal’s Jewish revival around Kadoorie Mekor Haim in Porto is a laboratory of continuity after rupture — even as Lisbon’s Sephardic naturalization track closed to new applicants in 2026. It matters that Israel join the demand that military honors and rank be restored to Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto — the Portuguese Dreyfus — whom Parliament rehabilitated but to whom the Defense Minister has still not restored his grade. The Jewish Community of Porto, which he founded, leads that fight; the same community today also leads among Europe’s major cities hosting the European Day of Jewish Culture.

4. Scale without fiction.

Named cohorts around Ambassador George Deek’s Christian channel and Captain Ella’s Arabic-European channel; short tours; measurable corrections; zero invented brigades. Domestic discipline when churches are hit — or Deek’s Europe work burns.

The thesis

The thesis, in one line Israel should remodel its bond with Christian Europe by proving — through Deek, Ella, J50, and verifiable acts — that a future in which Jews are unsafe is a future in which Christians lose too; that a Europe too weak to defend plural non-jihadist life will not defend Israel either; and that the dover of Tsahal must be free to show Europe’s Muslim minorities that Israel is the Western model of minority integration and the homeland of Muslim women’s freedom. They are not branding. They are evidence.

David Nataf is Vice-President of B'nai B'rith Portugal