When a Small European Nation Decided to Stand Apart

In November 1975, Austria made a decision that puzzled many observers. While most Western nations maintained full diplomatic relations with Israel, Vienna downgraded its ties to a minimal level. The move was not born of anti-Israel sentiment in the streets, nor was it driven by any particular affection for Arab nationalism. It was, instead, the culmination of a hostage crisis that exposed the raw vulnerability of a country still reconstructing its identity after the Second World War.
The story began six years earlier, in 1973, when Palestinian militants attacked a train carrying Soviet Jewish emigrants near the Austrian border town of Schönau. The crisis was brief but searing. Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, himself a Jewish socialist who had fled the Nazis, faced an impossible choice. He negotiated the release of the hostages by agreeing to close a transit camp through which thousands of Soviet Jews were passing en route to Israel. The decision saved lives but opened a wound that would fester for years. When the Palestine Liberation Organization later threatened further attacks, Kreisky chose survival over solidarity. Relations were reduced. Austria became, in effect, a Western country that treated Israel with official coldness.
The irony was not lost on anyone. Kreisky had spent the war in Sweden, escaping the Holocaust that murdered members of his own family. His Austria was not the Austria of the Anschluss, he insisted, but a new socialist republic that had broken with its past. Yet here he was, a Jewish chancellor, making a decision that Israel's government could only read as abandonment. Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, never forgave him. The two had known each other for decades. Their friendship did not survive.
This episode illuminates something uncomfortable about how small states navigate moral questions in a world of unequal power. Austria was not a neutral country in the Swiss sense, bound by tradition and mountainous geography to avoid entanglement. It was a country that had participated in the Nazi project, lost its empire, and emerged diminished. Its foreign policy in the postwar decades was shaped by a desperate desire for stability, for the kind of normalcy that larger nations take for granted. When threatened with violence, Austria folded—not because its leaders loved Israel any less, but because they feared chaos more.
The Schönau transit camp closure was not merely a diplomatic calculation. It was a psychological one. Austria in the 1970s was still inhabited by the generation that had witnessed the war, and the generation after that had inherited its silences. The country's relationship with its own Jewish past was fraught, marked by selective memory and the convenient myth of Austria as Hitler's "first victim." Standing firm with Israel would have required a clarity of national purpose that Austria had not yet achieved. Kreisky's realism, or his cynicism, reflected this immaturity.
What changed? Not quickly, and not completely. Full diplomatic relations were restored in the early 1990s, after the end of the Cold War reshuffled European priorities. Austria began to confront its past more honestly, however imperfectly. The Waldheim affair of 1986, when former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's Nazi-era military service was exposed, forced a public reckoning that earlier governments had avoided. Gradually, Austria's relationship with Israel evolved from one of embarrassed distance to something more engaged, if never entirely comfortable.
Today, the Austria-Israel relationship exists in a different register. Trade is modest but functional. Cultural exchanges occur. Austrian politicians visit Yad Vashem and speak of responsibility. Yet the shadow of 1975 lingers, not as a single decisive moment but as part of a pattern in which small nations facing pressure discover the limits of their commitments. Austria is not unique in this. What distinguishes its case is the particular historical weight it carries—a country implicated in the destruction of European Jewry, now called upon to stand with the Jewish state.
The lesson, if there is one, concerns the fragility of solidarity. It is easy to proclaim common values in moments of calm. It is harder when the cost becomes concrete: a closed border, a threatened train, a militant's demand. Austria's choice was understandable in human terms. That does not make it admirable. The distance between those two judgments is where honest foreign policy thinking must operate.
Israeli policymakers have long memories. They have learned, often through bitter experience, which allies can be relied upon when circumstances turn difficult. Austria's rehabilitation in Israeli eyes has been partial, earned through decades of consistent engagement rather than dramatic gestures. This is perhaps the only way trust can be rebuilt—slowly, with difficulty, without the expectation of full forgiveness.
The Schönau crisis deserves more attention than it typically receives. It is not the most dramatic episode in either country's history. But it captures something true about how international morality actually functions: not through the application of abstract principles, but through the pressured decisions of fallible people in specific moments, accountable to immediate consequences rather than historical verdicts. Kreisky chose the safety of his citizens over the solidarity his own biography might have demanded. Whether that choice was justified remains debatable. That it was consequential is beyond question.